"DREAMLAND" (2020)

DREAMLAND (2020)

Written by Tony Burgess & Patrick Whistler
Directed by Bruce McDonald
Starring Juliette Lewis, Stephen Mchattie, Henry Rollins
Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes

by Hunter Bush

Dreamland takes place in a world that's like ours, and yet not. Characters drift through it at an lackadaisical pace that heightens the film's tension by seeming to ignore that there is tension at all, or they get carried along almost nonchalantly by events, like a particularly "chill af" leaf on a river of gangland violence. Choices are made that would make no sense in a world where logic mattered, while here in Dreamland they seem like the only option worth choosing. With a title like Dreamland is it any surprise that this film is, well... dreamlike?




Likewise, talking about it is a bit like describing a dream. Which isn't to say that there is no logic; actions have consequences, cause begets effect and so on. There is a defined chain of events, it's just that some of the links in the chain are looser than others. If this were a realistic film set in a realistic world, I would want a nice, tight script: let me know the stakes, show me why the characters make the choices they do, firmly establish the relationships between the characters so I know why they behave towards each other the way they do, and so on. But this is not that kind of world.

Street-level crime kingpin Hercules (Henry Rollins) has his ego bruised by a personal hero and feels so slighted by it that he demands the fellow's pinkie finger be cut off to "send a message". The hero - a jazz trumpeter - and the man sent to collect the pinkie are both played by Stephen McHattie and both roles are largely unnamed (in fact what the Killer's name is becomes a bit of a running gag throughout the film). There's also a gang of hitmen children working for Hercules, a Countess of crime (Juliette Lewis) and her brother, an actual actual actual vampire (Tómas Lemarquis)!

My biggest issue with Dreamland is a tonal one. At the start of the film we see McHattie executing some folks who turn out to be rivals or roadblocks to Hercules' criminal empire. Now, with them out of the way he can expand into a new market: child trafficking. That is, as I so often say of such things, a powerful spice to add to your film's recipe, and one that in hindsight seems unnecessary. I understand it's importance as an inciting incident: the Killer quickly recognizes one of the girls as a neighbor and wants to rescue her which sets him at odds to Hercules and puts everything in motion for a climactic gunfight during the girl's unwilling wedding to the Vampire. If this were your regular-degular crime movie I wouldn't have as big a problem with it but it's not: the intended groom isn't just some high-ranking criminal goon, he's an actual actual actual vampire. It could just be explained - as in like EVERY OTHER VAMPIRE MOVIE - that the girl looks like his long lost love and boom! there's your wedding. Still creepy, but not Law & Order: SVU creepy.

All that nonsense is set up fairly early in Dreamland, so I'm not saying it's exactly a surprise, but I stuck with it expecting director Bruce McDonald and writers Tony Burgess & Patrick Whistler would address it; build something out of it, but that never happened. Sure Hercules gets his comeuppance (think of it as Film Karaoke - Henry Rollins' cover of Tony Montana's Death Scene) but not for child trafficking, just for standing between McHattie's Killer and the one underage girl he wants to save. Which is fair because this is not a film about child trafficking. So then why does it feature child trafficking at all?

Well, maybe it actually *is* about child trafficking. In the film's final moments, McHattie awakens into a reality that has been dogging him throughout the film as blurry instances of unreality. A dream perhaps or a memory, or possibly the waking world pushing in through cracked eyelids at this notably dreamlike one? It's up for debate (which is why I don't hesitate to talk about it in this review: these are not hard facts I am ruining by mentioning, they are avenues for discussion and rumination that the film opens up for us). Is McHattie really the jazz man, who encountered abused children in the woods with his ladyfriend (Lisa Houle) and is whisking them away to an island, dreaming about a world where these events and actions could make sense? Or is the world we see the real one, where the Vampire bites his sister, turning her into a supernatural creature so they can transmogrify into bats and fly away from a gunfight? Which seems more likely and: does that matter?

The speculation that Dreamland allows is my favorite bit about it. Sure the key performances are engaging - McHattie manages to play both characters as pretty different even though the characters are very similar as people; Rollins chews scenery like someone hid the antidote in it; and Lewis, though under used, crackles with her specific brand of manic energy - and the direction is solid, but as any kind of standard film it flounders. The crime stuff doesn't have enough weight, the monster angle is never explored or explained and the duality of McHattie's characters is never even addressed. However I don't think this is an oversight on the part of the filmmakers, I think they are deliberately telling us that these things aren't the focus.

From my couch in the continued restriction of social distancing where people are spitting on retail employees for enforcing health and safety regulations, and others are risking exposure to a life-threatening and highly-contagious disease as some form of weekend warrior political activism, watching Dreamland felt very prescient. Does this feel like the real world? If these events were happening in that background of McDonald's film, would that make it more grounded? What is reality anymore now that days all run together? Dreamland might not blow your hair back, but its oddly meditative tone might be a good mood-setter for an evening of contemplation. Double feature it with McDonald, Burgess, McHattie & Houle's much darker, but oddly hopeful previous collaboration Pontypool (2009) for some surprising connective tissue.