Mark Reviews Movies: SLUMBERLAND

Slumberland, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 17, 2022

The plot of Slumberland is far too busy with characters searching for things, other characters and things chasing our protagonists, and establishing rules that don't really seem to matter. There's a story filled with imaginative potential and deep melancholy beneath those trappings, but the movie's constant need to move forward hinders whatever spectacle and emotional honesty might be present here.

The premise comes from Winsor McCay's weekly comic strip, which ran for more than a decade in the early 20th century. As with most pieces of popular culture, McCay's comic has more or less fallen into obscurity, despite its contemporary success and continuing, if now mostly anonymous, influence. Director Francis Lawrence's movie might spur some renewed interest in McCay's work—not because this adaptation is particularly effective, but to confirm the lingering suspicion that something this generic must have come from something far more inventive.

In this story, we meet 11-year-old Nemo (Marlow Barkley), a girl in this version, who lives with her father Peter (Kyle Chandler) in a lighthouse on a small island beyond the coast of some large city. A quick montage of domestic tranquility shows Peter to be an ideal father and, hence, an ideal candidate to be killed off in sudden fashion.

Sure enough, he's kind and gentle with his daughter, always teaching her lessons by example and by telling her stories of his past adventure. Peter says he was once an outlaw with a partner, both of whom searched for some hidden treasure in some secret place called the Sea of Nightmares. There, he also encountered a tentacled monster made of smoke.

Also sure enough, Peter is called out for some task in the middle of a storm and doesn't return. Nemo is left an orphan (Her mother died when she was a child, leading her father to this remote place). According to her father's wishes, Nemo is made the ward of her city-dwelling uncle, her father's younger brother, Philip, who is written against our expectations as a genuinely caring guardian, who simply doesn't know how to raise a child but desperately wants to do it correctly, and is played by Chris O'Dowd with aching sincerity. The movie is at its most affecting when it merely focuses on the dynamic between these two characters.

Of course, that means, for the most part, the screenplay by Michael Handelman and David Guion mostly avoids it. This is an adventure tale, after all, with Nemo dreaming of the lighthouse, hoping to see her father again, and trying to find some way to accomplish that impossible goal. The concept is so simple, earnest, and sad, yet the movie seems to go out of its way to distract us from those qualities.

Most of it involves a treasure hunt. In one of her dreams of the lighthouse, Nemo meets Flip (Jason Momoa), her father's former outlaw partner with the horns and ears of a goat. He's looking for a map that Peter discovered decades ago—one that charts the world of dreams and marks the spot of magical, wish-giving pearls. Flip, who has lived in the world of dreams so long that he no longer knows his waking identity, wants a pearl as a big score (and for another reason, of course). Nemo believes finding one will let her see her father again.

The plot has the two, as well as Nemo's favorite stuffed pig that comes to life in dreams, moving from dream to dream. Some of them are imaginative, such as a dreamscape under construction with butterflies form the shapes of people and things, and some are bland, an executive bathroom and giant geese flying above mountains. Some just exist for an action sequence, such a city made of toy bricks.

On Flip's trail is Agent Green (Weruche Opia), an operative with the Bureau of Subconscious Activity, which assigns dreams and keep troublemakers like him from interfering. There's something quite disheartening about a story filled with such potential being pigeonholed by such an obvious plot device, especially one in which the only gag is that the bureau is stuck in the 1970s. By the way, that nightmarish monster is chasing the duo, too, just to add another layer of threat and another reason to keep moving, regardless of what this story could show us.

In her waking moments, Nemo does have to deal with the death of her father, the trouble of adjusting to a new way of life, and the uncertainty of her relationship with her uncle. Such moments are relatively grounded and effective, but only a few take some time to establish these ideas, these relationships, and this mood before rushing back to the world of dreams for more searching and chasing.

The possibilities for such a world are pretty much endless and without limitation, so why does Slumberland seem defined by so many haphazard rules and so much formula? This is a movie about dreams that comes across as afraid to really dream up a fantastical world, as well as one about grief that seems afraid to really feel that.

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