Hollywood loves Stephen King. He's the most adapted living author, and it is not even close. We're in the middle of a big King boom right now thanks to the success of the IT movies. The thing is, while King's plots easily translate to filmmaking, his style rarely does. Dreamcatcher is one of the rare movies to be a King adaptation that wants to keep everything that is unique and strange that is King. This is one of the few movies where the production choices are weirder than the space aliens.
Stephen King is a great writer, I'm a big fan. But there is lot about the guy that just doesn't work outside his prose. His books function best as insular psychological studies, which is tough to show on screen. King can effortlessly craft a three-dimensional character, but he cannot write believable dialog for his Mainer ass. His books can go to awful extremes in the nastiness. Just unbelievable tastelessness and twisted sexual issues, none of which I hope to see depicted by real actors.
When you see a movie, you're usually getting a very filtered version of King. Most screenwriters are not interested in "ka-tets" or Dark Towers or the Number 19. They'll cut out the various "bite my bags" in the dialog. King himself has written movies, directed movies, and had vast creative control over projects. But I don't think he's ever kept as much of his own idiosyncrasies in tact as has happened in Dreamcatcher. This is the pure, uncut King. You have to build up an immunity first, because this might kill first-time users.
Dreamcatcher (2001) is a book I have not read yet, mostly because of its reception. It is one of those novels King himself does not like, and few disagree. He wrote it while recovering from a car accident that nearly killed him, and claims to barely remember writing it. (King also loves to exaggerate his own legend, so who knows how true that is.) It is a book about aging psychic friends running into an alien invasion that can only be stopped by a magical mentally-handicapped man. This feels like many of King's worst instincts in one book - but maybe also a few of his best.
For whatever reason just two years after Dreamcatcher was published, director and co-screenwriter Lawrence Kasden (of Star Wars fame), decided to adapt it with a $68 million budget. Stephen King himself was not involved. Legendary screenwriter William Goldman has a co-writer credit on the script. That's the man who wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a masterpiece of character chemistry and banter. And what do these two beloved masters of spoken word on screen do with Stephen King's weird, weird character decisions?
They kept it all! They changed nothing! Dreamcatcher is a movie that throws around phrases no human planet Earth has used like "fuckaroo", fuckaree", "fuck me Freddy", and "bitch-in-a-buzzsaw". "Scooby-Dooby-Doo, we got some work to do now" is something a grown-man says to psyche him and his buddy up. The main human villain is played by Morgan Freeman and he drops random Irish slang like "laddie". How many other movies have phrases like "crashed intergalactic Winnebago"?
Dreamcatcher is a long movie at two hours because it has a lot of ideas to sort together. Our four leads all have their own unique abilities which they need to beat the villain. These four are Henry (Thomas Jane), Peter (Timothy Olyphant), Beaver (Jason Lee), and Jonesy (Damian Lewis). Plus, the cast has a vast backstory set in Pennywise country, Derry, Maine. They have all had childhood adventures, then a depressed adulthood with multiple chemical dependencies. We even have to have a car accident that mirrors King's own with deep prophetic implications for the alien situation. It is a lot of establish while also establishing fascist government agencies and aliens and snowy Maine winters full of dark mystery.
The aliens meanwhile are themselves somewhat psychic red fungi with a parasitic phase. When they're inside you, you swell up, and then shit them out in what seems like a very bad time. The signature monsters are called "Shit Weasels". (Again, only Stephen King.) Damian Lewis gets to play a double-roll as the lead alien, Mr. Gray, since his character spends most of the movie possessed by him. Also, in case the dialog alone isn't striking enough, Mr. Gray speaks using a hysterically posh British accent.
When Dreamcatcher is working as film, it works in that way many great Stephen King novels do. There's an intense scene where a character is trying to keep a newly-born Shit Weasel trapped under a toilet lid. The whole time he's using his weight to hold the thing down, he's also trying to reach over to grab a toothpick that's fallen to the floor. He's an ex-smoker, he needs the toothpicks to settle his nerves. The scene becomes this collision between an audacious and ridiculous horror premise and a very real and serious human flaw.
On the other hand, I can't not mention how poorly Dreamcatcher handles the issue of people with handicaps. King has a recurring and very bad problem of using marginalized figures in society in this way, be them Magical Negros or the Magical Disabled. Dreamcatcher casts several non-disabled actors, most notably Donnie Walhberg, to play a character with disabilities, the fifth friend, Duddits. That's not great. King and this movie do not see those with disabilities as full people, they're seen more like innocent pets or infants. The film makes it worse by making Duddits actually inhuman, he's an alien now. (Somehow.) This is fiction that can find vast and wonderful sympathy for the aging White men that Stephen King accepts as people, and just has no interest in those he does not.
Dreamcatcher opens on an awful fatphobia joke, fitting right into King's stated worldview that fat people are less than human. It's frankly abhorrent.
Let's be clear: Dreamcatcher is a hot mess at times. But I think I still like this movie. The dialog, as bizarre as it is, kind of hits a patter and meaning after awhile. You feel like you're slowly drawn into a friend-group with a thousand in-jokes, and maybe by the end you finally get them. I love the concept behind the aliens. I love the really weird details in this movie like how Morgan Freeman has Mentat eyebrows and the infected fart themselves to death. (And yet I don't love how much the alien infection is another cruel fat joke.) I love that the story is merciless and any one of the four great leads can die at any moment.
Dreamcatcher is just a really rich and unique film. There's so many ideas in this movie I didn't even have time to tell you about the Mind Palace! Some elements of Dreamcatcher are so bad as to be unforgivable, but most of it has a lot of charm. There is no other movie like it.
Next time we travel to 2004, the year of truly reckless levels of crunk, Fahrenheit 9/11 failing to topple the president, and our next movie, Exorcist: The Beginning.
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