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REVIEW: DREAMCATCHER
a Film Comment online exclusive
There's a ten-minute scene in Lawrence Kasdan's Dreamcatcher that is genuinely terrifying - curled up in a ball, peeking through your fingers, whimpering "if it were me, I'd just want to die already" scary. Four thirtysomething boyhood friends (Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, Damian Lewis, and Timothy Olyphant) meet for a weekend retreat in their isolated cabin in idyllic Maine. Harbingers of imminent doom abound (the eerie exodus of local fauna, the sudden appearance of a lost camper with a strange rash and the worst case of diarrhea since Jeff Daniels's in Dumb & Dumber), yet the precise nature of the threat remains unclear. Audience and characters are equally in the dark and inside everyone's head a little red light flashes "danger, danger." When Lee and Lewis trap the threat in a toilet (revealing (1) it can fit in a toilet and (2) it is an "it"), tension reaches a fever pitch. "What is it?" they/you ask but pray they/you won't find out, because seeing it means someone has to die. It's a wonderful moment and Kasdan milks the scene for all it's worth. Sadly once the question is answered (it's an alien), the film devolves into a series of unsuspenseful chase sequences in which the fate of the world hangs in the balance (and, really, when was the last time the world wasn't just narrowly saved?).
Not that there's anything inherently un-scary about aliens. Just this past summer M. Night Shyamalan's great alien horror film Signs succeeded because it adhered to the maxim of terror (from a visual standpoint, "less is more") and only revealed the invader's true face at the film's showdown climax. Unfortunately, Dreamcatcher, which Kasdan and William Goldman adapted from the Stephen King novel of the same name, doesn't have the luxury of being a straightforward alien movie. The backstory involves the four friends as young boys saving a mysterious retarded child named Duddits. In return Duddits gives them quasi-telepathic magical powers, making them the bestest bunch of friends that ever was. As bad things happen to nice people, it falls upon Thomas Jane (who should wear a sign around his neck that says "not Aaron Eckhart") to locate the grownup Duddits (a desiccated Donnie Wahlberg) because his gift of precognition tells him that that would probably be a good thing to do. Loopy Colonel Curtis (Morgan Freeman) of the "Blue Unit" (an autonomous government agency dedicated to destroying the alien threat) makes this difficult by trying to shoot him.
King is at his best (and his work makes for better movies) when the premise is simple: "evil is a hotel that wants to kill you" (The Shining) or "evil is a crazy woman keeping you captive until you write a novel" (Misery). With a few other notable exceptions, his work is generally too sprawling to fit neatly into a two-hour running time, Dreamcatcher being a perfect example. Evil seems less evil somehow when it's this complicated and its bureaucracy of laws and tenuous logic feels too of-this-world to terrify.
Though it's obvious why Kasdan chose this script (simply put, it's The Big Chill meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers), it's regrettable all the same. Horror as a genre is terra incognita for Kasdan, yet he seems to have a real talent for it. It's a shame that the complicated story line forces him to reveal the face of the menace a third of the way through the film, effectively draining away the suspense. From that point on, Kasdan focuses his attention on the more familiar territory of interpersonal relationships and Dreamcatcher wallows in the mire.
In an inspired act of marketing genius/damage control, Warner Bros. has decided to screen the first of nine animated shorts comprising The Animatrix after the film. The anime-inspired films will draw upon, elaborate on, and further complicate the plots of the upcoming Matrix sequels - and guarantee moderate box-office success for Dreamcatcher as legions of teenage boys line up to pay $10 for a ten-minute cartoon.
-ROBBY O'CONNOR
© 2003 by The Film Society of Lincoln Center
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