Dream for an Insomniac

During the run of the very popular television sitcom Friends, the main cast members attempted to capitalize on their newfound clout in the industry by trying to jumpstart film careers with varying degrees of success. For every Scream (featuring Courteney Cox), there was a Fools Rush In (Matthew Perry) or Ed (Matt LeBlanc) or The Pallbearer (David Schwimmer). Like her castmates, Jennifer Aniston’s cinematic track record was rather uneven, but in 1996 she appeared in two independent films, including the little-seen yet charming romantic comedy Dream for an Insomniac along with Ione Skye. The film was written and directed by newcomer Tiffanie DeBartolo and, despite Aniston’s star power, was barely released, flopping spectacularly at the box office, which is a shame because it is a smart, engaging rom-com that flew in the face of a lot of Generation-X movies being made at the time.

Like its star, Dream for an Insomniac is breathtakingly gorgeous, from its sumptuous black and white cinematography to its inevitable transformation into color, which also sets it apart from films of its ilk. The opening scene plays homage to classic Hollywood cinema with its black and white look and Ione Skye dressed up like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). “Novocaine for the Soul” by the Eels plays over the opening credits as we see Frankie (Ione Skye) – the insomniac of the film’s title – struggle to sleep (I’m not sleep deprived, I’m sleep deficient.”). If that weren’t enough, she’s unlucky in love, but it may be that her standards are too high with the personal credos like, “Anything less than extraordinary is a waste of my time.”

She lives above a café that she works at when not going on acting auditions with her best friend Allison (Jennifer Aniston) and in a week they plan to move to Los Angeles to pursue their career in earnest. Uncle Leo (Seymour Cassel) is an old school Italian man who owns the coffeehouse and worships Frank Sinatra, as does Frankie. He keeps hoping that his son Rob (Michael Landes) will find a nice girl and settle down, seemingly unaware that he’s in fact gay.

Dream for an Insomniac ambitiously maintains its dreamy black and white look for the first 20 minutes until Frankie meets David (Mackenzie Astin), the guy who just started working at the café, and notices his blue eyes. It is at this point that the film comes vividly to life as their meet-cute scene involves testing each other’s literary prowess as they have to figure out who the other is quoting, from Aristotle and Tennyson to Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and Raising Arizona (1987).

Frankie is a hopeless romantic that believes in passionate love, a dreamer unable to sleep and who is not only drawn to David’s intelligence (and good looks), but the fact that he is also a struggling writer. Her admiration for him only deepens when she reads some of his stuff. Unfortunately, he suffers from writer’s block, much like she’s plagued by bouts of insomnia. He promises to help her sleep and she aims to conquer his inability to write.

I always wondered why Ione Skye’s career didn’t take off after Say Anything… (1989), but maybe she wasn’t interested in doing big studio films as evident in subsequent efforts like The Rachel Papers (1989) and Gas Food Lodging (1992), which were small films that tended to fly under the radar. She often plays characters that possess a keen mind and Dream from for an Insomniac is no different as Frankie is a lover of the written word. I’ve always felt that Skye is a classic beauty and she adopts a stylish retro look in this film that compliments her features, including that warm, inviting smile. I like how DeBartolo includes little bits of business, like Frankie’s daily ritual of getting up in the morning and tossing pennies at Rob’s window across the way until he surfaces and she greets him with a literary quote. It provides us with some insight into these characters and the relationship between them.

Jennifer Aniston has a small, but significant role as Frankie’s best friend. She playfully adopts a variety of accents throughout (including French, Irish and Canadian) much to the mild annoyance of her friend, but this isn’t overplayed and serves as a reminder that she’s a struggling actress much like Frankie. Aniston is a gracious performer in this film as she doesn’t try to steal a given scene even though she is the biggest star in the film. She supports Skye and the two play well off each other as they portray convincing best friends. Allison is there for Frankie, consoling her when she finds out that David has a girlfriend and they spend an afternoon commiserating over pizza. It also makes one wish that Skye would get more lead roles this one and that Aniston would do fewer studio movies and take on roles in smaller films that don’t require her to do all the heavy lifting.

In the ‘90s, Mackenzie Astin effortlessly bounced between studio films (The Evening Star) and indie movies (The Last Days of Disco). He’s good enough as Frankie’s potential love interest and intellectual equal. He seems to have decent chemistry with Skye, but lacks the charisma required for the role. Again, this typifies the film’s desire to go against the trend of other Gen-X films with their proliferation of trendy hipster poseurs, like ones Ethan Hawke plays in Reality Bites (1994) and Matt Dillon in Singles (1992).

