In Dreams

Stay away from Hollywood, Neil Jordan. High Spirits, We're No Angels, Interview with the Vampire, and now In Dreams -- there's something about the glitz, money, stars, and bad taste that lures the director of such gems as Mona Lisa and The Crying Game into excess, folly, and inanity. In Dreams starts out auspiciously enough. Divers probe an abandoned town that's been flooded by a Massachusetts reservoir for the child victims of a serial killer (shades of Deliverance, M, and 10 other movies), and the image is a surreal harbinger of the unconscious. Meanwhile, Claire (Annette Bening, who seems to be acting on a three-second delay from the rest of the movie) coaches her daughter in the "Mirror, mirror" speech for a high-school production of Sleeping Beauty.

Poor Claire, though, is prone to nightmares of endangered children, a malignant man (or is it a woman?), a flooding bedroom, and an apple orchard, all of which seem to tie in to the killing spree and inconveniently surface when she makes love with her errant husband, Paul (the unfortunate Aidan Quinn). With oneiric logic a little girl and a dog disappear, Claire cracks up, she's put in the loony bin by Stephen Rea (playing the dumbest shrink in film history), and after shooting its wad in the first half-hour (Darius Khondji's cinematography is gorgeous and gratuitous) the film subsides into a bloody pas de deux with a wigged-out Robert Downey Jr.

It's hard to believe this is the same director who made The Butcher Boy, where madness terrifies because it is rooted in a real place and in real people. Here those are replaced by all the empty effects and hokum money can buy. Despite its flashes of genius and unnerving obsessiveness, Dreams is all wet. One hopes Jordan will wake up in time for his next picture.

-- Peter Keough