Watch Sweet Dreams For Free

Sick Product of a Sick System

Nice effects though.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Jessica Lange doesn't do her own singing as country legend Patsy Cline, however that hardly matters because the cadences of her speaking voice are musical. Lange hits some husky, lusty low-notes as the Virginia-born singer who met second husband Charlie Dick (Ed Harris) in 1956 while performing in a local bar, later staying by him through thin times (her pregnancy forcing her off a tour, his stint in the Army after being drafted) and tentative success (a hit record, "Walkin' After Midnight", which she first performed on a TV talent program). Robert Getchell's script has some crackling dialogue, but the episodes of Cline's hard struggle for country-western success as well as her tempestuous marriage to hellraiser Dick are needlessly stretched out; there's too much struggle and too much temperament, and the film begins to seem like an uphill climb (it's exhausting). For a major production with A-list talent, "Sweet Dreams" also looks a little drab and ordinary, without the location flavor of an earlier bio-pic, "Coal Miner's Daughter". Oscar-nominated Lange matches up well with Ann Wedgeworth as her mama, and her angry love for rascal Harris is well conveyed, but the highlights of Patsy Cline's career are tucked away in the folds of the domestic dramaturgy. **1/2 from ****

This unremarkable screen biography of singer Patsy Cline is short on imagination, but it features a natural performance by Jessica Lange and some colorful country-western atmosphere. Perhaps the film's biggest problem is that Cline's turbulent life could only have been adapted to the screen as a conventional show-biz melodrama, and the result here is a more or less typical Hollywood romance, easy on the eyes even when not particularly interesting. The rags-to-troubled-riches scenario is hardly novel, but that doesn't diminish the incidental pleasures of seeing more or less the same story told for the umpteenth time.The film's soundtrack includes many of the singer's original recordings, expertly lip-synched by the cast.

Patsy Cline is not very known in Europa but her influence can be heard in country music :it marks her as an important antecedent for all kinds of later figures ,from Dolly Parton to Linda Rondstadt.Elvis Costello covered "sweet dreams" on her "almost blue" country album.This biopic owes a lot to its two principals: Jessica Lange as the singer whose life and career tragically ended and Ed Harris,a reluctant draftee then a violent but tender husband :I like his scene when he 's alone in the room listening to his wife's record,the only thing that's left to him.Lange is dubbed for the songs ,a good thing cause we can hear Cline's real voice.She wanted to be Hank Williams ,another artist whose fate was tragic.NB: In the late fifties, a radio is playing Presley's "can't help falling in love".If my memory serves me well,this song was part of "blue Hawai" soundtrack,which was released only in 1961.

In one of filmdom's many biopics, Jessica Lange sinks her teeth into the role of country singer Patsy Cline. We see her go from a bored housewife to a national phenomenon over the period of a few short years before tragically getting killed in a plane crash in 1963 (although the movie focuses more on her personal life than on her career). Not surprisingly, Lange plays the role perfectly. Equally good is Ed Harris as Cline's philandering husband Charlie Dick. "Sweet Dreams" is a movie that has something for everyone. Maybe we wonder how many biopics there can be, but that would miss the point. The point is to understand these people's personal struggles and all. And this movie does a very good job showing that. I wonder whether country music biopics will see a resurgence, now that "Walk the Line" has made a splash.