Amazon.com Essentials:
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 Murphy
