I’m of the school that, generally, all-out pop culture takedowns can be fun in a schadenfreude way–just look at Television Without Pity–but it’s best to indulge only occasionally, like with rich desserts. They’re almost too easy, critically–the noxious words flow like wine, and so rarely are they constructive. They’re the Twinkies of cultural criticism.
That said, I’m going to break my own rule. Dream House was not built according to code, and needs to be demolished. (Puns in movie reviews! USA Today, here I come.)
(Sidenote: if there are rich desserts afoot, I will indulge more than occasionally. Same for wine. And Twinkies.)
I’m not going to say don’t go see it, because that’s a dick thing to do when there’s people’s livelihoods involved. Daniel Craig and Naomi Watts and Rachel Weisz, I’m not so worried about, but the gaffers and best boys and fierce Jean Yoo with her one line of non-English dialogue, I’m not begrudging them a little recognition no matter how bad the end product was.
But there’s also a responsibility, I think—if you’re a person who thinks concepts like aesthetics and responsibility have any business being near each other, which, I guess I do—to raise your hand and speak up when something has failed so spectacularly.
If you’re not listening already, I highly recommend the podcast How Did This Get Made? Recent episodes unpacked Gigli and the Nicholas Cage Wicker Man remake. I’m confident that, if the hosts stay in the podcast game long enough, Dream House will eventually get the same treatment.
What I like about the show is that it is the rare intelligent, sometimes-constructive takedown. Yes, they pick at the carcasses of those flops like flies. But it’s graduate-level picking. They speculate on whether an important expository scene might have been left on the cutting room floor; on if scenes were shuffled in the editing process, resulting in people randomly having, or not having, knowledge it seems like they should or shouldn’t have at a given point in the story.
There are lessons that can be taken away and implemented for next time, if you’re so inclined. Unfortunately, that point is probably moot since so often the blame rests squarely on the besuited shoulders of The Studios. And bureaucracies don’t learn their lessons, general rule.
By all accounts, that’s what happened with Dream House. Director Jim Sheridan and leads Craig and Weisz refused to promote the film, leaving Morgan Creek Productions to use soundbites from those all-purpose TV Guide Channel sit-downs to string together a promotional campaign. There were no advance screenings for critics, which, okay, enough said, right?
And then there was the trailer. If you were like me, you sat in the theater and thought, “Huh. They just gave away what in most movies (Identity, Shutter Island) would be the Big Twist. That’s pretty ballsy. There must be a bigger, even better twist. Oh look, creepy-cute moppets! Okay, sold.”
Spoiler alert: there’s no Bigger Twist.
I shouldn’t complain too much about this: secretly-schizo/split-personality movies are my least favorite horror subgenre, so frankly I appreciate a little heads-up. That way I know what I’m getting into, and then I can only hate myself afterward!
I know, ghosts, so it’s more like The Others than Identity, but no. Dude rocks back and forth in a dark, empty room and howls in psychic agony. It’s the secret-schizo genre, every box checked.
The Others had a Big Twist, but the ghost-the-whole-time thing didn’t bug there the way the bonkers-protagonist stuff always does, maybe because it’s not quite as overused at this point. I guessed the twist well before the end (The Sixth Sense had only come out two years prior), but I didn’t mind, and enjoyed the rest of the ride. The foreshadowy groundwork was subtly laid from the beginning, and director Alejandro Amenábar didn’t insult his audience like M. Night Shyamalan by doing the flashbacks-of-the-whole-movie montage to pound the twist home.
(That’s another thing that chafes about the cuckoo-climax subgenre: there’s always a flashbacks-of-the-whole-movie montage. If your audience can’t get it from having watched the film the first go-around and the crafting of your climax, you need to be rethinking the fundamentals of your film.)
I don’t know why I bother wondering why the promotional department thought it was in the studio’s best interest to spoil the film, because if Morgan Creek handled the production so badly that the stars and director ran away from it like, well, a burning building, you just say, “Ah, there was a suit-meddling clusterfuck,” and don’t hurt your brain anymore.
