Dream House

Dream House (2011)

Dir. Jim Sheridan

Written by David Loucka

Starring Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, Naomi Watts

I’m not going to sit here and try to tell you DREAM HOUSE is a good movie. You and I both know that’s a lie. But I’ll give it this: it’s not the bad movie I thought it was going to be. It is, if not an interesting bad movie, at least something of a rare variant on the usual crapola. It actually managed to surprise me, which is something I would never have thought possible when, in something of a masochistic mood, I decided to throw it on and see what happened. Is surprising the same thing as being worth your time? Well, not your time, certainly. But possibly mine, just barely.

I suppose before we go any further I should try and justify the kind of blatantly self-destructive behavior that would motivate a person to watch DREAM HOUSE in the first place. It is, of course, in part yet another recurrence of the dread “How could that not be great?” syndrome. As in, Woah, Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, and Naomi Watts made a horror movie with Academy-Award winning MY LEFT FOOT director Jim Sheridan? How could that not be great? This condition is a sadly temporary state of mental confusion nearly always immediately followed by a rueful Ah, OK, that’s how. I’ve suffered from this unfortunate malady before, actually, several times, and although I get over it every time I seem uniquely immune to full remission.

This time, however, my borderline-suicidal optimism was not the sole motivating factor; the truth is, dear reader, that in my deepest, secret heart, I’m something of a formalist by nature. It’s not something I’m proud of, but there it is, and I’m too old to deny it. While I can and do happily wallow in some absolutely indefensible dreck, I do deeply care about and love the craft of cinema, and sometimes, just sometimes, I need to cleanse the palate by watching something which was actually made by competent professionals who know how to make things look slick and pretty, and know how to work with fancy pants real Hollywood actor types.

Admittedly, while this kind of technique is necessary to give us everything from a James Bond movie to a STILL ALICE, it is rarely something which meaningfully benefits a horror movie, and often comes at the detriment of the actual important mechanics of the horror genre. As we’ve discussed before, the particular nuances of cinematic fear mostly come from places other than technical proficiency in acting and slickness in craftsmanship, as many a high-falutin’ mainstream director has disastrously discovered while crashing and burning on what they assumed would be a low-effort genre flick. The skillset it takes to movingly depict Daniel Day Lewis crying is not necessarily the same skillset that can evoke a sense of unease as Daniel Craig believes his house to be haunted. Succinctly put, there was almost never any chance this movie was going to be any damn good at all; these are talented people, but there was no reason to think they had the right kinds of talents to breath life into the threadbare haunted house subgenre.

But just because something is almost certainly going to be a trainwreck is no reason not to waste an hour and a half of precious, finite life on it! He said, a hint of wild desperation twining its way into his voice. Look, I just want to watch a movie that looks like a real movie every now and then, is that such a crime? I never said I was a role model. Leave me alone!

How could anyone resist this kind of exciting advertising?

NOTE: This will be a spoiler review, if you consider a movie you never wanted to see and I now emphatically recommend that you never see capable of being spoiled. But yes, this is a movie which is utterly dependent on holding onto a few secrets --some pretty intelligence-insulting but a few sort of surprising-- and if you think you might be as foolish as I am and give it a try, don’t read any further because the spoilers start, like, in the very next sentence after this warning (or the third sentence, depending on how you want to grammatically categorize the two sentence fragments which immediately follow).

So! DREAM HOUSE. DREAM HOUSE is called DREAM HOUSE, so it pretty much tells you right in the title that it’s going to be one of those tiresome twist-a-rooney movies that dignified mainstream Hollywood directors think are going to totally blow people’s minds because all they watch are weepy menopausal dramas about middle-age ennui, and they don’t realize these twists have been hacky since the middle 19th century. It begins with William (Daniel Craig, A KID IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT) a vaguely defined high-powered editor (of what it’s not clear; I’ve noticed that lots of people in movies are high-powered editors, because I think it’s the only middle-class sounding job Hollywood can dimly imagine outside itself) who is celebrating his final day at the office before embarking to his newly-purchased quaint small-town America suburban home to spend time with his cherubic family and write the Great American Novel. On the train ride home, he’s standing next to a silent Elias Koteas (TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES 1990) so obviously that’s gonna be a thing at some point.

