The Good Night

Review By: Michael Dance
michaelmdance@gmail.com

The Good Night is a poorly executed movie based on a good idea: a man bored with his life tries to escape into the world of lucid dreaming. It seems like it could be an imaginative, Michel Gondry-esque look into the subconscious, but instead it's just boring, with an awkward script that plays like a very rough first draft. It makes dreams dull.

The cast is led by the talented Martin Freeman, from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and BBC's The Office, who once again plays a likable but schlubby Brit, this time named Gary and living in New York as a mediocre songwriter scoring commercials. His best friend and co-worker is Paul (Simon Pegg of Shaun of the Dead), a complete buffoon who's cheating on his wife. Gary is also in a dysfunctional relationship, with his live-in girlfriend Dora (an ugly, frumpy Gwyneth Paltrow), who treats him like crap.

Gary starts having recurring dreams of a woman named Anna (Penelope Cruz), who in the dreams does nothing but look hot and profess a desire to have sex with him. He realizes that sounds much better than what his life currently consists of, so he finds a dream specialist (Danny DeVito) to help him learn how to stay asleep longer and control his dreams.

So far, it's a decent premise. But the movie goes absolutely nowhere. Every character in the movie, male and female, is a loser who's unlikable on some level; Gary is pitiable, but not that sympathetic, and the movie hints that he and Dora used to be happy but it never once shows her good side. (That makes the ending, in which he apparently realizes he still loves her, completely incomprehensible, but I'm getting ahead of myself.) DeVito is probably the best thing about the movie in that he dependably delivers some laughs, and even a little bit of the pathos that the movie otherwise doesn't manage to reach, but his character is minor and forgotten about for long stretches at a time.

The dreams are boring, too. Gary goes to sleep, the movie fades out, then back in onto an unremarkable setting (usually a house near the ocean). Anna is sitting somewhere, posed like a model. Before he can have sex with her, he wakes up. That's it. We're given that scenario three or four times.

The movie also opens with a mockumentary style of people in Gary's life being interviewed about him, talking about him in the past tense. It's a device that's completely unnecessary; not only does it try to illuminate his character in ways a simple narrative could've, and it's used sparingly and randomly after the beginning. Again, like many parts of the script, it feels like something that should've been discarded in an early draft.

A plot twist about halfway through is initially exciting because it actually progresses the plot: Gary discovers that Anna ...