Friday, January 15, 1999
Muddled nightmares, acting haunt Freudian ‘In Dreams’
FILM: Tormented Bening
burdens superb visuals, but creepy Downey Jr. saves plot
By Cheryl Klein
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
Call it the curse of postmodernism. You’re never sure what’s
self-referential semi-camp and what’s just bad. And Freud’s
theories of the unconscious have been condensed into a little logo
boy fishing from a crescent moon.
Dreamworks delves into the horror genre with a tale of the
clairvoyant Claire Cooper (Annette Bening), who foretells her
daughter’s kidnapping in a series of elegantly creepy dreams
fraught with hyper-shiny apples and nursery rhymes chanted to the
point of psychosis. Channeling serial killer Vivian Thompson
(Robert Downey Jr.) is both her best strategy and her near
destroyer.
Freud coined the term "dreamwork" to describe the mind’s
penchant for refashioning unbearable thoughts and memories into
palpable but cryptic images. The film dabbles in this philosophy,
most notably when Vivian points out, "That’s the thing about
dreams. They’re always wrong. And they’re always right." Thus the
blonde cherub trailing a faceless evil through her mind is not the
recently abducted local girl she assumes, but her own daughter.
The film, however, succumbs to such mental muddiness far more
often than examining it. It’s difficult to discern what Claire is
dreaming from what is actually happening in Northfield, the film’s
picturesque venue. Yet, other elements are overstated to the point
of condescension, as Claire screams out her first epiphany about
her nightmares, "Why didn’t you tell me it wasn’t the past – it was
the future!" Later the family dog leads her to clues so predictably
that we half expect her next line to be, "What? You say Timmy fell
down a well?!"
Downey delivers exactly what filmgoers have come to expect from
the versatile actor, injecting the abused-child-turned-psychopath
(another Freudian favorite, as are most thematic elements of pop
culture) with humor, quirk and unadulterated weirdness (he
constructs mannequins of his mother in his abandoned apple
processing plant). Unfortunately, he doesn’t appear for more than
two consecutive frames until nearly two thirds of the way through
the movie.
Which means we’re stuck with tormented-woman-of-the-week Claire
for most of the two hours. Bening spirals into a padded cell –
literally – so quickly that she comes across as more pathetic than
cathartic. Her alternating giggles and Beloved-esque growls seem
unappropriated even for a woman reeling from the disbelief of
others. Yet, she pulls herself out of her breakdown with equal
rapidity, suddenly free to roam the town on a manipulative mission
of vengeance.
A few plot and character inconsistencies further muddy the
waters of a town where the reservoir buries archives of the past in
"Titanic" style shots of green-blue waterlogged rubble. For
example, why does Claire’s stalwart psychologist research the
validity of her visions without exhibiting prior doubt to her
lunacy?
"In Dreams" rarely frightens – much of what should be
disconcerting in Vivian’s past and present is instead farcical.
This makes for a film that is "not so bad, it’s good" or "so good
it’s, well, good." But effective visuals and a haphazardly
intriguing story let it linger in that no-man’s land between dream
and nightmare.
FILM: "In Dreams" opens Friday.
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