Dreamland
Starring Finn Cole, Margot Robbie,
Directed by Miles Joris-Peyrafitte
Rating: **
True to its title , Dreamland remains lost in a rugged romantic reverie from which it never quite awakens. It has the potential of being a powerful drama , merging love with bloodshed. Margot Robbie as a gun-toting fugitive delivers a performance worthy of her stature as one of the most rapidly emerging new talent. Sadly she gets little support from the pale script and lame direction.
Set during the Great Depression, Dreamland makes for one helluva depressing non-happening cinema. The seeds of a seductive crime romance are sown, but never nurtured so that the film appears more idiotic than erotic. The yawn-invoking yarn begins in a barn where a young farmer Eugene(Finn Cole) hides the attractive outlaw Alison(Margot Robbie). They both want the same things. No, it’s not what you think. They both want to escape, she to safety, he to adventure.
Predictably enough the ill-matched twosome flee and the narrative assumes the avatar of a cat-and-mouse chase , with Eugene’s disciplinarian father determined to rescue his son from the seductive criminal. But who will rescue the plot from its destiny of drudgery ? Homeland starts off as a version of ET where a boy and his little sister Phoebe(Darby Camp) must hide their alien guest from prying eyes. It then becomes a Bonnie & Clyde kind of bang-bang shoot-out drama hurling to a tragic conclusion. Phoebe is the only bright spark in this dimwitted catastrophe.
The direction is sloppy enough to make the fleeing protagonists look more like school kids in need of discipline than attractive outlaws on the run who finally “do it” in a motel. The s*x scene is done like a striptease without the promised glance. The director shoots inexperienced Eugene’s seduction in the bathroom while Alison showers . We watch him slowly being invited into the showering cubicle by the off-camera Alison. Exactly why this sequence is shot as though the cinematographer forgot to focus on the other person in the room, is beyond human comprehension.
After a clumsily staged climactic shootout I could only pray for as quick a exit for us as the two talented protagonists. Both the actors deserve better. So do we.
