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Dreamcatcher
**
Cinema
Reviews - Week of May 2, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. USA.
136 minutes. Directed by Lawrence Kasdan. Written by William Goldman, Lawrence
Kasdan; based on the novel by Stephen King. Starring Morgan Freeman, Thomas
Jane, Jason Lee, Damian Lewis, Timothy Olyphant, Tom Sizemore, Donnie Wahlberg,
Mike Holekamp, Reece Thompson, Giacomo Baessato, Joel Palmer, Andrew
Robb.
"Dreamcatcher" is amazing. I don't
mean that in a good way. There must be other films that make such large dives
from gripping interest to complete bollocks, but the mind boggles when attempting
to remember them. Perhaps you should go see it -- not because it can be enjoyed,
but for purposes of study. It's fascinating, how the screenplay arranges
interesting pieces, gets us holding our breath and then gradually unravels
until we wonder why we cared in the first place.
In the opening passages, we're introduced to a
group of guys who meet up at a backwoods cabin every year to catch up on
each other's lives and drink to days gone by. They've known each other since
primary school, and back in those times they befriended a kid named Duddits,
who was retarded and got bullied a lot, but also had the supernatural ability
to wave his finger in the air and be able to find lost items or see dangerous
activity before it came. Duddits was so grateful for his friends that he
decided to share his gift, and they all possess it to this
day.
This is an interesting premise, shown to us in
scenes of curiosity and anticipation. The characters relate to each other
convincingly, speaking in the dialogue of people who know each other rather
than actors who know they're in a horror movie. Sitting at the kitchen table
and knocking back some beers, Jason Lee makes crude jokes and makes his
conversational points by throwing around movie references, Timothy Olyphant
nails the weary look of a car salesman who can get on with his job but could
have been doing something more creative with his life, Damian Lewis makes
some personal chitchat about his 'memory warehouse' and Thomas Jane does
some interesting things in the role of an overworked psychiatrist -- he looks
relaxed enough to know how to deal with his dilemmas, stressed enough to
still be carrying them around.
We hang with these guys for a bit, we learn about
their gift and how it has affected their lives, we see some "Stand by Me"
type flashbacks about when they roamed town with Duddits. And then... something
happens. Lewis and Lee discover a hunter in the woods, who carries a rash
that seems to spread by the minute, who looks pretty darn faint, and who
is, um, doing a lot of farting. The stranger is taken back to the house,
where blood streams out of his backside and a very vicious worm emerges from
the mess.
From here, the plot changes tack. I don't want
to give too much away, but I will say that it involves outer space and a
rather nasty virus. New characters end up coming to centre stage, like that
of Morgan Freeman, a hardline general who has been defeating alien scum in
special operations for over 25 years, and his successor, played by Tom Sizemore,
who respects Freeman's experience but doesn't take everything he says as
being the word of God.
What we've got here is a case of two very different
science fiction ideas, one that could be either fantasy or horror, the other
very obviously in the gore-horror box. It's an intriguing surprise, when
the initial story gives way to a whole new chapter, but as "Dreamcatcher"
goes on, it becomes clear that the transition doesn't work. The story of
aliens and their killer worms takes over, and instead of the two major strands
complementing each other or being paid off individually, I got the feeling
that the premise was only put there to provide a lazy get-out clause for
the other stuff. This film isn't genuinely interested in how four friends
with intuitive ability end up handling a bad situation; it's an action scare
flick, with the opening passages there to be picked up at the end and provide
a convenient solution.
It would be easy for me to mock "Dreamcatcher"
on the level of its imagery; it's no good, after all, when a tale begins
with magic and ends up relying on special effects of slimy goblins. But it's
not the monsters themselves that are ridiculous -- they're realised as such
sick little suckers that at first they have some impact, and it's the fact
of their irrelevance that becomes annoying. The movie gets so pointless that
we run out of patience for things that were previously possible to ignore
-- early scenes with Jane suggest he has suicidal tendencies, and that one
of his patients will become an important plot point, but neither of those
issues is resolved. And what's the deal with those farting
noises?
Oh, there's more. Lewis finds that his body is
taken over by an extra terrestrial commander, who for no good reason speaks
in one of those crazy old 'what-ho!' English accents. The scenes which visualise
Lewis's memory warehouse, showing him run around dusty old files in a large
attic space while Spielbergian beams of light glow through the windows, seem
to forget about the fact that they're just visualisations -- in an absurd
key moment, the rules of actual physical space are applied to them, and Lewis
manages to hide his thoughts from evil forces by running around and burning
boxes of paper. The Freeman character, set up as such a specific and forceful
personality, turns out to be all but discarded, and his final purpose is
to go crazy and interrupt a climactic sequence by hijacking a helicopter
and blasting away with its machine gun.
"Dreamcatcher" is truly a mess, in that there's
a lot of badness in there, and it's mixed in so thoroughly that you cannot
appreciate the good stuff so much as mourn its loss. Still, the good things
are there: The cinematography is striking and varied, and so are the dialogue
and performances, right down to a small role by Rosemary Dunsmore, who comes
on for about five minutes and makes a few sentimental gestures, but has such
a motherly sense about her that she brings the character relationships alive,
and even makes them moving, at a point in the film when all quality seemed
to be lost.
Lots of talented people worked on this thing --
Lawrence Kasdan directed it, William Goldman wrote the script, and the source
material was a novel by Stephen King. I think I'd feel better if the movie
had been done by hacks, because at least it wouldn't have raised false
expectations, and I could take the piss out of it without feeling regret.
What was Kasdan thinking? He has made several movies traditionally regarded
as classics ("Body Heat", "The Big Chill", "Silverado", "The Accidental
Tourist"), and others that aren't but should be ("I Love You to Death", "Grand
Canyon"). He's also one of those directors who picks a project when passion
takes hold instead of when he fancies the cash. I guess "Dreamcatcher" seemed
different on paper, where the rhythm of the story transitions may not have
played so tackily, and the reality of how the farting noises would play had
not yet sunk in.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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