National Post (National Edition)
MEAN DREAMS IS MADE OF THEMES
It’s been a less than stellar year for big movies. Tentpole remake/ 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 bankrobber 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 feature 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 knifeedge 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 from screenwriters Kevin Coughlin and Ryan Grassby) take an instant shine to one another. He’s a home-schooled lad working for his folks on a ramshackle farm. She’s just moved in with her singleparent 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 from this life, especially since his own father and the local sheriff (Colm Feore) are, respectively, ill-equipped and ill-disposed to help.
Morlando occasionally stumbles into a few mild thickets of cliché. 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.
There’s creative use of soft focus, including one shot in which a character becomes sharper on the screen as he wakes from a drug-induced slumber. And the score is good when it deigns to be standard, great when it strikes into new territory. One tense chase scene is backed by what sounds like a squad of Japanese taiko drummers.
Mean Dreams is getting a reasonably wide release, which means many Canadians will have a chance to sample this smart slice of home-grown cinema, and to reflect that entertainment doesn’t need a superhero to be super. ΩΩΩ½