Margot Robbie makes a captivating outlaw in the Dust Bowl thriller Dreamland
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Note: The writer of this review watched Dreamland on a digital screener from home. Before making the decision to see it—or any other film—in a movie theater, please consider the health risks involved. Here’s an interview on the matter with scientific experts.
“What if John Steinbeck wrote about gangsters?” seems like a hypothetical thought experiment that would come out of a particularly blissed-out hang with humanities nerds. It also essentially describes the vibe of Dreamland. Beautifully shot to communicate the almost otherworldly loneliness of Texas during the Dust Bowl era, Miles Joris-Peyrafitte’s film combines various emblems of Americana—an abandoned son, a struggling family farm, a gun moll, the dream of escaping a small town—into a familiar but effectively engrossing thriller. The film makes the most of its sparseness, using the strong performances of its ensemble cast (including a reliably excellent Margot Robbie) to question the accepted boundaries between right and wrong, citizen and outlaw.
Between the widespread devastation of the Dust Bowl storms and accompanying drought, and a steady rhythm of violent spats between gangsters and the police, 1935 was a bloody year in America. Teenager Eugene Evans (Finn Cole) lives with his mother Olivia (Kerry Condon), stepfather George (Travis Fimmel), and younger half-sister Phoebe (Darby Camp) on a struggling family farm in water-starved Texas. His biological father left when he was 5 years old, and Eugene has never gotten over that absence, as an adult Phoebe (voiced by Lola Kirke) explains through voiceover. So Eugene fills his days with fantasies of finding his father, who wrote him once about the beauty of the Gulf Of Mexico, and spends hours reading gangster comics in the family’s abandoned barn. It transforms into his refuge, full of the stories he wished he was living.
Eugene gets his chance at a different life when bank robber Allison Wells (Margot Robbie), fleeing from a shootout with the cops that leaves a 9-year-old girl and a half-dozen adults dead, crash-lands into town. At first, Eugene’s pursuit of Allison is sparked entirely by the $10,000 reward being offered for her capture. But when their paths cross and she insists on her innocence, their relationship starts to mirror some of the very adventure stories Eugene turns to so often for an escape. Screenwriter Nicolaas Zwart gets meta with his exploration of gangster mythology, allowing Allison to tinker with her own reputation and toy with Eugene’s lively imagination. But in their shared desire to flee their lives, Dreamland finds something less self-conscious, more melancholy and measured. There’s an aching quality to the ending; what it says about the limits of reinvention recalls the themes of labor, legacy, and identity that Steinbeck explored in novels like The Grapes Of Wrath and East Of Eden.
Steady and soothing, Kirke’s vocal performance gives the story immediate heft—the weight of a yarn passed down from generation to generation—and also serves as a shortcut to emotional interiority for these characters. Cole’s performance needs it; his Eugene is slightly under-sketched, leaping into rash decisions without quite enough identifiable motivation. The actor’s best in the film’s quieter moments, in scenes that rely on a pent-up physicality: staring frozen at yet another positively apocalyptic dust storm, before snapping into movement and slamming a door shut against it, or anxiously twisting his fingers together as he questions Allison about the feelings they have for each other. Cole isn’t particularly emotive—and his American accent is fairly spotty—but his low-key work allows Robbie to shine, as she always does.
Caught somewhere between the spirited freneticism of Robbie’s Harley Quinn and the private fragility of her Sharon Tate, Allison is varyingly unapologetic and repentant, manipulative and sincere. (“I’m the man in the hat,” she says by way of introduction when she sees all of Eugene’s comics.) The film’s final minutes, when Allison’s behavior becomes spontaneous, demand a fair amount from Robbie. But the character is so well-formed by that point that every choice makes sense in the second it’s made; it’s only a moment or so afterward, when Allison catches her breath, that she realizes the shattering impact of what she’s done—and that pattern works throughout Dreamland, which builds in little moments of quiet to remind us of the human cost of all these dreams.
Cinematographer Lyle Vincent (A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, Thoroughbreds, Daniel Isn’t Real) shows off another angle of his talent with a wide-eyed, sprawling style that’s Malickian in ambition. He contrasts the human despair of this corner of Texas with the beauty that can also be found there: a low-angle shot of the azure sky, uninterrupted and imposing; the creamy yellow of Allison’s car, speeding down a dirt road; the bleeding orange of a setting sun, silhouetting a search party canvassing the plain. Between Vincent’s cinematography and Robbie’s verve, Dreamland is a confident portrait of the restless, reckless striving of which American legends are made.
18 Comments
That second still is giving off pretty strong Bonnie & Clyde vibes.
Song-and-Dance Bonnie & Clyde is my favorite Bonne & Clyde.
I do not want to end up like them.
It almost doesn’t look real. It looks to me like a capture from a 1930s gangster video game.
full of the stories he wished he was living Screenwriter Nicolaas Zwart gets meta with his exploration of gangster mythology, allowing Allison to tinker with her own reputation and toy with Eugene’s lively imagination.It seems likely that the film is going to blur fantasy and reality in one or more scenes, and it may well use the visual style of old timey movies/comics to do it. It is called Dreamland after all.Hopefully the ending doesn’t involve Eugene waking up from a coma.
It’s great to see a classic story of American life be told the right way, with an Irish person, a British person and two Australians.
Well, it looks more interesting than All the British are in Ohio that came out earlier this year. (The Devil All the Time)
Hey, there was at least one Swede & Australian. I suppose Riley Keough being Elvis’ granddaughter is supposed to tick up the average Americanness of the cast by herself.
Christ. You know what? I am now 100 percent pro-Hillbilly Elegy. Laughable trash about Americans that at least has the decency to cast American actors. Ron Howard is a hero.
I hear even Superman is played by a limey these days
Nationalities aside, I’m glad that they cast leads that really look the part of people who have been beaten down by their hardscrabble lives.
Heh. That kind of thing doesn’t bug me that much as long as the faces are interesting, Robie is gorgeous but she’s also an expressive actor. Jones on the other hand… And I’m not too put out by crossover in individual performances but it seems like the general phenomenon is adjacent to the overall homogenization of faces and styles. Why tell unique stories about America through other nationalities?
There’s a certain type of acting that the Brits (and Brit-adjacent) do that’s very good for seriousness. Most great American actors have a smirk on their face even when they’re doing a serious scene. If you want that kitchen sink realness, you’re better off going with a Brit. The inherent silliness of superheroes gets dialled down by Brits, because they’re just playing their idea of an American.If you want someone you can relate to, especially if they’re playing a real scoundrel, Americans are better. This isn’t true across the board, but it works in practice.
The only exception to this rule is Benedict Cumberbatch.
Well we in Ireland get muck like Wild Mountain Thyme foisted on the world in our name with Brits and Yanks (and also funnily enough, Paddies) bludgeoning our accents to death. At least this looks interesting enough. You don’t know you’re born.
Hahahahaha holy shit, you were not kidding! Yikes. I would’ve expected better from Shanley.
Put them in cages not on film! Build that wall – around Hollywood!
I’m glad this bothers you too. We’ve become so race-obsessed that we forget cross-nationalities can be silly as well.
This was beautifully shot and wonderfully acted, I wish we had more time of our duo on the road instead of the majority of it being spent in that barn though. Or the movie could have been longer which is something I rarely say to add more time of their actual travels.