Review: Dreamland Wears More than Just Its Influences on Its Sleeve

Miles Joris-Peyrafitte’s film ultimately succumbs to melodramatic clichés and simplistic political demagoguery.

Dreamland
Photo: Paramount Pictures

Miles Joris-Peyrafitte’s Dreamland opens around the time of World War I, with families of homesteaders in a dirt field in Texas staking their claims on their own private pieces of land. One of these families is the Bakers, who, like those around them, moved west to become landowners, and as such masters of their own destinies. But this promised land is hard and unforgiving, and alcoholic patriarch John Baker (Hans Christopher) soon leaves his wife, Olivia (Kerry Condon), and young son, Eugene (Finn Cole), for what he believes are greener pastures in Mexico. Flash forward to the 1930s and these Texan dirt fields have grown into a small, hardscrabble farming community, and Olivia and Eugene have a new paterfamilias in the form of police deputy George Evans (Travis Fimmel). Olivia and George also have a daughter together, Phoebe (Darby Camp).

This is, course, the time of the Great Depression, and this particular community lies in the heart of the Dust Bowl. Dreamland envisions the American West as a land of broken promises and dreams forsaken—a physical, social, and emotional wasteland. Like the foreclosed farms and homes around them, Eugene and his neighbors feel abandoned by their government, which appears to have reneged on its implicit promise to look after its people. At least that’s how Allison Wells (Margot Robbie), an impossibly alluring bank robber and vigilante who blows into Eugene’s life like a dust storm, sees it. She blames banks and the government for losing her family home and uses her plight to rationalize her robbing and killing to Eugene, who, like Dreamland, never fully decides whether he accepts her reasoning.

Joris-Peyrafitte effectively captures the fear and misery of life in this hard-bitten time and place. This is a world of ecological ruin and apocalyptic dust storms. Locals wear gas masks to protect themselves against the omnipresent storms, which shatter windows and make the land nearly uninhabitable. Yet the director also finds beauty amid so much squalor, revealing wide vistas of monumental red skies and golden twilights. It’s here most of all that Joris-Peyrafitte wears his cinematic influences on his sleeve, filtering his story through the cinematic influence of Terrence Malick. Dreamland is Joris-Peyrafitte’s attempt at making a Badlands of his own, though closer in aesthetic register to Days of Heaven. But Dreamland, which also boasts naïve narration from a young girl and many scenes set during “the golden hour,” is ultimately a pale imitation, lacking the cosmic grandeur and aching humanity of Malick’s work and ultimately succumbing to melodramatic clichés and simplistic political demagoguery.

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The film’s first half largely consists of Eugene helping Allison hide from the authorities on his farm, and there’s much suspense regarding their goals and intentions toward one another. Allison deftly wraps Eugene around her fingers without revealing her true purposes, but Cole’s character is frustratingly one-note, dulling the dynamic between them. An extended chase sequence that sees the pair on the run from the law comprises the film’s second half, but it’s compromised by poor pacing and several gratuitous slow-motion scenes. One especially egregious example is a seemingly unending shower scene that could have been lifted straight from an episode of Red Shoe Diaries. The moment saps the suspense out of the film just as it’s about to reach the obligatory final shootout, a melodramatic and forgettable decrescendo.

Score: 
 Cast: Margot Robbie, Finn Cole, Travis Fimmel, Kerry Condon, Darby Camp, Hans Christopher  Director: Miles Joris-Peyrafitte  Screenwriter: Nicolaas Zwart  Distributor: Paramount Pictures  Running Time: 98 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2019

Oleg Ivanov

Oleg Ivanov is an assistant director at the American Jewish Committee.

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