Michael Landes (Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman) plays a gay man refreshingly devoid of all the cliché affectations that you see in most Hollywood movies. Rob is a guy that just happens to be gay and his dilemma is working up the courage to come out to his father, which is dramatic enough. Rounding out the cast is Seymour Cassel, who, by that point, had become an elder statesman of indie cinema and his presence in this film gives it some credibility, almost making us overlook the quaint Italian stereotype that is his character.

The few critics that saw Dream for an Insomniac were not crazy about it at all. In his review for The New York Times, Stephen Holden called it a “self-conscious modern sitcom that with its San Francisco setting suggests a pale shadow of Armistead Maupin’s Tales from the City.” The Los Angeles Times’ Kevin Thomas wrote, “It’s likely to be no more than a blip on the screen for its appealing actors, who’ve done fine work before and since this wan effort was finished three years ago.” However, in her review for the San Francisco Chronicle, Barbara Schulgasser wrote, “All of the playful dialogue – and this movie is joyfully full of talk – is handled well in DeBartolo’s savvy script and given life by actors who seem to truly embody the idealism of the characters.”

The machinations of Hollywood soured director Tiffanie DeBartolo from making another movie: “It was a life I really didn’t want to lead. I value my privacy, and the solitude of writing. Making films necessitates a lot of schmoozing and game playing and socializing that I just didn’t have in me. That said, I really did love the experience of being on the set and watching my words and my vision come to life.” She went on to become an author, writing two novels – God-Shaped Hole and How to Kill a Rock Star – and co-founded indie record label Bright Antenna.

Dream for an Insomniac is the forgotten Gen-X film and it wouldn’t be a ‘90s rom-com without all the characters frequenting a coffeehouse, the inclusion of a trendy hipster poseur, a few choice alternative rock songs, and a discussion about popular culture in an amusing scene where Frankie and her friends argue over a game of Scrabble about the relevance of Bono and wondering if his status as reigning rock god has become eclipsed by the likes of Eddie Vedder and Michael Stipe. That being said, this film succeeds where a lot of its contemporaries failed by staying relevant after all this time. It now comes across as some kind of postmodern Gen-X fairy tale rather than a postmodern Gen-X reference guide, which films like Reality Bites and Empire Records (1995) resemble.

That’s not to say Dream for an Insomniac doesn’t reference pop culture that was en vogue at the time, but it largely quotes from literary references that include writers like Jim Morrison and Charles Bukowski from various time periods. Literature makes up more of the film’s DNA than the references to film and television. This makes the film something of an anomaly in the Gen-X subgenre. Dream for an Insomniac flies in the face of other Gen-X movies with its cultural touchstones, the look of its characters – they aren’t all wearing flannel – the use of Frank Sinatra music as opposed to whatever Seattle music was trendy at the time, and even the coffeehouse setting lacks the fashionable clutter of pop culture décor that you see in films like Reality Bites and Singles.

If Slacker (1991) and Reality Bites represent the polar opposites of Gen-X cinema with the former epitomizing lo-fi indies and the latter an example of mainstream studios, then Dream for an Insomniac hews closer to Slacker. It is a Gen-X rom-com thankfully devoid of the irony that plagued most of its contemporaries, which has helped it age well over time. It is an underrated gem anchored by an engaging performance by Ione Skye that deserves to be rediscovered.

SOURCES

Ders, Kim. “Tiffanie DeBartolo: Amazing Grace and Rock ‘n’ Roll.” MusePaper. July 18, 2008.

The Iron Giant

“So we have to deal with our technological sophistication versus our spiritual sophistication — and technology always seems to be ahead of where we are spiritually. The machine in the movie ends up representing our own inventive side of ourselves and begs the question: Is it a good thing or is it a dangerous thing?” – Brad Bird

When The Iron Giant was released in 1999, it flew in the face of the current trend popularized by Disney animated musicals. Based on the 1968 children’s book, The Giant: A Story in Five Nights, by late British poet, Ted Hughes, The Iron Giant refuses to rely on musical numbers and simplify its message to appeal to kids. It is one of those rare animated films that both adults and kids can appreciate. It is also a nostalgic ode to the 1950s that is thought-provoking and entertaining.

Set in the small town of Rockwell, Maine in 1957, a nine-year old boy named Hogarth (the voice of Eli Marienthal) befriends a mysterious 50-foot robot (the voice of Vin Diesel) that has crash-landed near the town from outer space. Raised on steady diet of alien invasion B-movies, Hogarth tries his best to hide the presence of his large, metallic friend from his mother (voiced by Jennifer Aniston). He also keeps his new friend a secret from a snooping government agent (voiced by Christopher McDonald), but ends up sharing his secret with Dean, a jazz-loving beatnik sculptor (the voice of Harry Connick, Jr.), who runs the local scrapyard.

