In Dreams
USA 1998
Reviewed by Richard Kelly
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
In 1965, the New England town of Northfield is evacuated, then flooded to create a reservoir. In the present, illustrator Claire Cooper lives near the reservoir with her husband Paul, a pilot. Their marriage is fraying, due to Paul's frequent absences and Claire's recurrent nightmare-visions of an abducted child, which she thinks may be relevant to a local murder investigation. Claire's daughter Rebecca is snatched and her body is fished from the reservoir. Realising her visions were premonitory, Claire attempts suicide. She is treated by psychiatrist Dr Silverman, but the visions only get fiercer, and she slashes her wrists. She tells Silverman that the killer is "inside her head".
Paul agrees to have her committed. Claire foresees Paul's murder, but can't convince Silverman to prevent it. In her hospital room, Claire discovers a poem, familiar from her dreams, inscribed by ex-inmate Vivian Thompson. Claire breaks out by following Vivian's own escape route. Inspecting Thompson's file, Silverman learns that the child Vivian was left for dead by his mother during the Northfield flooding. Claire lures Vivian from hiding, and accompanies him to his home, a derelict cider factory where he is holding another child, Ruby. Claire helps Ruby escape and flees herself, pursued by Vivian. The police arrive but fail to prevent Claire plunging to a watery death. Ruled insane, Vivian is recommitted, only to be haunted by bloody visions and Claire's voice.
Review
Plainly, Neil Jordan is not an artist who's much arrested by naturalism. He has a flair for all things fantastic, hence his happy teaming with Patrick McCabe on The Butcher Boy, a film in which any sane man should take delight. So you have to wonder why Jordan continues to make movies for Hollywood studios. Whether the matter at hand be pretty-boy vampires or the birth-travails of the Irish Free State, the results always seem to bear the rabid tooth-marks of preview testing. His latest undertaking amounts to not much more than just another serial-killer thriller, and from Jordan that isn't nearly enough.
The pity is that there's some grand stuff here. Having formerly found a soulmate in the late Angela Carter, Jordan is comfortable with eerie invocations of fairy tales amid a rural bourgeois idyll. Claire Cooper's visions, if compounded of familiar dreads, come forth in great torrents and have a nerve-straining intensity: the boy Vivian chained and thrashing in his watery bedroom-tomb; a fair child and her killer, holding hands in a musty orchard; an apple ominously crushed underfoot. (Kudos must be due to the excellent Tony Lawson, whose editing feels taut throughout.)
A real treat is the sequence where Claire's moppet daughter Rebecca is stolen away from her school production of Snow White. As realised by Jordan and designer Nigel Phelps, the play is an uncommonly glamorous affair, bound to induce envy in any parent who has squirmed away an evening in a draughty assembly hall. The setting is authentically deep, dark woodland, lit with lanterns, and the kids are wonderfully costumed, not least Rebecca as the sprite inside the mirror on the wall. Suddenly, enchantment is translated into terror: Rebecca vanishes, police and a distraught Claire tramp the woods, only to discover a bereft pair of angel wings snared on a briar. A fast track past Rebecca's bewildered classmates finishes on the hapless little Wicked Queen, who earlier made such a lisping tour de force of her jealous tirade to the mirror.
Throughout, Darius Khondji's camera moves with giddiness and guile, seeming to assume assorted personages - even at one point that of Claire's dog Dobie. Claire's premonition of her suicidal plunge into the reservoir packs a tremendous, vertiginous point-of-view punch. Later, grieving Claire confesses to a sense of disembodiment, of watching herself from a distance as the camera watches her from a distance. At other times, we feel the watchful, wraithlike presence of the killer in the camera-eye. The commingling of these intimations duly comes, as Claire sees herself making love to Paul and is joined in the shadows by Vivian. They share complicit whispers, even a kiss - until Claire bites into his lip. Of course, ever since The Silence of the Lambs broke the box office, Hollywood has fed us gifted, wistful killers, whose dearest desire is to murmur endearments in the ear of some fine-boned WASP woman. Jordan flirts with a few variations on this theme of unnatural union, and there's one inspired passage of doubling, as Claire uncannily retraces Vivian's steps out of her asylum incarceration. But finally Vivian wants only to fashion a surrogate family for himself, and when that comes to naught, he settles for just giving Claire a nasty nip.