First though, we gotta pretend we think this isn’t going to turn out to be a dream or he’s really a ghost or something. That becomes increasingly difficult, as we meet his almost comically idyllic family -- Movie Wife #1 (Rachel Weisz, THE MUMMY RETURNS… holy shit, she’s in Stephen Norrington’s DEATH MACHINE? Just one more reason I’ve got to watch that) and indistinguishable adorable daughters #1 and #2 (Claire and Taylor Geare, real life sisters who also both appeared in INCEPTION), as they hug and sing songs and practically tie us down and garrotte us with the fact that they’re a perfect vision of suburban bliss, and not at all in any way a dream or a ghost or what have you.

But what’s this? His daughters keep seeing mysterious ghostly happenings, and he learns that the house was, get this, the site of the brutal murder of a family exactly like this one a scant five year ago! The victims were all shot by a mysterious perpetrator who has his face conveniently obscured in all the old newspaper photos, and also whenever William asks people around town about this stuff they act really weirded out and awkward around him. Sympathetic neighbor #1 (Naomi Watts, TANK GIRL), especially, keeps putting every known emotion on her face and looking conflicted and commiserative every time he shows up. Needless to say, the rest of the family never goes outside the house or has any interactions whatsoever with anyone besides William so we’ll never know how the town would react to the fact that whatever they are, they’re definitely not the ghosts of the family he murdered before being confined to a mental institution and is now imagining while squatting in his old, abandoned home to try and deal with the grief and guilt, no siree-bob.

Well, it’s not exactly a mystery what’s going on here, but the movie bravely pretends it is for a disastrously long time. That much, though, I expected. The surprise here is not that Craig is actually a mentally ill man named Peter, squatting in the ruins of his former home where his family was killed and creating an elaborate fantasy life where they’re still alive (and have different names?). The surprise is that Sheridan and writer David Louka (RINGS, HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET, so we’re not exactly talking a flawless A-list pedigree here) don’t save their big reveal for the end, but actually drop it (in a painfully clumsy bit of end-of-PSYCHO exposition) right smack dab in the middle. And honestly... that’s kind of a ballsy move because, uh, what else is there to this story except Peter’s journey of self-discovery? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining that it didn’t go full SHUTTER ISLAND and force me to go back to murdering prostitutes again, but what other plot could there possibly be lurking in this premise?

Alas, having managed, against all odds, to actually surprise me, DREAM HOUSE is totally exhausted and just settles on suddenly and arbitrarily introducing a totally new plot, that maybe Peter wasn’t the actual killer and he needs to figure out who it really was. So he quickly gets over being crazy and turns detective for the remainder of the runtime, because, why not. Not that the mystery here exactly requires the world’s most cunning detective. Considering they wouldn’t dare end on an attempted double secret reverse twist (where it turns out that no, he actually really did do it*), and considering it definitely wasn’t long-dead wife #1, that leaves only three other characters in the movie:

1: Sympathetic Naomi Watts,

2: Her asshole ex-husband (Marton Csokas, the beloved role of Lamech in Darron Aronofsky’s NOAH) who the movie spends a suspicious amount of time and effort establishing for no immediately extant purpose, and

3: the apparently unimportant Elias Koteas who appeared right at the beginning but sure hasn’t done anything since.

Hmmm, I wonder who the culprit(s) are?

The good news, though, is that even if the two halves of the movie are both bad and are barely related to each other, there are two fun wrinkles. For one, when the big twist comes, the movie’s entire production subtly shifts from the golden-hued, idealized fantasy look where Peter was the perfect dad with beautifully coiffed hair (and killer abs the movie makes sure to show us), to a grimier realism with a greasy-haired Peter crouched in a mouldering, graffiti-covered house under slate gray skies (he still has great abs though, I noticed. Guess that part was real). Because it’s a uptight multi-million-dollar Hollywood production, you never question how phony and gorgeous the first half of the movie is until the other shoe drops, and consequently the descent into realism is subtle, but feels seismic. That’s a pretty smart filmmaking trick I can’t recall ever seeing before, although I’m sure it’s been used somewhere or other. Of course, the movie then shoots itself in the foot by being even more patently ridiculous in the back half than the front (completely negating its newfound sense of realism), but oh well, it was a good idea.

