What Dreams May Come

I'm actually surprised that Hollywood doesn't make more movies like this. In fact, I'm surprised that ALL of their movies aren't like this. It's a big budget special effects extravaganza with a total California New Age philosophy. It deals with death, rebirth, what heaven and hell are really like, and how there are no accidents. It's an awful lot to swallow. Amazingly, it works. What helps it work, though, is a solid performance by Robin Williams and the best visuals you've ever seen.

Williams is Christy, a pediatrician who meets cute with Annie (Annabella Sciorra). They get married, have two children, and are bliss fully happy. Tragedy strikes, however, when their children are killed in a car accident. Annie has trouble coping, while Christy simply never leaves the denial stage and acts strong without ever dealing with the problem. It gets worse four years later, when another car accident takes the life of Christy. After witnessing his own funeral (those kind of scenes always give me the creeps), Christy goes to heaven, or at least his version of heaven, which consists of the things that offered him comfort in life. Those things that offered him comfort, it turns out, were Annie's paintings. Christy reaches out to touch a flower, and it melts in his hands, into a ball of blue grease paint. It's a spectacular sequence, as a bird flying through the air changes color and moves at his command, yet still looks like a painting. Absurdly early Oscar prediction: this gets nominated for Best Art Direction.

Meanwhile, back on earth, Annie is not dealing with losing everything that ever mattered to her. She kills herself, and goes to hell. Christy's guide to the afterlife, Albert (a somewhat miscast Cuba Gooding, Jr.), comes to break the news to him. Christy is evastated, but is also convinced that he can save her, even though Albert tells him that suicides are the most hopeless people in hell. He's told that she won't recognize him, he's told that she is so far lost in her own misery that he has no chance of getting through to her. It means nothing: Christy is going to save his soul mate, even if it costs him his stay in the more pleasant part of eternity.

As striking as the visuals are, and this is without a doubt the most original looking movie I've seen in a long time (if ever), the visuals alone are not enough to see this movie. There is another issue at stake, and that's your tolerance of the aforementioned New Agey philosophy. If that stuff strikes you as hokey, then stay far, far away from this one. There are a couple scenes that, to a skeptic, are prime howling material. Personally, I liked what they did with the idea of Christy being unable to get Annie to "see" him. It's something that I'd never thought about much myself, and while I'm not sure how of it I buy into, it nonetheless had me thinking.

Now back to that performance by Robin Williams. It wasn't flashy. It only had small glimpses of his comic ability. But it was exactly what this movie needed to be believable. A lesser actor would have turned this into some TV movie that premiered after Touched by an Angel. Without Christy, all is lost. And it's a good thing that Williams was strong, because Gooding was a bit out of his league here. Sometimes, when he showed restraint, he had it going. But he overdid it a bit too much. Sciorra took the part that Michelle Pfeiffer passed on, and despite the age difference, I did buy them as a couple (unlike, say, Harrison Ford and Anne Heche). She had a rather thankless part, really. The despondent widow is the kind of role that requires a lot of crying, and it screams "Look at me, I'm acting!" As it was, she was more convincing when not in tears. A pleasant surprise was Max Von Sydow as a tracker who takes Christy through hell to help find Annie, a sequence that should have been a lot longer than it was. Perhaps that's how they kept this movie under budget, as the hell sets were much more detailed, and a lot cooler. But it cost them in the form of a big letdown of an ending.

What the makers of What Dreams May Come have really done is make the most expensive art film ever (though that is also what they're saying about Eyes Wide Shut, the Stanley Kubrick movie starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman that's coming out next summer). The ideas behind the afterlife are certainly a little more complex than they were in Ghost. I think it's good that the filmmakers felt that the audience was looking for something a little deeper than wings and angels and fire and brimstone. The problem is when you describe a movie by using the phrase "Thinking Man's" and following it with a hugely successful movie; you're doomed to never come close to the success of the former movie. This has been called a Thinking Man's Ghost, and that's accurate. But it's also unfair. It's much smarter and unbelievably better looking, but it deserves better than to be an also ran to anything else, especially something as oversimplified as Ghost. At least they gave it a shot, and for that I am grateful.