Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a review from Sheldrake in New York for a Sundance favorite called DREAMLAND. After last time I swore I wasn't going to look at another email that Sheldrake sent to me... he said the most vile, creepy things about my dog... But I couldn't resist. This time he sent in a review without any threats towards my family pet, which is a relief. Enjoy!
DREAMLAND
Director: Jason Matzner
Screenplay: Tom Willett
April 6th, 2006
2006 New York GENART FILM FESTIVAL
Sheldrake here, reporting to you live from New York and the Ziegfeld Theater on West 54th Street in midtown Manhattan. I love this old and enormous last-man-standing movie palace and have been coming here for years, but only tonight did I realize that the seat panels facing the aisles all are carved wood with the Ziegfeld signature “Z” in bold relief.
The exhibit of woodcraft mixed with the commerce of film makes this a great place for the Genart Film Festival to have it’s premiere night. Genart’s an interesting organization, founded in 1993 by Ian and Stefan Gerard and Melissa Neuman, they’ve long since passed their original intention of producing art shows and have moved on to fashion, film and music divisions producing well-regarded shows throughout the year in New York.
More good news: they have a great video podcast you can get by going to this site. Then click on video podcast and let itunes launch - then subscribe. You can get interviews and other cool content about the festival here.
GENART really is one of the coolest film events all year to happen in New York, LA and Miami. This festival always draws a young hip crowd and usually movies that are a cut above the rest of the circuit. Let’s look at the first one.
Tonight’s movie premiered at Sundance this year in the Spectrum division of the festival, a category at Sundance that in the past has given us, for example, GODS AND MONSTERS. This year it’s giving us director Jason Matzner’s first picture, DREAMLAND.
DREAMLAND takes place, mostly, in a sparse trailer park (the bohemian kind, not the white trash kind) of the same name in the middle of the desert in New Mexico. The metaphor is intentionally overt: the people who live here are all broken in some way and living in a half-awake convalescent state, protected by each other and by isolation, all waiting for something, anything to happen to wake them up back into life. There’s an 18 year girl with MS, the self-named Callista (KELLI GARNER); an underwater welder from Galveston, Henry (JOHN CORBETT) whose wife has died, leaving him with alcoholism and his own 18 year old daughter, Audrey (AGNES BRUCKNER); and a strange man named Dreamer (LUCE RAINS, say it out loud) who’s checking the night skies for signs of alien presence.
One day a new family arrives: a woman (GINA GERSHON) and her husband (CHRIS MULKEY) and their son, Mookie (JUSTIN LONG), a college basketball player who’s blown out his knee and is in the park waiting for it to heal . Audrey and Mookie are immediately drawn to each other, but Audrey, who seems to think life is for other people, directs Mookie towards Callista and the two begin dating. In the meantime Audrey takes care of Henry and files away all the letters accepting her to college. She wants to emulate her hero, Emily Dickinson and lead the quiet, poetic life; besides, she can’t leave her father. He’d fall apart without her. But as Mookie’s knee slowly heals and he prepares to leave for college and life, everyone in the park will be faced with a decision that will change their lives and, perhaps, let them leave the park and enter into the world outside—outside the park and their own introspection.
When JEFF ABRAMSON, the VP of Genart’s film division, presented the film he said to the audience that he thought it was appropriate to show this movie first because it had such great aesthetic qualities. It’s beautifully shot by JONATHAN SELA, the cinematographer who’s shooting the new OMEN. And there’s a profound sense of beauty to the story, a careful architecting of the story and characters towards the end of showing people in a state of grace who are moving towards healing. I’ve been reading SARAH VOWELL lately, and she remarks about the Chelsea Hotel, a place where the notably nervous retreat for a breakdown, or worse, that sometimes people don’t want or need a clean well-lit place to get better. Sometimes they want to convalesce in a dive, absent of the threats of the well-adjusted, bright and sunny personalities that probably injured them in the first place. The park is that kind of place. An interesting thing about the heroine is that she’s sui generis in the park: she’s there because of her father’s injuries, not her own, and doesn’t belong there. I thought that was a brilliant recapturing of how it felt (in my case at least) to be a kid, trapped in a dysfunctional family and living out the drama of your parent’s problems. And you don’t get to leave. That’s pretty much what it felt like to be a kid.
I was most reminded after I’d left the theater of an experience I had seeing an Atom Egoyan movie, THE SWEET HEREAFTER. I saw with a friend and really couldn’t make sense of the story; then my friend Randi, who’d seen it with me, explained it to me in terms of the imagery of the story connected with the plot, and suddenly I “got” the movie. I’d been a little lost because, while all the elements were certainly there in the film, they were understated and left for the audience to pick up on and discover. Once I realized that, a whole new style of film-making opened up to me. On the one hand, you have a movie like PLEASANTVILLE, and it’s “we’ll announce EVERYTHING” style of movie-making; and on the other hand you have TSH and DREAMLAND, movies that create a similarly irreal “magic” place, but resist the inclination to make a dumbed-down fairy-tale of the story.
There are two main themes running through DREAMLAND: (1) the story of the community and the individuals who live there; and, (2) beside it, the story of the operatic feelings of three 18 year olds. And once again, the first thing I have to say is, “yeah, that’s pretty much what it felt life.” Everything was larger than life, heart-breaking and Ultimately Important. Real Anna Karenina throw yourself on the tracks stuff.
I liked the movie and recommend it, with a couple of reservations. If you’re over thirty, you might have a little trouble identifying with the 18 year olds and what they’re all so het-up about., but if you can connect with your inner 18 year old, you’ll appreciate the emotional accuracy of the character sketching. My other reservation is that there’s a scene that needs to be in the movie to complete the John Corbett story—when he finally leaves the park—that they ran out of time to shoot on their 19 day shooting schedule. They found something to replace it, but the rest of the movie is so well-made, and this scene is THE scene for the character, his moment of triumph, so it’s a little jolting when the movie just refers to it’s happening off-screen.
But these are minor gripes. This is a hell of a first movie. JOHN CORBETT gives an especially good not-the-usual-JC performance as HENRY, and AGNES BRUCKNER cements the movie effectively as Audrey with her natural internal complexity. See it when it hits the theaters.
Mr. Sheldrake
New York, New York
April 2006