The film originated with Pete Townshend (guitarist for the legendary rock band, The Who) who had produced a musical version of Hughes’ book in 1993, called The Iron Man. He brought the project to Warner Brothers with Des McAnuff, director of Tommy (1975), with the idea of transforming it into an animated musical. Animator Brad Bird heard of the project and met with Townsend and the film’s screenwriter, Tim McCanlies. Bird remembers, “I read the book and I liked the book, but I had a whole lot of ideas of my own about what this film could be about. Once it sort of went that direction, I didn’t envision it as a musical.” Bird pitched his take on the material to the studio as follows: “What if a gun had a soul?” Warner Brothers liked the idea and gave the project the go-ahead.

Bird drew his inspirations for the look and feel of the film from two unlikely sources. He was inspired by the cliched and dated educational films depicted in the documentary, The Atomic Café (1982) about the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war in the ‘50s. He also liked the radio broadcast about Sputnik that opens Robert Redford’s film, Quiz Show (1994). Bird said in an interview that “the bomb had changed our perspective and the future was no longer this perfect thing. Every upside had a dark underbelly.”

In many respects, The Iron Giant has a lot in common with another excellent film that came out around the same time, October Sky (1999). Both films are set in the same year (1957) with the beginnings of the space race and the dawn of the atomic age as their respective backdrops to the main action. The young protagonists of each film are dreamers and outsiders of their societies and present refreshingly peaceful resolutions to their respective conflicts.

To further reinforce the ‘50s vibe, Bird shot the film in Cinemascope, a widescreen form of cinema that was created to compete with the rising popularity of television. Bird said in an interview that, “There’s something immersive about the experience. Also, a lot of movies in the late ‘50s were shot in ‘Scope, so I thought it was appropriate for a movie set in 1957.”

The Iron Giant has a wonderfully nostalgic, small-town atmosphere that is brought to life by stunning animation that is on par with anything that Disney has produced in recent years. The attention to period detail, from the cheesy educational videos that Hogarth's class is forced to watch, to the way the townspeople talk, is faithfully recreated and goes a long way to drawing the viewer into this engaging world.

The animation style of this film recalls the early, groundbreaking Fleischer brothers” Superman cartoons of the 1940s with its depth of field, but without the German Expressionist influence. Bird and his team mixed computer animation (the robot) with traditional hand-drawn animation (the rest of the characters) in an exaggerated, cartoonish fashion that went against the current trend of realistically rendered characters (see Pixar). For Bird, “the reason to do animation is caricature. It’s the same reason that photography didn’t render portraiture obsolete. It’s because you can draw things in a way that is not trying to reproduce reality, but more the essence of reality.”

The real strength of The Iron Giant is the relationships between the characters — something that is often overlooked in animated films in favor of flashy visuals and epic musical numbers. This film has the feel of a very intimate, character-driven story with the relationship between Hogarth and his robot friend as the emotional center but with several other relationships (like the ones between Hogarth and his mother and between him and Dean) featured prominently as well. This is no simple Saturday morning cartoon but a strong feature film that actually has something to say.

The Iron Giant enjoyed positive reviews from most critics. Roger Ebert gave it three-and-a-half out of four stars and felt that it wasn’t merely “a cute romp but an involving story that has something to say.” In his review for The New York Times, Lawrence van Gelder wrote, “Many adults, including parents eager to have their children absorb lessons about the perils of guns and the merits of peace and tolerance, will doubtless approve of the film's messages while they ponder how the passing years have smoothed the jagged edges of history.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film an “A-“ rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “At times, The Iron Giant is more serene than it needs to be, but it's a lovely and touching daydream.” The Village Voice’s J. Hoberman wrote, “The music doesn't flood the script with sentiment or canned nostalgia, and the movie is even restrained in its toilet jokes. Remarkably unassuming, genuinely playful, and superbly executed, The Iron Giant towers over the cartoon landscape.” In his review for the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum praised the film’s “flavorsome period ambience and its lively and satiric characters.”

The Iron Giant did not do as well at the box office as Bird had hoped. Traditionally, animated films set promotional deals a year in advance so that the appropriate amount of hype and advanced word can be created. Warner Brothers delayed giving the film a release date and so every time Bird courted a potential sponsor, they would lose interest because no concrete date was set. Very few advanced posters and trailers were created and this hurt the film when it was finally released. It only grossed $23 million but has since found a new life on video and DVD.

The Iron Giant is one of those rare animated films that not only appeals to both children and adults; it does not contain one annoying musical number. It is also refuses to serve as one long, obvious advertisement for a toy. In fact, this film is an entertaining, even touching story about tolerance and compassion. It deals with real issues like death and bigotry — pretty heavy topics for a children's animated film — in an honest and heartfelt way. From all indications, The Iron Giant was clearly a labor of love for those involved and this translates into an enjoyable film for everyone to enjoy.