Freeman chases dream girl through "Good Night"
BY MARLI GUZZETTA INDEPENDENT ARTS EDITOR
That moment when you wake from a dream where you are loved perfectly by a person who doesn't exist is the place where Gary, a former pop star in a dull marriage, lives in Jake Paltrow's directorial debut, "The Good Night."

Penelope Cruz and Martin Freeman in Jake Paltrow's "The Good Night"

"That's the idea, to dramatize that emotion, of waking up and trying to hold on to that fleeting feeling of , 'If I can only go back for five more minutes …'" said Paltrow, whose cast included Martin Freeman (BBC's "The Office") as Gary, Penelope Cruz as his dream girl, Danny Devito as his lucid dreaming coach ("softer, broken, post-Dylan Village idealist) and Gwyneth Paltrow, Jake's sister, as Gary's wife.

"I basically wrote the movie for Martin Freeman, who I watched on 'The Office,' which I thought was the best comedy I'd seen in a long time," Paltrow said. "I think, from his rhythms and humanity, I kind of scraped together this character, and when the script was finished, I went to him immediately."

Paltrow described the process of working with his sister as "great. Gratifying. It brought me a great sense of security when I started. It being my first feature. I knew this person was only there to help me succeed."

In his research for the story, Paltrow read up on lucid dreaming, a type of dreaming during which the dreamer is conscious that he is dreaming and can thus edit the dream's contents. Depressed over his defrocked fame, his life as a jingle writer and his ailing marriage, Gary pursues the ephemeral Anna (Cruz) by trying to harness the power of lucid dreaming - spending more and more time in the sleeping world of his unconscious at the expense of his waking life.

With only 525 cuts in the whole movie, Paltrow took a measured approach to creating a film with a classic, romantic aesthetic, in which some scenes play out in a single shot. To create a subtle disparity between Gary's waking and dream lives, Paltrow shot all of the "reality" scenes in 16 mm and all of the dream sequences in 35 mm.

"So the shift between reality and the dream state is a resolution shift, and it seems to be quite powerful," Paltrow said. "It's like a sigh of relief for the audience as well as Gary to leave this fuzzy reality. The shift creates a very tangible clarity. He can see things much more clearly and much happier in his dream state than in reality."

In a way, the movie becomes a metaphor for the contemporary phenomenon of Internet relationships - the idealized passion and perfection of which sometimes wilt in the brightness of daylight.

"The idea of the movie is about how lost people can get in the search for perfection and control," Paltrow said. "There's a certain sadness to the main character, who feels like he's been a failure because he measures his life by past successes. It's a grass is

always greener, kind of story." I
When: Wed., June 13, 9 p.m.;
Sat., June 16, 2:30 p.m.;
and Sun., June 17, 10 a.m.
Where: Starlight Café
Cost: $12; Purchase tickets at
www.nantucketfilmnfestival.org
for at the American Legion Hall
for the Wednesday screening;
Purchase tickets at the door for
the Saturday and Sunday shows.