What? A lot of high-powered editors/psychotic homeless men look like this!

The second idea is equally pointless in execution, but I like it even more. By the film’s climax, we know that there is no “William” and there are no ghosts -- Peter’s just a nut who was living in a completely convincing idyllic fantasy of his own past with a different name because that is a totally real thing people do wink wink. This, of course, makes the first half of the film totally meaningless arbitrary nonsense, because none of that happened, and it’s not even like it helped us learn about his character or anything because it’s just boilerplate movie ghost stuff and hugs, and doesn’t even hint that there might be some further mystery about who the killer was. Fair enough, but when the inevitable showdown with the real killer inevitably goes down in his ruined old house, we get one final twist: he’s not nuts, or at least not totally nuts, because the ghost are real! While Peter is fighting for his life with a gun-toting murderer, Ghost Wife shows up to help out!

Of course, she’s a ghost, so she can only do movie ghost things like gently rustle wind chimes or knock over empty cans, but it does create the amiably weird situation where the killer, unaware that he’s in a ghost movie, gets really confused and irritated that things keep falling over and distracting him from his murder. I find it charming that the movie, having established no rules whatsoever for this phenomenon and, in fact, giving itself the easy out that the “ghosts” were all in Peter’s head, instead doubles down on this dumb idea and just decides to play by standard ghost movie rules as to how the disembodied spirits can actually assist the living (his lazy daughters sit the fight out, though. Thanks, girls, #feminism). It goes without saying that this twist is goofy and needless, and it doesn’t even really seem to affect the outcome of the fight very much, but I appreciate the weirdness of it. If I’ve ever seen another movie where the ghost of Rachel Weisz tag-teams in on a fistfight, it’s sure not coming to mind right now.

Needless to say, this is not a movie which deserves or makes any use whatsoever of the talents of these A-list actors. Weisz, who I would seriously consider one of the best actors alive today --period, any gender, any genre-- is capable of sewing silk purses out of pretty much whatever you want to give her, even in a completely boring non-role like this one, where the totality of her character could be summed up in the phrase “fantasy loving wife.**” That ain’t even being given sow’s ears, that’s like sewing silk purses out of scraps of dead leaves and grease-stained carpet swatches. But she’s Rachel Weisz, dammit, and she’s incapable of not making an impression. Poor Naomi Watts fares worse as a plot point halfheartedly disguised as a character. She’s working hard, but there’s just absolutely nothing interesting about this role, and she barely registers in a stock character which could have been just as successfully played by a mop stapled to a paper plate with a smiley face crudely drawn on it. Craig is… well, Craig actually seems to understand how silly a movie this is, and seems to be barely suppressing a smirk the whole time.**** He’s a pro and isn’t exactly coasting, but he also seems to have figured out that aching psychological realism is out of the question here, and he’s better off just powering through on charisma (and killer abs). Good choice.

Apparently the final product here is at least in part a mess due to friction between director Sheridan and producer James G. Robinson, who reportedly clashed so severely during the production that Sheridan tried to have his name taken off the finished film. A number of reports claim that Sheridan wanted to deviate from the script and pursue a more improvisational method, which the article claims is typical of his work (never saw GET RICH OR DIE TRYING, can anyone confirm?). Loucka’s other scripts don’t exactly scream ‘mastery of the written word’ so that approach might have helped a little, but frankly the movie’s got much more severe problems than the dialogue, starting and ending with the high-gloss approach to such pulpy genre hokum. You might be able to improvise something which was a little less stilted than the final result here, but come on, this whole premise is ludicrous from front to back, there’s not a shred of realism in it to bring forward, so tweaking the dialogue was only ever going to do so much.

