Eventually she falls into the hands of a psychiatrist (Stephen Rea) who is wise, kindly, and patient, and locks her up in two cruel institutions. One has a padded cell and is guarded by a Nurse Ratchet clone. The other looks like the original snake pit crossed with a dorm at summer camp. The psychiatrist isn’t even the villain.
In Dreams is the kind of movie where children’s nursery rhymes and sayings are underscored like evil omens. “Mirror, mirror, on the wall . . .” we hear, while the sound track vibrates with menace, and a mother, a daughter, and their dog walk on the banks of a reservoir which was, we learn, created in 1965 by flooding a village that still lurks beneath the waters, a ghost town. Scuba divers explore it, and we see that the napkin dispensers are still on the counters in the diner, while holy statues float around the church.
Was the villain (Robert Downey, Jr.) drowned in this town? It’s not that simple. The explanation of this movie contains more puzzles than the plot itself. Let’s say we grant the premise that the villain can indeed project his dreams into the mind of poor Claire. In addition to being clairvoyant, is he also telekinetic? Can he make children’s swings move on their own, turn on boom boxes at a distance, project words onto a computer screen, and control garbage disposals?
And does he control the family dog, which has an uncanny ability to find its masters anywhere, anytime? (This is such a clever dog it should know better than to lure Claire into the middle of that highway—unless of course, its dreams are also under remote control.) And what does the buried village have to do with anything? And although the killer was abused as a child by his mother, whose high heels supply a central image, what does that have to do with the nursery rhyme about how “My father was a dollar”?
I dunno. The movie was directed by Neil Jordan, who has done a whole lot better (Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, Interview with the Vampire). Here he navigates uncertainly through a script that is far too large for its container. Whole subplots could have been dumped; why even bother with the other woman in Australia? Although the drowned village supplies some vivid images, wasn’t it a huge expense just for some atmosphere? And how many viewers will be able to follow the time-shifted parallels as Claire’s escape from a hospital is intercut with the killer’s?
In my dreams, I’m picturing Tony Lawson’s first day on the job. He was the editor of this picture. His survey of the unassembled footage must have been the real horror story.
In Praise of Older Women
(Directed by George Kaczender; starring Tom Berenger, Karen Black, Susan Strasberg; 1977)
In all your amours you should prefer old women to young ones . . . because they have greater knowledge of the world.
So says noted kite-flyer Benjamin Franklin, quoted on the first page of Stephen Vizinczey’s novel In Praise of Older Women. He may be right. He invented bifocals, after all. But his advice has a built-in male chauvinist flaw, since it assumes that the greater knowledge possessed by older women is not sufficient to warn them away from younger men. This is (we must be fair) a movie clearly inspired by its title. It is in favor of older women, with a top age, I should judge, of about forty. Maybe forty-three. The women pass through the life of Tom Berenger, who plays a Hungarian philosophy teacher who emigrates to Canada. Both Hungary and Canada have their share of older women, who emigrate to Berenger as if he were going out of style, if he had any. He’s a kinda pleasant kid, soft-spoken, with a grateful grin that he has to employ again and again in this movie. Older women can’t get enough of him.
And that’s the problem with the movie: It’s not about sexual encounters with older women, it’s simply the record of them. He keeps running into older women, and having affairs with them, and moving on, and learning nothing. It may well be, as Ben Franklin promises, that older women have greater knowledge of the world, but in this movie, they’re canny, and keep it to themselves. The Berenger character isn’t a young student of life that they can tutor; he’s a heaven-sent one-night stand.
This whole business of older women and younger men is a big deal right now. Another quickly forgettable new movie, Players, also deals with the theme. But it cheats: Ali MacGraw may sleep with Dean-Paul Martin in the movie, and she may be, according to the screenplay, twelve years older than he is, but she isn’t an older woman, for Pete’s sake—she’s Ali MacGraw.
Same problem with In Praise of Older Women. The older women include Karen Black and Susan Strasberg and a Canadian actress named Helen Shaver. Older women? Big deal. I had a pizza with Helen Shaver at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, and she wasn’t an older woman then. The movie’s basically just a series of soft-core sex scenes tied together by the hero’s gratitude. It’s not about anything. Berenger has a neat way with his licentious grin, something like Albert Finney’s in Tom Jones, and that’s about it. There are no insights into the relationships involved, no efforts to make the characters into people, no mornings after. No wonder he’s so filled with praise.
And yet the movie’s doing business, maybe because the title is sensational. I saw it up near the Loyola campus, where the students no doubt consider thirty-three-year-olds to be older women, and I had the benefit of a running commentary from the two jocks sitting behind me. “She’s neat,” they agreed, after Susan Strasberg appeared on the screen. “She’s cool,” they agreed about Alexandra Stewart. “She’s nice,” they agreed about Marilyn Lightstone. “She’s neat,” they agreed about Marianne McIsaac. That’s the trouble with younger men. They’re so quick to praise.
In the Army Now
(Directed by Daniel Petrie, Jr.; starring Pauly Shore, Andy Dick; 1994)
We were about halfway into In the Army Now when I realized the movie’s secret ambition, which is to be nice. It’s a movie about a misfit who finds himself in the army—the kind of setup that lends itself to the barbed satire of the Bill Murray movie Stripes. I was waiting for the barbs and they weren’t coming and to my amazement I realized the movie wanted basically to be an innocent, childlike adventure.
The star is Pauly Shore, a curly-haired comedian who comes across like a skinny Richard Simmons and whose characters are never the slightest bit brighter than the screenplay absolutely demands. He plays an incompetent clerk in an electronics store who gets fired and decides, with his buddy Jack (Andy Dick) to join the Army Reserves—because, hey, after all, they like pay you money for like doing practically nothing, right?
The movie comes to life during a basic training sequence in which the boys draw a sexy female drill sergeant (Lynn Whitfield). The biggest laugh comes after she adjusts a trainee’s uniform and Shore quickly dishevels his own, so she’ll tug on his pants, too. The scene doesn’t have a payoff, but, hey, the setup is fun. Shore and Dick join Lori Petty and David Alan Grier on a water purification team, and are amazed when a crisis breaks out in Liberia, and they find themselves in the middle of a potentially deadly situation.
The screenplay, work by five writers, based on a story by three others, is by a committee and about a committee; the most-used phrase of dialogue is, “Hey, you guys!” The bad guys are of course all Arabs, Hollywood’s flavor of the year in villains. But they aren’t really bad, because the movie doesn’t care that much. Most of the war scenes consist of the four heroes slogging through the sand enchanging rueful one-liners and low-key observations. I was waiting for comedy and got whimsy.
The movie clocks in at ninety-two minutes, not time enough to explain why the Arabs didn’t notice anything when U.S. troops parachuted two dune buggies, machine guns, and supplies to Shore and his buddies, immediately outside an enemy camp. Nor time enough to explain such strange details as the Petty character’s conviction that if you tear off a shirtsleeve you can use it to carry water in.