Since her spirited early roles in Valmont and The Grifters, Annette Bening has looked marooned on-screen as a middle-class mommy. But as Claire becomes an increasingly unhinged and resourceful heroine, Bening serves a reminder of her spark. The supporting players are given only bones to suck. Duplicitous husband Aidan Quinn is marked as dead meat from the start. Stephen Rea plays the sceptical spare-part shrink with a flawless accent. (Clearly, and not unreasonably, Jordan can't stand to be without him.) As for Robert Downey Jr, with his rather sensual man-child mien and ragamuffin demeanour, it was probably inevitable that he would eventually get a go in the cinematic nut-house. But his delayed entrance to the proceedings is the point where the film descends unerringly into formula. One is forced to reflect that few horror films have been as good as Gary Sherman's Death Line (1972) in giving us a lovelorn bogeyman who's both loathsome and pitiable.
As In Dreams unravels, its lineage is laid bare (Freud and fairy-tale psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, Psycho and The Shining), and the plausibles take a pasting. An unpleasant epilogue exposes yet again just how deeply the serial-killer thriller responds to the US obsession with capital punishment. Jordan clearly felt for Patrick McCabe's murderous butcher boy, but this time out his heart is harder - or maybe just not in it. The likely fate of this movie is to wind up in digital double-bills with Jennifer 8 or maybe Candyman. That could be counted a success only if Jordan's present ambition as a film-maker is to become quite nasty. His fans know better, and expect that his next one, an adaptation of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, will see him in finer fettle.
Credits
- Producer
- Stephen Woolley
- Screenplay
- Bruce Robinson
- Neil Jordan
- Based on the novel
Doll's Eyes by - Bari Wood
- Director of Photography
- Darius Khondji
- Editor
- Tony Lawson
- Production Designer
- Nigel Phelps
- Music
- Elliot Goldenthal
- ©Dreamworks LLC and Amblin Entertainment, Inc
- Production Company
- A DreamWorks Pictures presentation
- Co-producer
- Redmond Morris
- Production Supervisors
- Judy Richter
- North Carolina:
- Lori Johnson
- Mexico Unit:
- Eve Honthaner
- Production Controller
- Jim Turner
- Production Co-ordinators
- Lizz Grant
- Mexico Unit:
- Fernanda Echeverria
- Vail Romeyn
- Unit Production Manager
- Nan Bernstein Freed
- Unit Manager
- Mexico Unit:
- Rafael Cuervo
- Location Managers
- Bryan Thomas
- North Carolina:
- Lance Holland
- Post-production Co-ordinator
- Tricia Perrott
- Production Consultant
- Mexico Unit:
- Omar Veytia
- Assistant Directors
- Patrick Clayton
- Christopher H. Morse
- Bac Delorme
- Script Supervisor
- Robin Squibb
- Casting
- Janet Hirshenson
- Jane Jenkins
- Location:
- Carolyn Pickman
- Underwater Photography
- Peter Romano
- Camera Operators
- Mike Roberts
- Alec Hirschfeld
- Mexico Unit:
- Scott Browner
- Steadicam Operator
- Jerry Holway
- Digital Visual Effects
- The Computer Film Company
- Visual Effects Supervisor:
- Mark Nelmes
- Visual Effects Producer:
- Alison O'Brien
- CG Artists:
- Richard Clarke
- Stephen Murphy
- Digital Paint Artists:
- Alex Payman
- Gavin Toomey
- Compositors:
- Tom Debenham
- Adrian de Wet
- Editorial:
- Roz Lowrie
- Studio Manager:
- Pete Hanson
- Special Effects
- Supervisor:
- Yves de Bono
- Workshop Foreman:
- John Herzberger
- Senior Technician:
- Andy Wilson
- Buyer:
