Movie Review : Kazan’s ‘Dream Lover’: A Harrowing Little Thriller

Ray Reardon (James Spader) is an upscale architect, just divorced, who appears to be leading the perfect life. He’s highly successful, handsome, smart and on the prowl.

Then he encounters a woman who is so eminently his “type”--moody and darkly attractive--that he’s hooked. Lena (Madchen Amick) is alternately blunt and full of ah-sweet-mystery airs, and Ray spends most of his courtship in a state of deep ga-ga.

“Dream Lover,” the first feature directed by the talented screenwriter Nicholas Kazan, is about how Ray is drawn into a marriage with a woman he realizes, to his horror, he doesn’t even begin to know. Although Kazan draws on the femme fatale conventions of film noir, he’s trying to tap a wider range of meanings. At its best, the film plays like a shadow play on the themes of marriage and fidelity--on the limits of really knowing the person you share your life with.

It’s a tricky, harrowing little film. Kazan keeps things fairly schematic--every plot point is secured, every look is “knowing”--but the overall effect is ambiguously unsettling. Most of the movie is taken up with how Ray slowly--incrementally--learns and then unlearns practically everything he knows about his wife’s past (and present). The suffocation of their burnished, perfectly appointed life is made even more suffocating by the up-close specimen-like way Kazan frames the couple. He keeps a microscopic eye on their torments.

One of the sick jokes played out in “Dream Lover” is that the characters’ worst fears get realized again and again. Kazan is a sophisticated sadist; he sets up situations with multiple escape routes and then closes off all the exits. And even though you recognize what is happening before Ray does, the dread is still there.

Ray isn’t a bad guy, and he’s on the receiving end of most of the anguish. But Kazan doesn’t give all his sympathy to him. There’s something too buffed and yuppie-ish about Ray. Ray is so smoothly narcissistic that, despite his decency, you almost want to see him brought down--his frictionless good fortune is an indignity. Despite Kazan’s sophistication, there’s a narrow, moralistic edge to his approach. (The classic Hollywood film noirs from the ‘40s and ‘50s, once you cleared away the drizzle and the fog, often thumped for “traditional” values too.) Ray is drawn to Lena primarily because of her “look” and he must be punished for his superficiality. Even though Lena, too, is drawn to Ray, the film seems more concerned with Ray’s defects--and redemption. Spader can’t provide all the emotional levels the part requires--beneath all those burnished surfaces of his are still more surfaces. We’re periodically shown Ray’s nightmares--he dreams he’s in a circus--and we can’t connect up the imagery to the man.

Madchen Amick, however, is a real find. In her first full-scale film role, she manages to give Lena’s surface blankness some depth. Lena has a way of looking both vague and fixated. It’s the look of someone who is constantly reinventing herself.

Kazan recoils from her but coddles her too. He understands that Lena is too fragrant a monster to squash.

* MPAA rating: R, for strong sexuality and language . Times guidelines: It includes brief nudity and violence.

‘Dream Lover’

James Spader: Ray Reardon

Madchen Amick: Lena Reardon

Bess Armstrong; Elaine

Fredric Lehne: Larry

A Gramercy Pictures release. Director Nicholas Kazan. Producers Sigurjon Sighvatsson, Wallis Nicita and Lauren Lloyd. Executive producers Steve Golin, Edward R. Pressman. Screenplay by Nicholas Kazan. Cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier. Editors Jill Savitt, Susan Crutcher. Costumes Barbara Tfank. Music Christopher Young. Production design Richard Hoover. Set decorator Brian Kasch. Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes.

* In limited release at the AMC Century 14, 10250 Santa Monica Blvd., Century City. (310) 553-8900.