Dream Lover (1986) BQ visitors, once again we're happy to strike gold in our neverending mission......unearthing an obscure, long forgotten film that nobody actually remembered even when it was released.
What an incredibly strange movie to end up in the middle of director Alan J. Pakula's filmography....yes indeed, the very same guy who directed "Klute", "The Parallax View", "All The President's Men" and "Sophie's Choice".
We'll now take a bold stab at answering the question, "What the hell was he thinking with this thing?"
We'll guess Pakula unwisely became infatuated with the then new technique of sleep studies.....hooking up a sleeper with 300 wires to monitor every single body and brain function while someone catches some Z's.
Having submitted to one of these ourselves (to detect sleep apnea), we found the experience weird and uncomfortable and not particularly dramatic.
Pakula, however, no doubt thought to weld this procedure with a flimsy sort of psychological thriller, propped up by a few startling combination dream-nightmare sequences.
Possibly a wild card, purely visual oriented director might've extracted some crazy fun out of this concept (much like Ken Russell did when taking over "Altered States" - see our post of 6/11/19).......but Pakula was too grounded in reality for the task. He made great films, but you'd never categorize any of them as imaginative flights of fancy.
The lead role here required a a young woman with considerable range.... to play.a jazz flautist tormented by nightmares after she stabbed to death a psycho who invaded her apartment. And you'd think Pakula, director of such stellar actresses as Meryl Streep and Jane Fonda might gravitate to an A-lister for the part.
To our surprise, he cast, of all people Kristy McNichol, then known as a busy child and teen actress of TV shows. She more than proved she possessed the chops to throw herself into the unease and bouts of hysteria the film required of her. With her large expressive eyes and, slim, slight frame, she came across the screen as both adorable and painfully vulnerable.
Sadly, Pakula thought he could flesh out a barely-there skeletal script by decorating it with elaborate, clumsily staged dream sequences, for which he displayed no real ability. Though a master of dread and suspense (as in "Klute" and Parallax View") he was no Fellini-esque dream weaver. Those attempts at nightmarish imagery looked like watered down steals from Argento's "Suspiria".
The entire film, in fact appears stillborn, stiff and generally lifeless (much like director Robert Benton's 1982 Hitchcock homage "Still Of The Night", see our post of 11/2/18......
We always loved seeing Kristy McNichol, even when she landed in worthless crap unworthy of her. Sorry to say, "Dream Lover" fall into that category. 2 stars (**) and that's strictly for her presence in the film......otherwise we'd bounce it down to Zero.
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