The
latest in the unending series of films adapted from the Stephen King novel
factory employs a grab-bag, or perhaps a garbage-can, approach to the author’s
usual subjects, resulting in an extraordinary and virtually uncontrollable
farrago of horror. Dreamcatcher combines the nostalgia and sentimentality of Stand By Me with the psychic phenomena of, say, The Dead Zone, the alien invasion of
innumerable science fiction flicks, and the gross-out gore that King loves so
dearly. The movie also reveals, more blatantly than usual, a good deal about
the author’s peculiar approach to his subjects, and even hints at an unusual
source for the subjects’ appeal to his immense audience.
           Dreamcatcher introduces four characters, friends who each possess a special but slight
supernatural power: a psychiatrist who senses his patients’ thoughts, a
carpenter with precognition, a professor who apparently empathizes with his
students, and a car salesman who can find lost objects. The four somehow
acquired their abilities through the instrumentation of a special child, a
retarded boy named Duddits, who they saved from a couple of bullies when they
were 12-year-olds (this sequence is shown in flashback). The four gather every
year at a cabin in the Maine woods to hunt and talk about old times, including
their feeling that their shared relationship with Duddits defines the essential
emptiness of their lives.
           After establishing that situation,
the movie turns into a combination of exciting sci-fi and ghastly horror. Two
of the friends encounter a lost hunter wandering in the woods, bleeding from
some odd wounds, frostbitten, and apparently in pain. The two others, off to
buy supplies, find the man’s wife, also frozen and suffering, and like her
husband, unable to explain her plight. The friends discover that the man and
woman harbor a hideous parasite that devours them from the inside and exits
their bodies through the anus. A combination of the phallic and the vaginal,
the creature initially resembles a slug or a leech, than rapidly grows into a
huge, slimy eel, like a giant lamprey, with a long, toothed mouth for a face.
           The presence of the creature piles
on more plot, introducing Morgan Freeman as the crazed commander of a special
military unit dedicated to killing extraterrestrial invaders, called “Ripleys”
— after the classic film Alien‘s
monster, with its propensity for invading the human organism and popping out
through the chest. He and his men quarantine a large area of the Maine woods in
order to destroy the aliens, their ship, and, incidentally, all the infected
human inhabitants — including, of course, any survivors of the original
quartet. The action then jumps around between the battle of the four friends
against the invaders; the particular struggle of one of them, Jonesy (Damian
Lewis), against his personal internal guest; the conflict between Freeman and
his second-in-command (Tom Sizemore), who carries his own emotional baggage;
and the desperate trek of the psychiatrist (Thomas Jane), to find Duddits, who,
he comes to realize, will save the world.
           The various plots and characters,
which should provide enough material for three or four movies, finally coalesce
around the climactic struggle between the now-adult Duddits (a mortally ill
young man) and the chief of the aliens, known for obscure reasons as Mr. Gray.
The picture suggests that a kind of fate operates in the lives of the four
friends, that their rescue of Duddits twenty years before actually determined
the pattern of their lives, guiding them to the place where they would face the
danger Duddits foresaw, armed with the powers he somehow gave them. The
ultimate encounter defines their friendship and confers meaning and goodness on
their lives.
           Aside from the familiar gore (Dreamcatcher is the bloodiest movie
since Gangs of New York) and the
plethora of allusions to contemporary popular culture — movies, music,
cartoons, TV shows — that distinguish the King canon, the movie displays a
rather disturbed fixation on bodily functions. The phallic monster exhibits a
true vagina dentata, for example (and
even clamps its teeth on a character’s penis), enters and exits the body
through the anus, and initially appears when a character is seated on the
toilet. All this, along with a considerable discussion of flatulence,
underlines the movie’s preoccupation with the excremental.
           The absolute absence of sex, the
reiteration of the childhood memories, the adolescent bonding of the four
buddies, and the nature of the menace all suggest that King remains
disturbingly fixated in juvenility, which may truly provide the basis for his appeal.
The movie demonstrates his tendency to exploit the perennial terrors of
childhood, here revealed through the mixture of science fiction, alien
invasion, apocalyptic disaster, and horror flick. The result tends to resemble
an indigestible stew of plots, characters, and themes, disturbing more for its
possibly unintended revelations than for its purported horror. Dreamcatcher, without achieving any
particular excellence, may enlighten as much as it sickens, which may
constitute some kind of success.
Dreamcatcher, starring
Morgan Freeman, Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, Damian Lewis, Timothy Olyphant, Tom
Sizemore, Donnie Wahlberg, Michael O’Neill, Rosemary Dunsmore; screenplay by
William Goldman and Lawrence Kasdan; based on the book by Stephen King;
directed by Lawrence Kasdan. Cinemark Tinseltown; Hoyts Greece Ridge; Loews
Webster; Pittsford Plaza Cinema; Regal Culver Ridge; Regal Eastview; Regal
Henrietta.
You
can hear George and his movie reviews on WXXI-FM 91.5 Fridays at 7:15 a.m.,
rerun on Saturdays at 11:15 a.m.
This article appears in Mar 26 – Apr 1, 2003.
