Small, simple film beautifully done
MEAN DREAMS ★ ★★★ 1/2 out of 5 Starring: Josh Wiggins, Sophie Nélisse, Bill Paxton Director: Nathan Morlando Duration: 108 minutes
It’s been a less than stellar year for big movies. Tentpole remakes/ sequels like Suicide Squad, Batman v Superman, X-Men, Jason Bourne, Independence Day, Tarzan and Ghostbusters have underwhelmed, underperformed and sometimes both.
But beneath the box-office top 10, some excellent genre pictures have sneaked into cinemas, proving that sometimes small is beautiful. There was the unexpectedly thoughtful Barbershop; Hell or High Water, a bank-robber picture with brains and a heart; and Deepwater Horizon, which breathed new life into watery disaster movies.
And then there’s Mean Dreams. A sophomore film from Toronto’s Nathan Morlando (Citizen Gangster), it’s a deceptively simple story of two teenagers (Josh Wiggins, Sophie Nélisse), who go on the run, chased by an abusive parent and fuelled by that old movie standard, the big bag o’ cash.
That’s essentially it. But the young couple, poised on the knife-edge cusp of adulthood — with all the feelings, resources and survival instincts that implies — have great chemistry together, from the moment they meet in the woods, new neighbours in a nondescript rural region. (The film was shot in and around Sault Ste. Marie, but is deliberately vague as to even what country it’s in.)
Casey Caraway and Jonas Ford (great, literary-sounding names) take an instant shine to one another. He’s a home-schooled lad working on his folks’ ramshackle farm.
She’s just moved in with her single-parent dad (Bill Paxton), who also happens to be a cop.
“Call me Wayne,” says the old man to the boy, though everything else about him says: Don’t. He’s clearly a bad cop and a bad father — how much of each will soon become clear to Jonas, who decides he has to rescue Casey, since his own father and the local sheriff (Colm Feore) are, respectively, ill-equipped and illdisposed to help.
Morlando stumbles into a few mild thickets of cliche. There’s the shot of Wayne closing his truck’s hood, revealing Jonas standing behind it. And the old “I’m not afraid of him”/“You should be” two-step. But so much more of what’s going on here is original, superbly executed or sometimes both.
Mean Dreams is getting a reasonably wide release, which means many Canadians will have a chance to sample this smart slice of homegrown cinema, and to reflect that entertainment doesn’t need a superhero to be super.