MOVIE REVIEW : A SLEEPER OF THE WORST SORT IN ‘DREAM LOVER’

“Dream Lover” (citywide) is the worst kind of sleeper, a sloggy zonker that has all the energy of a sleepy St. Bernard and the clarity of your Aunt Emma after she’s popped a few Valiums.

Written by Jon Boorstin, the film manages to transform a potentially fascinating subject--the twilight zone between nightmares and the real world--into a silly exercise in scientific mumbo jumbo. Even crack director Alan Pakula (“Klute,” “All the President’s Men,” “Sophie’s Choice”), who’s normally at his best with vivid thrillers, can’t add much electricity to this dreary psycho-chiller.

The movie’s central character is Kathy Gardner (Kristy McNichol), a young flutist trying to make it on her own in New York, playing in a jazz combo. Her bandleader and musical mentor (Justin Deas) quickly becomes her boyfriend, but the real love of her life is her imperious poppa (Paul Shenar), a chilly, forbidding figure who apparently drove her mother to an early grave and seems intent on giving his idolatrous daughter a hefty dose of the same bad medicine. (To make sure we don’t miss this heavy-handed Freudian point, Kathy dreams of holding hands with her father at the opera while in real life, they discuss her move to New York while nestled in Daddy’s bed.)

With a setup like this, it’s no wonder Kathy has enough raw dream material to keep a team of shrinks scribbling for months. After a violent encounter with a mysterious intruder, her dream life really explodes, unleashing a wild flood of terror and repressed emotion. Fearing she’s losing control, Kathy rushes off to a ramshackle sleep-research lab, where a well-intentioned scientist tries to bring her back from the abyss of dreamland.

Unfortunately, the movie tumbles off the deep end long before Kathy does. Don’t let the prestigious scientific consultants listed in the credits fool you. The farther the film makers wander into the misty realm of sleep research, the more you begin to suspect that most of their ideas were borrowed from Prof. Irwin Corey.

The film’s clumsy attempts at symbolism--Kathy’s bed is seen as the source of her problems, both sexual and subconscious--only emphasize the thin, sloppily constructed story line that never gets around to resolving most of the dilemmas it stirs up.

Meanwhile, Kathy’s recurrent nightmares, which should have given the film a striking visual kick, are perhaps its weakest link. Worse still, Kathy is a listless doormat, completely under the spell of every man in her life. It’s a testimony to Kristy McNichol’s considerable acting talents that she retains any dignity at all. The film makers have her wander around in such a passive, shell-shocked fog that it’s almost impossible to develop any real interest in her struggle to regain her sanity.

If anyone’s sleepwalking, it’s Pakula, the poet of paranoia who seems to have momentarily lost his keen eye for the edgy rhythms and moody psychology of suspense. There’s far too much dream love and not nearly enough dream logic here.