Rando! The Dream Team (1989)
About a year before I was dragged kicking and screaming into a mental hospital as a movie-mad fourteen year old juvenile delinquent, I went to the movie theater and watched The Dream Team.
The Dream Team suggests what One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest might look and feel like if it were a mediocre, formulaic buddy comedy rather than an iconic drama about corrupt authority and the evils of conformity.
I vaguely but distinctly remember liking The Dream Team despite knowing at the time that its depiction of mental illness was cartoonish and reductive as well as insultingly unrealistic.
The Dream Team is about the simultaneously cursed and fortunate patients of Dr. Jeff Weitzman (Dennis Boutsikaris), a kindly psychiatrist who looks at his patients and sees human beings in need of empathy and compassion. The film is decidedly less sensitive in its depiction of the mentally ill, reducing its heroes to broad comic types to be laughed at rather than understood.
Michael Keaton keeps things watchable as Billy Caufield, a Michael Keaton/Jack Nicholson type (there’s an awful lot of overlap) with a constantly referenced history of violence who ended up in a psychiatrist institution due to his over-active fantasy life and aversion to telling the truth.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s own Christopher Lloyd plays a very different kind of mental patient in Henry Sikorsky, a buttoned-up if neglectful father and husband with a fetish for order who pretends to be a doctor rather than a patient at the New Jersey mental hospital where the action begins.
Peter Boyle is another legend of the big screen doing work far beneath him as Jack McDermott, a former hotshot advertising executive and committed libertine who has a mental break and becomes convinced that he’s Jesus Christ.
Jack believes in standing naked before the Lord and his Ultimate Truth literally as well as figuratively, which causes all manner of problems, most notably during a painful scene where he wanders into a black church and is predictably caught up in the spirit before things take a turn.
Lowbrow comedies of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s were full of scenes where white people entered traditionally black spaces and bad taste, ambiguously racist culture-clash comedy ensued, perhaps most notably in Animal House and Adventures in Babysitting.
Blues Brothers came perilously close to giving this regrettable strain of comedy a good name by making it not the basis of a single muddled scene but rather the basis for an entire film rapturously in love with the entirety of black music and black culture.
The Dream Team is not in love with black culture, however. Its interest in black people extends only as far as a DOA comic set-piece that succeeds only in being slightly less offensive and problematic than it has the potential to be.
Animal House’s Stephen Furst rounds out the quartet as Albert Ianuzzi, the least developed of the film’s four threadbare lead characters. He’s a mostly mute man-child who communicates solely through commercial slogans and baseball terminology.
In the 1980s filmmakers saw the mentally ill as analogous to space aliens and sentient computers in understanding an unfathomably complex and complicated human world largely, if not exclusively, through what they see on television.
The action in The Dream Team kicks off with Dr. Weitzman getting permission to take the titular assemblage of mental patients on a field trip to New York to watch the Yankees play.
En route to the ballgame, Albert has to stop to urinate. During the impromptu pee break the well-intentioned doctor stumbles upon a police officer murdered by corrupt fellow officers. Weitzman is shot but, in a narratively convenient development, Albert makes it out alive but is unable or unwilling to tell his fellow mental patients what just happened or why the doctor has gone missing.
As day bleeds into night the other three venture into the city by themselves in search of the missing doctor and to pursue their own desires.
Billy reconnects with ex-girlfriend Riley (a pre-Goodfellas Lorraine Bracco), an aspiring actress working as a waitress. As a former mental patient, I can vouch from firsthand experience that pretty much the only upside to being a mental patient or an ex-mental patient is that you get to make lots of bleak, self-deprecating jokes about being in the nuthouse or a former resident of the looney bin.
In the film’s only bit of verisimilitude, our fabulist writer hero is constantly rubbing his status as an escaped mental patient in the very proper noses of the respectable people he meets during his eventful field trip.
Just as I have through the years, Billy owns being a literal escapee from the funny farm because otherwise it would be a source of intense shame. If you don’t make being institutionalized a point of defiant pride, it’s easy to be hopelessly embarrassed by it.
Henry gets drunk, then kicked out a bar while Jack visits old colleagues in the advertising business. Four outcasts utterly incapable of functioning successfully in the world find themselves in the surreal position of having to protect their benefactor from being murdered by the corrupt cops behind the murder that he witnessed.
The Dream Team has the cast to be dramatic as well as funny. Instead the film is seldom genuinely guffaw-inducing or affecting. When The Dream Team aspires to drama the results are mawkish and overly sentimental. When it goes for laughs the best it can manage is mild amusement.
In an underwhelming third act a little fresh air and freedom solves all of the Dream Team’s problems. Henry visits his wife and daughter and comes to realize that maybe, as their father, he should be a part of their lives instead of shunning them. Jack, meanwhile, discovers that he’s a terrific copywriter but a decidedly sub-par deity and Billy learns how to live in reality while saving his shrink from dirty cops and a big, bad city full of danger.
The Dream Team gives fake epiphanies and bullshit redemptions to its fake crazy people, its cardboard lunatics, its one-dimensional oddballs. It’s frustratingly at peace with its lazy derivativeness and maddening lack of ambition.
A movie with this cast and this premise should do more than pass two hours relatively painlessly but The Dream Team is forgettable seemingly by design. It’s an agreeable enough time-waster as long as you don’t think too much about its squandered potential and shameful under-utilization of singular talents like Lloyd, Keaton and Boyle.
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