Dream Lover (1986)

(On Cable TV, July 2021) There are times when, as a film’s credits roll, I have to remind myself of why I wanted to watch it in the first place. Was it the premise? The lead actor? Some kind of weird filmographic project I’ve latched on? Not surprisingly, these kinds of questions usually emerge at the end of a very specific category of bad movies — those so insignificant that their reason for existing is unclear. In Dream Lover’s case, the end credits answered my question — this is a film from well-regarded Alan J. Pakula, whose 1970s paranoia trilogy (Klute, The Parallax View and All the President’s Men) remains a classic. But while Pakula scored a few hits through a nearly thirty-year career as a director, his filmography is not consistent, and Dream Lover is probably going to end up in his lowest tier by the time I’ll be done with his filmography. As suggested by the title, this is a film that deals heavily in dreams as plot devices, which (to seasoned filmgoers) means that it’s not going to make a single shred of sense. Indeed, as our heroine dreams of killing someone and being abused, the film goes so often for shocking dream sequences that viewer interest disappears maybe a third of the way through: when anything and everything can happen, when dubious pseudo-psychiatry justifications are used instead of narrative logic, Dream Lover becomes more grating and overlong even at 104 minutes. The script was written by the film’s producer, which is seldom good news — without narrative oversight, it careens from one fantasy sequence to another. I’m not fundamentally opposed to dreamlike films — I mean, there’s Inception and Dreamscape and much smaller films like the audacious (if not entirely successful) Canadian title Come True. But those better movies have some energy, wit and imagery to them, and Dream Lover doesn’t. It’s just one thing after another until we’re done, and very little of it sticks despite the potential of the premise. It comes across as substandard de Palma except without, well, anything that made de Palma so revered. On the upside, there’s now one less Pakula film on my list of films to watch, although if the remaining ones are all at the same level, I’m not going to have a good time.