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The talent of Robert Downey Jr. was still obviousBut his appetite for drugs and alcohol allowed the studios to easily refuse him work during the first decades of his career. The son of the independent filmmaker Pioneer Robert Downey (whose “Putney Swope” is one of the most scabrous pieces of Pop cultural satire), Downey son appeared on the outskirts of the favorites of the 1980s as “strange science” and “return to school” than zero. “”

Downey had the gift. He had everything. He has always been the most exciting person on the screen, who probably struck some of his co-stars, but the child could not help it. Like Eddie Murphy or Robin Williams, you were ready to laugh each time he entered the frame. Unlike these stars, you didn’t know if you could trust him. He could be a tyrant. He could be a CAD. And he could be a killer.

Avu Downey had been able to resist the substances that landed in prison more than once and almost destroyed his career, I doubt that he would have spent the entire 1990s who knows it in mainly supported roles. Featuring in “Chaplin” And winning an Oscar nomination for the best actor in 1993 should have placed him permanently on list A. But his demons had not finished with him.

And so, two years after delivering an extraordinary execution performance in James Toback’s “two girls”, “Downey found himself playing a child killer in the elegant thriller of Neil Jordan” in Dreams “. The actor was in and out of prison, rehabilitation and direct prison during this period, so he did not really call his air when it comes to roles. However, there were good reasons to think that the room could have a big advantage. To start, it was one of the first Greenlights of DreamWorks SKG. In addition, it was written so that Steven Spielberg was potentially direct. So what’s wrong?

In the very entertaining book “Smoking in bed: conversations with Bruce Robinson,” The deliciously thorny scriptwriter of “Withnail & I” and “The Killing Fields” (for which he won an Oscar nomination) discussed the way Spielberg hired him to write “a psychological drama of extreme darkness, not a thriller but what” the brilliant “should have been right, a lot in the relationship of the characters”. “This follows because Spielberg was friends with Stanley Kubrick and is obsessed with the adaptation of the filmmaker of Stephen King’s novel (to the point that he incorporated it into” Ready Player One “).

“In Dreams” was a Primo Hollywood project, but, according to Robinson, Spielberg had cold feet when the time came to do what would have easily been his darkest gender work. According to Robinson:

“It was very heavy, and something in his head, or someone like his wife, may have said:” Listen, Steve, you are the man who does ‘and’ Do you want to make a film on a children’s killer? Your audience may be very unhappy that you have a subject like this. It does not immediately lend itself to the mainstream cinema, and it was the big problem of writing the bloody thing. “”

Spielberg finally returned the project to Jordan, the brilliant filmmaker responsible for Classics such as “Mona Lisa”, such as “The Crying Game” and “The end of the case”. He also had a successful credit due to the realization of “the interview with the vampire”. It was not a step down, but Jordan is a tortured and excited Catholic who carries his religious agony on his sleeve. He made a beautiful film (shot by the director of the director of photography Darius Khondji), but it is a great mood in search of a fascinating story. If Jordan had not rewritten Robinson, he could have evoked the black magic of “don’t look now by Nicolas Roeg. Instead, he made a studio art film or Pli-Nnor-Fowl.

Downey is quite good in the film, but it is mainly a window for Annette Bening as the mother of the murdered child – and, shock of shocks, she is the subject of the mission. If Spielberg had done “in dreams”, he would have been shot by Janusz Kaminski and probably lacked the terrifying beauty of Jordan’s interpretation. Spielberg finally rocked this itching with “Minority Report” in 2002, a year before Downey was cleaned. They just missed it, but it is still time for them to connect.