But I’m reluctant to place all the blame on the studio. I realize that multiple script rewrites are de rigueur for a star-studded big budgeter, but you have to at least start with an original script. The screenplay is credited to David Loucka: his only recognizable IMDb credit is the 1996 Whoopi Goldberg vehicle Eddie. No, it’s the one where she’s a basketball coach. Director Sheridan, on the other hand, did In America and My Left Foot. I think I’m willing to put a little blame on Loucka.
Let’s get down to specifics. First of all: I hate it when climactic big reveals hinge on anagrams or their analogues. They did it in Tales of the City with the scrabble tiles, but that’s the exception that proves the rule, okay? Anna Madrigal gets to do it, and then nobody else gets to. The fun of a Big Twist movie is that the audience actually has some chance of piecing it together along the way (see The Others). Dream House did some not-entirely-hamhanded telegraphing with the creepy looks Will Atenton’s (Craig) “coworkers” gave him early in the movie. That’s enough. Not everyone in the theater is a Bananagrams champion, okay?
In Dream House, even Peggy Hill wouldn’t be able to crack the various dumb name-play codes, because the audience is playing against a stacked deck. For instance, we haven’t seen Atenton’s medical bracelet, so we have no way of knowing that the random series of numbers and letters resembles the name he is deluding under for the first part of the film (81010 = eight-ten-ten = last name “Atenton,” which, I Googled it so I know it’s a name, but I’ve never heard it before, and the fact that none of the actors can pronounce it without maximum levels of marble-mouthed awkwardness should have been a clue).
Same with the daughters: “Dee Dee’s real name is Katherine! Katie is short for Katherine, and if you take the second syllable in Katie and double it, it’s Tee Tee, but when I was a little girl I mispronounced it Dee Dee!” WHAT!? It is so painfully obvious that screenwriter Loucka knew this one family this one time who called their daughter, Katherine, “Dee Dee,” so he thinks it’s okay to shoehorn it into his script. But this is not how writing works! It’s unbelievable, regardless of if it’s true or not.
This all may seem like nit-picking, but you know what? If you’re fucking up something as basic as naming your characters, it calls into question your ability to handle a more complicated task, like assembling a coherent script.
I know psychiatrists and their ilk are represented in films in ways that serve the plot, and don’t necessarily resemble real-life mental health professionals, but I think I may have found the worst psychiatrist in film in Dream House. Yes, worse than Hannibal Lecter—we don’t know, he might be good at his day-job.
The psychiatrist in Dream House plays a bunch of clips for Atenton early in the film, of probable-murderer Adam Ward, who we know from the trailer is really Atenton. (Imagine the poor intern at the mental hospital, getting that order. “A clip show? Really? Should I include a gag reel?”) His face is obscured by Nick Nolte mugshot-photo hair, okay, fine, we’ve all seen the trailer.
Then, after a bunch of clips and expositioning, the psychiatrist beep-boop-beeps the clip show to a close-up Atenton’s face, realization, dramatic music, “You’re Adam Ward!”
Now to backtrack: I thought, for most of this scene, that the psychiatrist was actually a police detective or something, who hates Atenton/Ward because he dodged a conviction, and so is getting an assy thrill out of confronting him with his psychosis. But no. It is a medical doctor, explicitly charged with Atenton’s care, who conducts this elaborate little gotcha mindgame.
I realize that every movie has scenes that exist solely for exposition’s sake, but you hope there’s some skill in the execution; some in-story justification. Couldn’t they had had Atenton break into the psychiatrist’s office and watch his best-of tape all on his lonesome?
Plus, besides the beautiful Florentine floral design Weisz’s ghost-wife character paints in the stairwell, the “dream house” ain’t even all that.
No one’s making any screencaps of this thing, so here’s a shot of Anna Madrigal. And I’m out.
