senseless

“Dream Lover” stars James Spader, so good at playing the creep in supporting roles, and i’m trying to think if this is good stunt casting or not. Here, he seems to be the hero but he is soon presumed to be a creep by everyone but the main villain. That’s just one of many twists in Nicholas Kazan’s only directorial effort, which is baffling, ridiculous, and so nonsensical that it has a kind of trainwreck quality in being hard to look away.

Spader plays Ray Reardon, an architect on the rebound after a divorce. He wants a family but has a reputation for being needy so when he meets a woman named Lena (Madchen Amick) I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised when the two hit it off over one night of passion and the sharing of deep secrets. He is fascinated by her but she tries to pull away from him at first because as she says, she is too into him.

That she loves him so much only inflames him more and before we know it the two are marrying, and within two years, have two kids. But as many movies of this ilk have taught us, things seldom work out this perfectly and when they do, there is usually a lot that is not what you think it is.

There are red flags from Lena from the start. An abusive past which she has run away from, no contact with her parents, or much in the way of friends either. Ray ignores all this at first but then Lena’s lies begin to slowly unravel to the point where he doesn’t even know who he’s married to anymore.

And we don’t even really know what we’re watching. Kazan sets Lena up as a psychopath but we’ve seen so many of these beautiful lunatics before that we’d like to see some nuance which we never get. Lena’s secrets are hardly the stuff of pulse-pounding drama (mom and dad are hicks! Oh no!) and even worse, her goals for Ray become all the more cloudy and convoluted as the film goes along. She seems wholly a product of screenplay concoction, here to be unreasonably nasty for the sole purpose of nothing but to be unreasonable and nasty.

And that’s not all. At times Ray seems to have the same dream where he’s at a night time carnival and a creepy clown seems to be giving him romance advice. Huh? Also, the ending. Who thought this was clever? It’s astoundingly lazy, cheap, and a total copout that only cements what we’ve known all along, which is this movie was going nowhere long before.

Spader does what he can to add some paranoia to all this but Amick seems mysteriously dead-eyed right from the beginning. I’m pretty sure she spends so much time concealing that it’s hard to imagine she’s not hiding something. Both look terrific in a sex scene but there isn’t nearly enough nudity to compensate for the curiously bland, senseless, and cheap nature of the rest of it. The only way it works is for unintentional laughs.