What Dreams May Come Summary and Analysis
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
t wasn't so long ago that love, in Hollywood-speak, was supposed to mean "never having to say you're sorry." "What Dreams May Come," one of the most elaborate metaphysical love stories ever tackled by Hollywood, lays out a whole new set of irritating catch phrases to define the quest for a love that triumphs over death. These range from the blunt "Never give up," which is repeated like a mantra throughout the movie, to portentous utterances about winning when you lose and losing when you win.
| |  Polygram Films |
| Robin Williams and Annabella Sciorra in "What Dreams May Come." |
"What Dreams May Come," based on a novel by Richard Matheson and directed by Vincent Ward, the New Zealand filmmaker noted for his skill at creating lavish cinematic dreamscapes, represents the uncomfortable collision of two ideas about filmmaking, one commercial, the other eccentrically, ambitiously dreamy. On the commercial level, it is an ecumenically canny exercise in pop inspiration that's smart enough to drop the name "God" only once, in a vague, nondogmatic reference.
The story of the world's happiest couple, who after both dying tragic deaths meet again in the afterlife, wants to be a more grown-up, sophisticated "Ghost." This feel-good allegory, chock-full of celestial special effects and sentimental reunions, comes with an uplifting triple-decker finale in the manner of "Titanic."
Robin Williams, with his Humpty Dumpty grin and crinkly moist eyes dripping with empathy, is Chris Nielsen, a gifted pediatrician, doting husband and father of two, who, in a feat of metaphysical heroism, travels into the netherworld to rescue his wife and soul mate, Annie (Annabella Sciorra), from eternal damnation. Annie is a painter and museum worker who commits suicide (and is condemned to live in hell for taking her own life) after Chris is killed in a car accident.
Four years earlier, the couple's two children, Marie (Jessica Brooks Grant) and Ian (Josh Paddock), also died in a car wreck that left both parents shattered. At that terrible moment, Chris' devotion pulled Annie out of a near-suicidal depression.
Working from a screenplay by Ron Bass, Ward has created a film that at its most visually evocative portrays its characters' lives and afterlives as a kind of hall of mirrors, in which the lines between dream and reality, memory and eternity are continually blurring as one gives way to another. At its most seductive, the film portrays heaven as a magical, hallucinatory extension of the physical world that has been left behind. It is a place flooded with dim golden light and thick with flowers, of misty peaks and crags, where people and objects float through the sky and great distances can be breached with a single leap (of faith, of course).
When Chris first arrives in heaven, he finds himself inside one of Annie's Gothic romantic paintings. After crunching down in a flower bed, he gets up to find himself covered with paint, as though he had landed on a just-completed three-dimensional Renoir canvas that was still wet.
The underworld he visits with the help of a grim-faced guide played by (who else?) Max von Sydow is a grim but PG-13-looking place (when it comes to punishment and suffering) surrounded by burning shipwrecks. In the most powerful image of hell, one that is intensely claustrophobic, Chris is forced to run across a sea of muttering heads all craning up through an endless expanse of mud.
But for all their visual fascination, these images don't seem connected to real people. Bass' screenplay is so clotted with slogans, riddles and dime-store psychobabble that Chris and Annie never coalesce into anything more than a pair of idealized greeting-card parents with terrible luck. The movie doesn't give them enough earthly screen time for us to get to know them. Brief flashbacks find Chris arguing with his son about school, but they try to cram too much information into too small a space for the relationship to develop any substance.
And all the weeping and hugging the characters do can't make up for the film's fatal lack of texture and psychological nuance. Cuba Gooding Jr. is glaringly miscast as an angel who guides Chris through his first days in heaven and who turns out to be -- well, you'll have to see the movie to find out.
It's often been said that baby boomers think they can live forever. "What Dreams May Come" is the movie that tells them, yes, it's possible, at least in a solipsistic New Age sense, to attain eternal life. That's because eternity, the movie soothingly suggests, is whatever you imagine it to be. If you can conjure it up, then on some level it must be reality. Just like "Peter Pan." Close your eyes, snap your fingers and you can fly.
PRODUCTION NOTES
WHAT DREAMS MAY COME
Rating: "What Dreams May Come" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It deals with an uncomfortable subject (death) and has scary images of hell.
Directed by Vincent Ward; written by Ron Bass, based on the novel by Richard Matheson; director of photography, Eduardo Serra; edited by David Brenner and Maysie Hoy; music by Michael Kamen; production designer, Eugenio Zanetti; produced by Stephen Simon and Barnet Bain; released by Polygram Filmed Entertainment. Running time: 106 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.
Cast: Robin Williams (Chris Nielsen), Cuba Gooding Jr. (Albert), Annabella Sciorra (Annie Nielsen), Max von Sydow (the Tracker), Jessica Brooks Grant (Marie Nielsen) and Josh Paddock (Ian Nielsen).
What Dreams May Come Summary and Analysis
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/library/film/100298dreams-film-review.html
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