‘Dreams,’ Driven by Jessica Chastain, Deserves Better Than Its Drowsy Reception

The actress Dame Helen Mirren once remarked that the difference between nominated for an Oscar and winning the award is that if you don’t take home the golden statuette everyone forgets about it on the Sunday night, and if you end up victorious everyone forgets on the Monday morning. Jessica Chastain and Ms. Mirren acted together in 2010 drama “The Debt” where they both played the same character, a Mossad agent, and Ms. Chastain, who now possesses an Oscar of her own, would do well to recall her former co-star’s acerbic observation.It’s not that Ms. Chastain, who won an Academy Award in 2022 for portraying evangelist Tammy Faye in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” has suffered a suboptimal career post-Oscar; yet of late things for her have gotten strange. Last September Ms. Chastain’s new TV drama “The Savant,” which explores efforts to track the role of online hate groups in public attacks, was abruptly postponed by Apple TV three days before its release, in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a decision the actress publicly said she was not aligned with.”“The Savant” still does not have a date for its streaming debut but in the meantime Ms. Chastain’s new film “Dreams” has been released. You could be forgiven for not having noticed this as “Dreams,” written and directed by Mexican filmmaker Michael Franco, has been rolled out in a most limited fashion. This is a shame since, seemingly like “The Savant,” “Dreams” is a highly relevant watch, given the film chronicles the demise of a love affair between a wealthy San Francisco philanthropist Jennifer McCarthy (Ms. Chastain) and an undocumented Mexican immigrant Fernando (Isaac Hernández) who attracts the attention of ICE officers.Despite this topicality, “Dreams has sat on the shelf for a year following its premiere at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival and a week after its release seems only to be generating interest among a few movie critics on X, a grouping informally known as “Film Twitter.” (One is tempted to compare their deliberations to two bald men fighting over a comb, but that would be to insult the follically challenged.)“Dreams” begins as an immigration drama with Fernando illegally making his way over to San Francisco to re-connect with Jennifer who he first met in Mexico City. Fernando is a talented ballet dancer and his peformances caught the eye of Jennifer, who extensively funds the arts through her father’s foundation. After a gritty beginning depicting an illegal immigrant’s assimilation into a new country, the film then abruply shifts into an erotic melodrama as Jennifer and Fernando resume their torrid affair, before in its final act turning into a hostage thriller.These shifts in style can be jarring — “Fatal Immigration” might be an apt way to describe “Dreams,” although neither character is in another relationship. The danger comes from the immigration authorities and the reaction of Jennifer’s father Michael (Marshall Bell) and her brother Jake (Rupert Friend) to her wrong-side-of-the-tracks affair with a Mexican ballet dancer. What ultimately makes this hot-button study of human coldness so absorbing and worthwhile is Ms. Chastain’s performance. Ms. Chastain is no “nepo baby”- she had a poverty-stricken upbringing, which along with her sculpted, poised “Old Hollywood” features, reinforces the sense she is a throwback who bolted through a closing door to become a film star. In “Dreams” she exquisitely portrays a woman who is as entitled as she is emotionally isolated. In one scene in particular, at a ribbon-cutting event for her family’s foundation, as her father lavishes fulsome praise on her brother before subsequently merely referring to her as “my beautiful daughter”, Ms. Chastain radiates the essence of privileged pain.Hers is a performance that is greatly enhanced by Mr. Franco’s direction and script . Many filmmakers would have adopted a preachy approach to the film, satirizing the super-rich and giving the poor sanctimonious speeches about unfairness. Not “Dreams”, something Ms. Chastain has herself acknowledged, telling The Hollywood Reporter: “If I was playing it as myself, through my own lens, the story would be completely different and she would have behaved in a different way. So I had to completely remove my own personal politics in order to approach the story the way that we did.” While it is refreshing to see scenes of pireouetting instead of virtue signalling, “Dreams” goes too far in the other direction; we don’t hear enough from Fernando. Away from his ballet scenes, Mr. Hernández, a professional dancer, plays Fernando without sufficient spring in his step. The concept of a lovestruck immigrant adrift in unfamiliar affluent surroundings is a familiar one, most notably explored in Piers Paul Read’s majestic 1988 novel “A Season in the West,” but here Mr. Franco doesn’t extensively depict Fernando’s struggle to settle in a new milieu, beyond a doomed collaboration with a San Francisco ballet company.This is to Ms. Chastain’s gain. Her acting is so compelling that she makes the extreme third act actions that Jennifer sets in motion seem somehow plausible. This film would always have struggled to overcome the inertness that defines the two lovers at the heart of its story. But “Dreams” is both resonant and relevant, guided by an actress in her prime who, having won film’s most prestigious award, deserves a better fate for her new movie than having its carcass devoured by a few scattered cinematic nerds on the outer reaches of social media.

‘Dreams,’ Driven by Jessica Chastain, Deserves Better Than Its Drowsy Reception

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