By: debbie lynn elias
The story is simple. Four friends, touched with the gift of clairvoyance following their performance of a heroic act, meet each year in the far-removed Maine woods for an annual “hunting trip.” (Hey, there really is hunting taking place – not to mention, drinking, partying and toasting to their friend, Duddits – who never appears until the end of the film.) Henry, a psychiatrist suffering from depression, gets his kicks reading the minds of his patients while Beaver (sorry guys, not Jerry Mathers) torments all he knows with one joke after another. Alcoholic Pete is a car salesman and poster boy for Mr. Lonely Hearts Club while Jonesy is an English professor. Each has a variant of clairvoyance be it for reading minds, finding lost objects, seeing into the future or having premonitions of impending doom. This year, however, things take a slightly different spin than in the past when a stranger stumbles into their camp, muttering and mumbling about lights in the sky, pitting our young heroes against an alien force and a psychotic military colonel as they once again are forced to call upon their heroism to prevent murder, mayhem and mind control. Based on the Stephen King novel by the same name, “Dreamcatcher” has all the potential imaginable in a King book. Sounds interesting. Sounds intriguing. Sounds exciting. Sounds ominous. Sounds scary. Add the likes of director Larry Kasdan and co-writer William Goldman and you’ve got a sure winner. Not. I hate to say, it, but think again.
“Dreamcatcher” is riveting at its start with so much detail and information crammed into the first 40 minutes that you find yourself getting cross-eyed. Blink and you might miss something. But hey, if there’s this much going on now, what can the rest of the film hold! Unfortunately, not much, for it goes downhill from this point forward. Within scant moments, secrets are loosed, deaths occur, extra-terrestials take form, miliary choppers pass overhead advising of a widespread quarantine, body-swapping aliens appear……..the only things missing are Mulder and Scully! Too bad there’s another 60+ minutes of film to endure.
The only real “star power” here radiates from Morgan Freeman as alien hunter Colonel Abraham Kurtz. Freeman, as always, brings a depth to the role not seen or felt on the page and the film is the better for it. Seems no one does a military assistant better than Tom Sizemore and he fills the bill perfectly as Kurtz’ assistant, Captain Underhill. Jason Lee, Damian Lewis, Timothy Olyphant and Thomas Jane are compelling and believable as our four friends and it is only due to their combined talents that the second half of the film is even tolerable.
Writer William Goldman, who very successfully and proficiently adapted “Misery” and “Hearts of Atlantis”, both by Stephen King, and now together with co-writer/director Kasdan, surprisingly seems out of his element here, perhaps because they strayed so far from King’s novel – even more noticeably as the film builds to conclusion. The writing in the second half of the film is, for lack of a better description, sloppy and incomplete with no attention to character or detail, as if this portion of the film exists merely for visual effects. But what visual effects they are thanks to Industrial Light & Magic.
Wearing his director hat, Lawrence Kasdan, known for hits like the Oscar winning “The Accidental Tourist,” and “The Big Chill”, not to mention camp classics likes “Silverado,” does merely adequate, seemingly disinterested job, of pulling the film together and keeping it afloat, but is unable to overcome the inadequacies of his own written word. He goes from convincing, intriguing and even heartwarming to uneven, unfunny, unscary and confusing, but nevertheless still does manage to get in a fright or two and never moreso then in one scene involving a toilet and bunch of toothpicks. Kudos definitely goes to one of my favorites, cinematographer John Seale, the man responsible for such works as “Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone,” “The Perfect Storm” and “The American President.” Seale is a master of his craft and uses his vast talents to create a visual atmosphere fraught with chills.
Legend has it that long ago an old Lakota Indian sat atop a mountain and had a vision where Iktomi, the great trickster and teacher of wisdom appeared as spider. Iktomi began to spin a web, a dreamcatcher, using the willow hoop, feathers, horse hairs and beads of the old man, the entire time speaking to the old man about the cycles of life. According to Iktomi, in each cylce of life, there are many forces and directions that affect the harmony of nature. With the dreamcatcher, there is a perfect circle with a hole in the center. If you believe in the good and great spirits, the web will catch your good dreams while the bad will go through the center hole.
Obviously, the hole in “Dreamcatcher” was a little too small thus allowing a lot of the bad aspects of the film to stick in the web along with the good.
