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| Thorn EMI | Release Date: October 11, 1985 |
Starring:
Ann Wedgeworth, Caitlin Kelch, David Clennon, Ed Harris, Gary Basaraba, James Staley, Jessica Lange, John Goodman, P.J. Soles, Terri Gardner
Summary:
The story of Patsy Cline (Jessica Lange), the velvet-voiced country music singer who died a tragic death at the height of her fame.
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What elevates these scenes from the usual concert simulations - and what gives the entire film its tremendous immediacy - is the extraordinary way in which Miss Lange has molded herself to fit the music. Although the performance is conspicuously prop-heavy, with brittle wigs and an enormous number of costume changes, Miss Lange makes herself a perfect physical extension of the vibrant, changeable, enormously expressive woman who can be heard on these recordings.
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Director Karel Reisz (The French Lieutenant's Woman) clearly doesn't trust the American audience's ability to handle mixed, emotionally complex tones (and by all the available evidence he's right not to), yet by segregating the feelings he wants to express he makes them seem artificial and programmatic. But the performances do have a redeeming vividness.
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The point is: When Sweet Dreams' as it is now constructed, is over, we remember and are intrigued more by Charlie Dick than by Patsy Cline, played by Jessica Lange in a performance that comes up short when necessarily compared with Sissy Spacek`s tour de force as Loretta Lynn in ''Coal Miner`s Daughter.''
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That's what's wrong with Sweet Dreams. Its insights into this sudden, shortlived star are no more profound than those of a tabloid expose; it's bad-marriage gossip. [17 Oct 1985, p.B6]
SWEET DREAMS is like "Coal Miner's Daughter," but without the grit. It's a slow, insensate musical biography, with the unfortunate Jessica Lange miscast as country singer Patsy Cline. The physical and emotional opposite of the coarse Cline, Lange looks like a refugee from a dude ranch in her western gear, her delicate features overwhelmed by a raggedy black wig and a rhinestone cowgirl's hat. She croons into the smokey, liquor-soaked night of a honky- tonk saloon, "I Fall to Piecessss . . . ." [11 Oct 1985, p.29]
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