The Good Night (DVD)

...a sexually charged relationship with the beautiful Anna. The worse his real life gets, the more time he wants to spend in his dreams. He goes to a dream guru, who advises him how to control his dreams and get the most out of his sleeping life.

Presumably the only reason writer-director Jake Paltrow got a distribution for this meaningless pile of pretentious twaddle was because he got his more famous sister onboard. The film plays like ...
...throws every available trick at the screen in the hope they will resolve into some kind of style. He shoots hand-held on digital video, which makes the movie look cheap because he can't keep the camera still. It's hardly surprising all the characters are so depressed with the grey world in which they live. It's supposed to be New York, but is doubled unconvincingly by London. A cast of poorly-accented British bit-parters puts paid to any illusions ... more

Gary is a former pop star who now works for a friend as an advert jingle writer. He's stuck in an unfulfilling relationship with a former groupie and his only release from his dull everyday life comes in his dreams. There he's successful and has a sexually charged relationship with the beautiful Anna. The worse his real life gets, the more time he wants to spend in his dreams. He goes to a dream guru, who advises him how to control his dreams and get the most out of his sleeping life.

Presumably the only reason writer-director Jake Paltrow got a distribution for this meaningless pile of pretentious twaddle was because he got his more famous sister onboard. The film plays like a first attempt by a new film school graduate, so is more focussed on pointless affectation than telling a story. He throws every available trick at the screen in the hope they will resolve into some kind of style. He shoots hand-held on digital video, which makes the movie look cheap because he can't keep the camera still. It's hardly surprising all the characters are so depressed with the grey world in which they live. It's supposed to be New York, but is doubled unconvincingly by London. A cast of poorly-accented British bit-parters puts paid to any illusions you might have had about the location. There's lots of background noise that is supposed to add to the sense of realism, but doesn't fit when he's had to loop in dialogue later, which suddenly cuts out the incidental sound. He begins with a series of documentary-style talking heads that tell you nothing about the story and are too badly written to have any resonance when you think about them later. They are too stagy to feel real. One seems to exist solely to prove Paltrow can get Michael Gambon to appear in his film.

The most obvious influence on him is the work of David Lynch. You can tell from the early dream sequences that have Penelope Cruz speaking to Martin Freeman either in subtitles or backwards with subtitles. It's a cheap, pointless affectation that just looks pretentious. This is in addition to Cruz gliding in on wheels and appearing as multiple versions of herself in the same scene. The shifts between reality and dreams are often abrupt, so you don't get a sense of Gary losing himself in the dream world and it destroys the possibilities for the audience to be misled. By the time you get to the is-it-or-isn't-it-a-dream finale, the answer is most likely to be "Who cares?" Paltrow won't even allow the audience that little bit of intrigue, throwing in a decisive shot that removes any doubt. Despite being a mere ninety-three minutes long, the film manages to drag interminably.

There are two serious problems with the screenplay. The first is a dearth if likeable characters. Gary is a self-absorbed depressive who treats his girlfriend like dirt, Dora is sour-faced and spends all her time bitching and moaning, Paul is a self-absorbed, misogynistic prick, Mel is an angry little man with no social skills and Anna is merely a cipher for desire and the difference between expectation and reality. The second big issue is a lack of story. The film is simply a series of rambling dreams slotted into a framework. This format doesn't work because Gary's personality isn't informed by them; they're just an escape from disappointing reality. Because there is no real background for the character, it is unclear why he becomes obsessed with his dream-life so quickly. And because he's so desperately unlikeable you don't really care what happens to him one way or the other. The film meanders too much because there's no point to the story; Gary's dreams don't mean anything and they don't do much to change his life for the better. If anything they make him more selfish. Perhaps it would work if it was a five or ten minute short, but there isn't enough story to fill an hour and a half. The dialogue is dreary and peppered with unnecessary expletives and we don't even get a satisfactory explanation of the significance of Gary's dreams.

Martin Freeman plays Gary like an even more depressive version of his character in "The Office". He's a neurotic, rumpled, jealous, flabby and increasingly grumpy sad sack with virtually no redeeming features. It may just be the way the part has been written, but he's too unsympathetic to be likeable. The same can be said of Gwyneth Paltrow as Dora. She's cold, brittle and surprisingly wet as Gary's permanently complaining girlfriend. It only took a couple of scenes for me to want to slap her.

Simon Pegg feels miscast as Gary's smug, self-centred best mate and boss Paul. That being said, he's about the only cast member that appears to be making an effort to breathe some life into his character and he provides the few laughs of the movie. Danny Devito is playing his usual angry little man character as the mean and nasty dream tutor Mel. There's nothing to like about the pretentious and permanently grumpy pseudo-intellectual. Penelope Cruz is little more than window dressing as Gary's dream-girl Anna and her real-life counterpart Melodia. She looks good as the role requires but appears entirely vacuous in both incarnations. The oddest casting is Jarvis Cocker as one of Paul and Gary's former band-mates. Presumably he was employed so Paltrow could get access to Pulp's back-catalogue for the soundtrack.

The original music by Alec Puro is non-existent until Penelope Cruz comes on the scene, as if her appearance heralds the world opening up for Gary. She is represented by warm string arrangements that become increasingly complex as the movie progresses are a strong contrast to the lack of music elsewhere in the film. When reality and dreams collide, the warm string and piano arrangements become discordant as the action turns into a nightmare. The incidental music also includes the dodgy advertising jingles Gary writes, like a "Cheers" theme tune rip-off. The rest of the soundtrack has a distinctly late-nineties' feel to it as it incorporates the instrumental version of Blur's "The Universal" on several occasions and Pulp's "Do You Remember the First Time?" The retro feel continues with T'Pau's "Heart and Soul" and the rather bizarre inclusion of "Happy Talk" from "South Pacific". The overall effect is somewhat disjointed and there aren't enough original compositions to make it feel like a coherent body of work.

"The Good Night" has a title that is the very antithesis of my experience of the film. It is a pointless, meandering, self-indulgent pile of pretentious claptrap that ably demonstrates why some people shouldn't be allowed to make movies. The writing goes nowhere, the direction is messy and the performances sloppy. Had I not made the mistake of paying to see it, I would have walked out and found something, anything, to do as it would have been a more valuable use of my time than wasting ninety-three minutes of my life on this steaming turd of a film. 

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