- Mark Griffin
- Technicians:
- Simon Baker
- Ron Colucci
- Phil H. Fravel
- David Hill
- Mexico Unit Technicians:
- Matt Kutcher
- Steven King
- Danny Swanson
- Art Director
- Martin Laing
- Set Designers
- Mark Morgenstein
- Mexico Unit:
- Jon Billington
- Charles Dwight Lee
- Set Decorators
- Gretchen Rau
- Mexico Unit:
- Merideth Boswell
- Original Artwork
- Veronika Hart
- Cynthia Guild
- Storyboard Artist
- George Jenson
- Costume Designer
- Jeffrey Kurland
- Costume Supervisor
- Dawn Y. Line
- Make-up
- Key Artist:
- Lori Hicks
- Artists:
- Matiki Anoff
- Felice Diamond
- Carrie Angland
- Special Make-up Effects
- Billy Messina
- Bill Johnson
- Special Make-up
- John Caglione Jr
- Kevin Yagher Productions, Inc
- Key Hairstylist
- Aaron F. Quarles
- Hairstylists
- Jacqueline Payne
- Enzo Angileri
- Titles
- Frameline, London
- Music Performed by
- London Metropolitan Orchestra
- Musicians
- Guitars:
- Page Hamilton
- Mark Stuart
- Andrew Hawkins
- David Reid
- Eric Hubel
- Conductor
- Jonathan Sheffer
- Orchestrations
- Robert Elhai
- Elliot Goldenthal
- Additional Vocals
- Elizabeth Fraser
- Music Co-producers
- Teese Gohl
- Elliot Goldenthal
- Electronic Music Producer
- Rick Martinez
- Music Editors
- Curtis Roush
- Preview:
- Robert Garrett
- Recording Engineer
- Joel Iwataki
- Soundtrack
- "Don't Sit under the Apple Tree" by Lew Brown, Sam Stept, Charles Tobias, performed by The Andrews Sisters; "If" by David Gates, performed by Bread; "Ebb Tide" by Carl Sigman, Robert Maxwell, performed by The Righteous Brothers;
- "In Dreams" by/performed by Roy Orbison
- Sound Design
- Leslie Shatz
- Production Sound Mixer
- James J. Sabat
- Re-recording Mixers
- Leslie Shatz
- Additional:
- Paul Massey
- Additional Sound Editor
- Douglas Murray
- Dialogue Editor
- Philip Alton
- ADR
- Group Co-ordinator:
- Burton Sharp
- Foley
- Artists:
- Pauline Griffiths
- Jenny Lee Wright
- Ruth Sullivan
- Caroline O'Hanrahan
- Editor:
- Nicky Moss
- Aerial Co-ordinator
- Al Cerullo
- Marine Co-ordinator
- North Carolina:
- Marlon Jackson
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Jery Hewitt
- 'Pete' Owner/Trainer
- Steve Berens
- Cast
- Annette Bening
- Claire Cooper
- Katie Sagona
- Rebecca Cooper
- Aidan Quinn
- Paul Cooper
- Robert Downey Jr
- Vivian Thompson
- Stephen Rea
- Doctor Silverman
- Paul Guilfoyle
- Detective Jack Kay
- Prudence Wright Holmes
- Mary
- Krystal Benn
- Ruby
- Pamela Payton-Wright
- Ethel
- Margo Martindale
- Nurse Floyd
- Kathleen Langlois
- Snow White
- Jennifer Berry
- hunter
- Emma J. Brown
- Jennifer Dragon
- Samantha Kelly
- Jennifer Caine Natenshon
- Bethany M. Paquin
- Erica Sullivan
- dwarves
- Amelia Claire Novotny
- prince
- Kristin Sroka
- wicked stepmother
- Robert Walsh
- Denise Cormier
- couple at school play
- John Fiore
- policeman
- Ken Cheeseman
- paramedic
- Dennis Boutsikaris
- Doctor Stevens
- Devon Cole Borisoff
- Vivian Thompson, as a boy
- Lonnie Farmer
- Nurse Rosco
- June Lewin
- kindly nurse
- Dorothy Dwyer
- foster mother
- Geoff Wigdor
- Vivian Thompson, as a teenager
- Wally Dunn
- Walter
- Eric Roemele
- security man, 1970s
- Dossy Peabody
- Vivian's mother
- John Michael Vaughn
- helicopter pilot
- Brian Goodman
- policeman in squad car
- Michael Cavanaugh
- voice of judge
- Pete
- Dobie
- Certificate
- 18
- Distributor
- United International Pictures (UK) Ltd
- 8,963 feet
- 99 minutes 35 seconds
- Dolby digital/Digital DTS sound/SDDS
- In Colour
- Prints by
- Technicolor
- Super 35