And that just brings us around to our original point: Sheridan, Weisz, Watts…they have a particular skill at getting at emotional truths. But this is not a movie about emotional truths -- this is a bunch of silly genre bullshit, and their enormous combined talents are completely wasted here on parts where they don’t make a damn bit of difference. There’s not a single frame of this film which wouldn’t work just as well and maybe better with Patrick Lussier directing Jeff Fahey, Tara Reid and Paris Hilton. In fact, having all that talent just serves as temptation to try and steer the whole enterprise towards a tone of ponderous seriousness which it is constitutionally incapable of earning, totally deflating the few schlocky genre thrills it does offer. And having to spend all that money (a reported 55 million, a ridiculously unwise gamble on a ghost movie even if it had turned out good) just makes it more likely that some overbearing producer like Robinson here is going to get nervous and wrestle for control and totally dilute whatever bit of actual focus and intent might have originally been present in large enough quantities to at least give it a little bit of impact.

Not that I think anyone could have made this moldy old chestnut of a script into a genre classic or anything. But it certainly could have been better than this, if someone had just seriously asked themselves how to crank some juice out of this lemon, instead of how to make it more emotionally resonant. It was never going to be rich and truthful, but it could have at least been entertaining. With this level of talent on board, though, your priorities get all mixed up and you want to focus on acting instead of performing. The result is a film which is great at absolutely everything that doesn’t matter, and frustratingly bad at everything which is actually important, completely negating every bit of potential fun it could ever have hoped to provide

Well, almost everything. It did get Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz together, which bodes well for mankind’s overall gene pool.***** As Craig himself said of DREAM HOUSE, “The movie didn’t turn out great, but I met my wife. Fair trade.” So I can confidently say that the only thing standing between me and enjoying DREAM HOUSE is my current inability to marry Rachel Weisz. So Rachel, if you wanna give me a call, we can discuss our future together and possibly also adding an extra star to my rating here.******   

*Although if they had actually gone for it I would be forced by the honor of a gentleman to track the filmmakers down and give them a long, increasingly uncomfortable hug.

**Not to be confused with “fantasy-loving wife,” where the lady digs on Tad Williams*** and David Eddings and Robert Jordan and shit. That would be way more interesting.

***Side note: have you ever googled a picture of Tad Williams? I just did, and man does he not look how I expected. I mean, I guess it’s unfair of me to picture him as a bespectacled beanpole nerd, but I sure didn’t expect him to look like Domenick Lombardozzi cosplaying as Anton LaVey. Never meet your heroes, kids.

****It’s also possible he was banging Rachel Weisz -- who he met and later married while filming the movie-- on the sly, which would be more than enough to get anyone grinning. Heck, if he was doing that and could make it through these lines without spontaneously bursting into ‘zippidy-do-dah,’ this performance deserves a fuckin’ Oscar.

*****She was previously married to Darren Aronofsky, who subsequently went on to marry… Jennifer Lawrence?! Man, she jumped off that ship in the nick of time.

******Since I feel a little weird ending on this joke the same day literally every woman I’ve ever known is posting “Me Too,” I’d just like to clarify: I hope if Rachel Weisz is reading this she’s very happy with Daniel Craig’s killer abs and knows that this comment is made in total jest, and she should not feel in any way pressured to run away with me in exchange for a B- rating on my review of her 2011 movie DREAM HOUSE.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	The Truth Can’t Stay Hidden Forever
TITLE ACCURACY	As long as you don’t mind spoiling the movie’s halfway-through twist in the fucking title, it’s perfect
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Ghosts, Psychological horseshit
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	All
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None. Elias Koteas? He’s been in plenty of genre movies over the years, but I never think of him as a horror guy, per se.
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Yes
POSSESSION?	No, mercifully, it’s pretty much the only cliche which remains untouched here.
CREEPY DOLLS?	None, which is odd since this seems like exactly the kind of horror cliche low-hanging fruit this film might be tempted by
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	Oh, Definitely
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Clean Craig to Dirty Craig. His abs stay the same, though.
VOYEURISM?	Yes, someone is watching them from the woods, and it turns out to be real!
MORAL OF THE STORY	(spoilers) Sometimes when you murder your family you create a vivid, all-encompassing alternate reality where you imagine your dead family still being alive but also you have a different name and also they’re really ghosts I guess and you’re not actually imagining things because it’s magic, and also someone else killed them and framed you in a crazy mix-up, it turns out. You know, the sort of thing a lot of folks can relate to.