½*/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Jeremy Jordan, Courtney Gains, Portia Dawson
written and directed by Ann Lu
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's a film-within-the-film in Ann Lu's Dreamers that underlines everything that makes Dreamers itself so terrible. Ethan (Mark Ballou), Dreamers' chief wannabe auteur, shoots a fantasy sequence involving an asylum-style treatment program for those who suffer from movie love; the idea would seem to be that would-be filmmakers are martyrs, regardless of talent. It becomes obvious that this aspirant has nothing else to put on film but annoyance at his frustrated ambitions, and we'd wonder who'd watch such an empty exercise in self-pity if we were not, in fact, watching one just like it at the time. I don't recommend that you become part of that elite club of Dreamers-watchers, because, despite an incidental evocation of squalid life on the fringes of film, it has little reason to live–save as a warning to all indie dreamers not to follow its shabby path to destruction.
Cruelly, Dreamers initially suggests a film that could have been: after the unpleasantness of an opening teaser (in which a dog poops on a Hollywood star, ho-ho), the film introduces us to Dave, nerdy son-victim of restrictive God-fearing conservatives, and his best friend Ethan, tough victim-son of a rough and dysfunctional family. For whole minutes, the film tantalizes us with the juxtaposition of two different motives–that of a life of too much and that of not enough–for escape, and as Ethan hits the road to the dreamland of Hollywood, Dreamers makes us wonder if it will actually do anything with this suggestive portrait of yearning.
Not a chance. Once the young Dave grows up to be played by Jeremy Jordan and heads out to the City of Angels to be with Ethan, the film abandons any pretense at exploration and trots out every cliché known to disappointed man. Hollywood, wouldn't you know it, is a harsh and unforgiving place, populated by a legion of failed dreamers whose fresh ideas are rejected by venal producers. Ethan, naturally, is one of them, under the thumb of his awesomely unsupportive mother and scrounging to complete his aforementioned magnum opus. Dave gets a series of demeaning film-related jobs, and wonders if it's all worth it. And who can blame him? For the love of Mike, there are prostitutes here!
And so it becomes obvious that the filmmakers have no real vision to work from. For all its exhortations on behalf of those who would make "real" movies, Dreamers fails to notice its inability to define what such films might be like–if it did, it would have to veer off from its existing narrative in order to be a part of such a cinematic conception. Instead, it's just a familiar riff on the trials of the indie auteur, minus the creative impetus that presumably set him/her on the road to ruin. This mentally-blank attitude poisons the aesthetic as well: while Dreamers is surprisingly glossy for what was obviously realized on a limited amount of funds, there's nothing interesting or perceptive about its look, and the movie grabs at obviousness with endless drive-by shots of "seedy" Los Angeles neighbourhoods that further accentuate the filmmakers' incredible naiveté.
Dreamers is also an incredibly offensive film on the levels of both politics and that of simple human dignity. Despite its appeals at sympathy for the two leads, it goes to such lengths to humiliate them that it feels like watching a prizefighter go to town on sides of beef. One marvels at the fact that the writer-director Ann Lu is both female and of Chinese descent, as the picture seems like one more lament for white male privilege, with a couple of leads with entitlement problems who seem owed something by the rest of the world. The film is astoundingly misogynistic at times, its female characters acting as either master-tormentor (Ethan's mother), sex fantasy (an angelic girl who works at a coffee shop), or both (a middle-aged woman who leverages sex for a role); similarly, most of the non-whites are on the fringes as seedy prostitutes–the lone speaking role for a black actor is that of a gay aerobics instructor who's played for embarrassing laughs. Surely such ugly attitudes couldn't have been part of Lu's intent, but it's ultimately what's on screen, and that's not a pretty sight.
THE DVD
![Dreamers [DVD]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41XSE3F99WL._SL500_QL70_ML2_.jpg)
The 1.85:1 non-anamorphic widescreen DVD transfer of Dreamers itself is a comparatively pretty sight: the image has remarkable clarity for a film of limited means, with relatively high definition even in scenes of darkness. The Dolby Surround soundtrack is similarly unobjectionable; while there's nothing here to give the subwoofer much of a workout, the film is well mixed for the money and generally a smooth listen.
The commentary track, alas, gives all-too-vivid insight into how Dreamers might have turned out the way it did. Lu and cinematographer Neal Fredericks are maddeningly vague about their aesthetic choices, constantly at war with "conventional" filming–i.e., the early sequences are "the most conventional in the film" and other parts "push the edge of the envelope," but what they mean by such terms is never elaborated. Some heavy-handed symbolism involving the colour red, which is impossible to divine from simply watching the film, is also discussed, as is a bit of wishful thinking involving a set of steps and the scene's "enclosure" imagery. Worst of all, they've invited "number-one fan" Robert Naptor to interject inanities; he claims to have seen the film theatrically ten whole times, a masochism milestone to be sure.
The Pathfinder release also includes a photo gallery (which features poster concepts that are uniformly better than the one that adorns the DVD case), cast and crew bios, a trailer, and a TV spot. Deleted scenes include "Pete's Lesson in Show Biz," an extended version of a scene where an actor abandons Ethan's shoot; "Stuttering Boy's Revenge," a ridiculous episode in which Dave rescues beautiful-coffee-shop-girl from a bully that was wisely excised; and an alternate dream sequence that isn't appreciably different from the one that made the final cut.
A "making-of" featurette is more like a moving-picture slideshow, with director Robert Naptor (him again) explaining the backstory to some on-set Hi-8 snapshots. It's nothing special, but it–like the commentary–offers one juicy bit of advice to indie filmmakers looking to save some money: instead of using a multitude of locations, and thus wasting time and money on permits and travel, the production team found an unused building called La Casa and used its many rooms, transforming it through the miracle of art direction. It's a brilliant idea, proving, once again, that some good can come from evil.
93 minutes; R; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English Dolby Surround; DVD-9; Region One; Pathfinder
