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A FRIENDLIER COMING OUT Karel Reisz’s Sweet Dreams is the friendlier coming out for Jessica Lange. The zonky, irky, cool to ice-cold, never-quite-sure qualities in her earlier work—King Kong, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Tootsie, Frances and parts of Country—have vanished. For the first time she’s right for a role—absolutely right for playing the legendary Patsy Cline. The achievement is all the more striking because Lange has to do what’s been the bane of many performers before her—lip-synch to pre-recorded music. If at the beginning we’re all too aware of it because Lange can’t sing, because the music is state-of-the-art enhanced, the accomplishment, long before the end, is that Lange convinces us to accept her as Cline, mainly due to getting into her life not as clone, but as a full-bodied sassyass woman, so vivid and likable we simply have to have more of her. (She has said this was “the best time I ever had making a movie” and we believe it.) Any real complexities Cline might have been burdened by are removed, and the severe carping from her family and devotees over the script not following facts are noted and accepted, but the movie works beyond its weaknesses because the story is straight forwardly about Cline’s rise to country music fame and how it interferes with her marriage to her second husband (Ed Harris). Dumbing down really can help sometimes and so do those laconic, romantically plaintive lyrics in Cline’s songs—“I’ve got your picture, she’s got you,” “Why can’t he be you?”—saying she’s a sucker for love but won’t give up. Indisputably the core of country music, it’s also the reason she was a successful crossover into pop. Even as northern state teenagers she got to us as a conveyer of communal heartbreak, as powerful today as when many of us flipped on those everywhere Japanese transistor radios and heard the tragic news. At the closing of Sweet Dreams, we’re feeling both weepy yet ecstatic by Lange’s embracement of Cline’s legacy of honesty in her whole-souled rhapsodies. Life isn’t fair, but this movie sure is. Text COPYRIGHT © 2005 RALPH BENNER (Revised 9/2026) All Rights Reserved.
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