dir. neil jordan
st. annette bening, robert downey jr.
USA 100 mins 1998

The film opens with an evacuated town being flooded as a new reservoir is built. The flooded village is an unusual metaphor for this otherwise limpid thriller. It is Jordan's first excursion outside of Britain, and he has had to make some major compromises. Despite tackling a new genre with a weak script and with big studio investors breathing down his neck, Jordan has carried over some themes from his previous films, In the Name of the Father, the Crying Game, The Butcher Boy. Like Francis Brady, this film features a character whose abusive childhood leads to antisocial psychosis, scrawling on walls and mental institutions. Like Daniel Day-Lewis locked up in an British jail, this film imprisons its main characters and almost breaks them. And like The Crying Game it features kidnappings and a strange attraction between kidnapper and kidnapped. Neil Jordan seems to be interested in what happens when someone is deprived of their freedom, their sanity.

My daddy was a dollar I wrote it on a fence My mummy was a song Not worth a hundred cents

The use of a nursery rhyme as a fear appeal was interesting, reminding us of exactly how grim Grimm's fairytales, Ring a Ring a Rosy are, linking death and malice with youth and innocence. The collapse of reality and fantasy, ego and alterego, creates the possibility for a Norman Bates style Psycho, but because it is sweet lil' Annette Bening with her pointy chin and twinkling eyes, there is no ambiguity as to who the victim is and the audience's fear of what lies in the darker recesses of their own psyches is played down. Unlike the traditional thriller, the supporting characters are never suggested as potential suspects. And Bening's periods of insanity seem overdone - apples appearing out of nowhere, empty swings, invisible children laughing, the computer screen taunting her with scrolling text - classic horror cliches - the killer is about so you'd better look out! One woman, incredibly upset by the representation of mental illness, shouted "If you knew a thing about schizophrenia, you'd know this film sucks!" and ran from the cinema sobbing, as onscreen a manic Bening was strapped to a bed for some more injections of Thorazine.

The deranged killer of this film only targets young girls, who he drowns in the lake... how simple to invoke the demon who preys on innocents - pure evil, once again, no pity no ambiguity. It is a vacuous movie. Neil Jordan does Hollywood, with B-list stars thrust upon him by the studio - "We couldn't get George Clooney, so we had to call in Downey Jr. ... I know, just do the best you can..." An indication of how bad this movie is, is that they gave Downing Jr. not one but two roles to fuck up! Annette Bening is gorgeous but her character is inconsistent: nervous, self-assured, unbalanced, on the ball, etc. It is however, beautifully shot and rendered, with those rich interiors Neil Jordan is famous for. His trademark dream sequences turn the absurd narrative into fragments of cinematic pleasure. The woman's shoe slowly sinking in the dam is an image I'm sure every viewer will take away with them. In Dreams is also quite gripping, the tension well maintained until the final hour when Bening's sanity is resolved and the film switches from a psyche-based horror film into a conventional thriller with a climatic manhunt. It ends with The Fugitive instead of The Game, which is unfortunate, as it could have been so much more. It could have been somebody... a contender...

eugene chew
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