In Dreams [VHS]
by Neil Jordan
![In Dreams [VHS]](/images/In-Dreams-VHS-B00000IO4P-L.jpg)
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Product details
Actor: Aidan Quinn, Annette Bening, Katie Sagona, Paul Guilfoyle, Robert Downey Jr.Director: Neil Jordan
Cinematographer: Darius Khondji
Writer: Neil Jordan
Producer: Charles Burke
Producer: Redmond Morris
Producer: Stephen Woolley
Writer: Bari Wood
Writer: Bruce Robinson
Edition: VHS Tape
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, NTSC
Running Time: 100 minutes
Release Date: 2000-08-29
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Publisher: Dreamworks
Studio: Dreamworks
VHS Movie Reviews of In Dreams [VHS]
Movie Review: Discount-Rack Thriller
Summary: 3 Stars
Note the going used price for this movie: 14 cents. According to imdb.com IN DREAMS cost $30M to make, and so far has reaped $11.9M. What does this mean? This film will appeal to lovers of the psychics-who-predict-murders genre.
Personally, I love movies that involve precognition. But, where this film goes wrong, is in the assumption that we don't already know this genre. So many of the situations here are cliche. Example (warning, partial spoilers here) no one takes Claire's visions seriously, until someone dies, and even then, she's locked up and can't communicate appropriately or in time to prevent the next tragedy. While you may argue that this formula fits the genre, the characters I just don't buy.
There's a dream interpreter, who doesn't interpret dreams. He just sits and listens, nodding his head without comment. This is very disturbing stuff that Claire is telling, and all the doctor can offer is thorazine!
And this serial killer Claire has a psychic connection to. Are we supposed to empathize with him or not. She's more concerned about him, at times, than her own family. And then, she hates him, and then feels apathetic towards him, and then sympathizes with him and then- (the over-the-top end sequence they should've cut from the film.) How am I supposed to feel about this freak - this kidnapper of children. The movie shows what a tough life he had - and then you're supposed to hate him. What?
Good things about this movie: The film starts off with a great premise - an idea (involving the making of a dam) which could have been the subject of a movie in and of itself. The photography is excellent. Sound design and editing is good - the pacing is such that - it smooths out any rough spots in the story.
Bad things: the acting, and the script (or should i say, the lack of believability in any of these characters). The overall story is decent. Fun. But standard thriller. But I get no sense, whatsoever, that Annette Bening is the mother of Katie Sagona. Nor do I get the feeling that Aidan Quinn is Bening's husband. Why? All the dialogue is too cleanly spoken. All too perfect. And not real.
These are NOT candid moments here, of a family slowly being torn apart - due to Claire's nightmare visions. No.
There is a scene designed to make you feel the strong love between mother and daughter. (shot beautifully against the afternoon sun by a lake) Claire [Annette Bening] and Rebecca [Katie Sagona] recite lines from SNOW WHITE to each other. How poignant. It was intended to be. But, it plays like two strangers hired to be nice to each other in front of a camera.
Sagona notes in one scene that her goldfish died, and it now resides in the freezer. The line is delivered with no emotion. You get the feeling there never was a goldfish, nor did she ever care about it - whether it was in the bowl or in the freezer.
Granted, I'm being harsh on a child actor here, and that's not fair. However, ALL the scenes play as if they were well-photographed footage of actors reciting words. Words with no meaning behind them. The only scenes that play tolerably well are the ones without talking.
I like Bening as an actress - but in this film, she's forced to act hysterical, again, and again, and again - and so much of it seems unmotivated, or covers up the lack of a character. It's as if director Neil Jordan gave Bening little or nothing to work with - (like: 'you are grieving during this scene') and she had to do the best she could - concocting something from obvious voids in the script.
The movie is too clean. Too expensive. One feels it came out of a glossy magazine. There's no grit to it. The actors involved in this production looks too well-fed, and too well-paid to have any appreciation of the horrors a clairvoyant person could experience in such a devastating situation. There's no empathy. And as a result, it's very difficult to empathize with any of the characters in this pulp story.
Summary of In Dreams [VHS]
Anyone who has seen and loved Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves should feel right at home in his off-beat psychological thriller In Dreams. A sexy, very adult take on "Little Red Riding Hood," Wolves unreeled as a series of surreal "fairy tales" interwoven within the heated dreams of a young girl verging on womanhood. Wolves' patron saints were Freud and Jung (as sifted through Jordan's wickedly fertile imagination), and the duo are very much aboard for In Dreams as well. Here's a movie that takes place entirely in dreamtime, where the dark, violent fantasies of Claire Cooper (Annette Bening)--wife, mother, and illustrator of children's books--play out unpoliced by superego, conscience, or society. On the face of it, Claire's a clairvoyant whose mind becomes more and more possessed by child-killer Vivian Thompson (Robert Downey Jr.). Cops and shrinks refuse to take her seriously until she loses her own daughter and much, much more. Tapping into weird images of her soulmate's childhood, when he was abused by a hateful mother in a house now submerged in a nearby reservoir, Claire comes closer and closer to her gender-shifting bad boy (and his latest victim). From start to finish, In Dreams dwells in hyperreality. Whether leeched of or drenched in color, slipping eerily through an underwater world, rushing madly toward catastrophe--every hallucinatory shot is saturated with menace. It's the kind of potent, unresolved menace that haunts your waking day after a particularly unsettling nightmare. Watch this gorgeous film as therapeutic (?) theater inside Claire's mind, where she and her murderous doppelganger act out a terrible Oedipal drama driven by sex and jealousy. Bening and Downey deliver superb, risky performances, and Darius Khondji's cinematography, with almost every frame punctuated by blood-reds, is sensuously dreamlike. In Dreams is one of those great, flawed films that reaches for more than it ultimately achieves. But what a welcome change from the dullness and shallowness of the formulaic sure things that dominate movie screens as the 20th century draws to a close. --Kathleen MurphyMovies most talked about in Video Genres
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