My Mom tells a story – it probably started as a human-interest news story, but we can regard it as an urban legend after years of tellings and (now) a game of Telephone in which I’ve become the teller – about a man found on a high bridge at night, threatening to jump off to his death. Now, his threatening to do it was a good sign, since it left him open to counter-arguments; and a couple of strangers had taken their turns with him. Still, if he hadn’t jumped yet, he also hadn’t moved; and there’ve been plenty of people whose last two minutes of life were spent telling someone, with slowly growing confidence, “Please put down the gun”. This story or legend is about a man who might indeed have killed himself.
Except that some inspired genius walked up to him and said “Hey! You left your car’s headlights on!”. And the man immediately left the bridge to go save his car’s battery, at which point people intervened in turn to save him. He was expecting platitudes about the beauty of life; his car’s battery was a completely different script. He didn’t have any counter-arguments planned for that; he’d just done something stupid with his car.
The great Dead Kennedys’ song “Soup is Good Food” is sarcastic and jarring, but when Jello Biafra sneers “I’m sorry, but it’s against the law to jump off that bridge/ you’ll just have to kill yourself somewhere else/ the tourists might see you and we don’t want that”, I could see that too as a successful intervention. And so too, at the start of Dream with the Fishes, is Terry (played as a lumpish dweeb by David Arquette) brought out of his suicidal reverie by the question “Look, before you jump, could I have your watch?”.
And honestly, I think the best way this review could go is if you went and added Dream with the Fishes to your to-rent list now, and waited to find out for yourself how this scene plays out. The first 13 minutes of Dream constitute, in my opinion, the best movie opening I’ve ever seen: a very very dark form of laugh-out-loud comedy, loaded with plot tension. (My previous nominee, the similarly morbid Harold and Maude, would appeal as a film to many of the same viewers; other points of triangulation for the movie as a whole could be Lawn Dogs, and the Fishes writer/director Finn Taylor’s next movie, the oddball romantic comedy Cherish.) To review the film properly, I’m going to have to tell you some of what happens here, and Dream is a movie with surprises up its sleeve. I first watched it with no idea what to expect, and I recommend the experience. This review should still be here when you’re done.
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But, of course, some of you could use more persuasion.
Fine, then.
Terry’s response to being asked for his watch is “No!”. That’s rude and wasteful, and Nick (played by Brad Hunt), a shaggy blond 20-something, isn’t amused. He points out to Terry that jumping from a bridge is idiotic, because what if he doesn’t die? What if he just pulverizes his legs and back? No, no, Nick has a much safer idea: Nick has a bottle of pills Terry can take, for a quiet peaceful death. But in exchange, Terry better fork over that watch.
Even Terry can see it makes sense.
So what happens after Terry takes the whole bottle of pills? Well, Nick hangs around: “I’ve never watched anybody die before”, he explains, “and I’m curious what it looks like”. Maybe that’s the problem: maybe Terry has performance anxiety. Terry changes his mind and begs to be rushed to the hospital. “What!?”, Nick asks incredulously. “You can’t change your mind! I got a lot of stuff to do, you know. I was just gonna hang around a bit, see you die, and get on with my day. We had a deal!”
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But it turns out – and the fact that the movie’s running time is over 90 minutes, rather than 13, might have made you suspicious – that Nick never actually said what kind of pills he was offering Terry. Terry has just swallowed an overdose of megavitamins; Nick takes him to the hospital, and out of his hospital bed he comes, bright and alive. Except that, well, “alive” wasn’t going too great for him in the first place. Nick will tell Terry about a study in which rats used different tactics to fight for their lives, and all Terry can ask is "couldn't there be a Buddha Rat, just accepting change in peace?"
What drives Nick crazy about that is that Nick is dying. Against his will, thank you very much. Brad Hunt’s got a halfway believable look for that: he’s still a fairly muscular guy, we’ll see, but if we ignore that, he looks haggard and semi-emaciated. Nick might be able to pull off a few more months of life in that hospital, or then again maybe not, but the hospital is exactly where he doesn’t want to be. Nick’s had hundreds of things stored up that he always meant to do before he died, and now he’s only gonna be able to get a few of them done, and it burns him that this Terry jerkwad – a man with thousands of dollars salted away in the bank, and hundreds of photos of his dead wife – doesn’t want to do anything.
And so, Nick offers the deal that is the movie’s hook: if Terry will empty out his savings, Nick will help him spend them on fantasies. If, by the time Terry is out of money, he still doesn’t want to live, then fine: he might as well kill himself. But meanwhile, he’ll at least have helped give some good times to the nice dying man who just saved his life.
Dream with the Fishes could take this premise in plenty of directions, many of them grandiose and funny and blatantly “inspirational”. Furthermore, those might have been excellent directions. But what I find fascinating is that Finn Taylor can’t bring himself to do that. Nick is an articulate working-class slacker, and he’s got a brilliant rude insightfulness to him, but ultimately Nick is allowed to be ordinary. The first longtime fantasy he drags Terry into fulfilling involves renting an entire bowling alley for a night, which Terry thinks is cool, because he’s forgotten how much he enjoyed bowling as a kid. Only it turns out that Terry has arranged for them to bowl nude in the presence of two nude hookers.
It’s small, but it’s exciting for him, and when else will he get the chance? Why does Terry have to keep his clothes on and complain – Terry, who when asked for a fantasy can only recall how much, as a kid, he wanted to be able to eat all the Cracker Smacks in the whole store?
Not all of Nick’s dreams are that small: a few of his stunts are wonderfully inventive. There’s definitely room for some broad comedy, which works because Hunt and Arquette don’t overplay it. And the characters need to improvise, such as when Nick, who knows that no doctor would let him walk free after writing his prescription, is forced to hold up a pharmacy at gunpoint for his medication (“How much do I owe you?”, he asks the counter man, who says “Just take it! It’s free!”. “No, really, you seem like a nice guy, and I want to pay: how much are the pills?”. The counter man looks up the cost: $745. “That’s highway robbery!”, Nick yelps).
But the essence of Dream with the Fishes is this: Finn started to write a classic farce, and then couldn’t help caring about the characters. Terry’s dead wife, Nick’s girlfriend, Nick’s parents and hometown friends, all of them come to matter. A great gimmick premise becomes a serious meditation on dreams, money, grief, and the illegal uses of binoculars. LSD use comes into play too (“Bet you’ve never done that before”, Nick tells Terry after sharing his solution; “What? Of course I’ve done drugs before”, Terry insists, offended at seeming even squarer than he is. “But I bet that’s the first time you’ve licked a man’s finger”, Nick replies). Maybe you or I wouldn’t, in general, endorse some of the lawbreaking that occurs in the name of living dreams; or, for example, we might not in general agree with Terry’s revelatory act at the movie’s end.
But life is precious, Nick insists: we have our hours, and then they’re gone, and in the meantime we figure out what to do. Dream is the opposite of an arrogant movie; it isn’t telling us how to live. It’s just reminding us that, if what we’re doing isn’t working, we should try something else while we still can. I know dozens of people who need that reminder. Don’t you?
Product DetailsOriginal Title:Dream With the FishesActors: Brad Hunt - David Arquette - Kathryn Erbe - Patrick McGawCondition: NEWFormat: DVDDirector...More at iNetVideo.com
David Arquette, Brad Hunt, Cathy Moriarty and Kathryn Erbe star in this irreverently romantic road trip written and directed by Finn Taylor. Hoping to...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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