What Dreams May Come
Director: Vincent Ward. Cast: Robin Williams, Annabella Sciorra, Cuba Gooding Jr., Max Von Sydow.
Screenplay: Ron Bass (based on the novel by Richard Matheson).
Vincent Ward's What Dreams May Come, like a great big, gangly mobile, consists of dazzlingly
beautiful objects suspended from and connected by the slimmest and most tenuous of frames. The film's
ripe saturation with vivid colors and dreamlike images lends it a unique visual character that was
obviously the main intention of the project; like other movies with such an explicit focus on surface
effects—this year's Dark City and Babe: Pig in the
City both spring to mind—the story often gets lost amidst all the set-pieces and pageant-like
displays. Ostensibly the film deals with the character of the afterlife and the pained, sometimes
reckless choices made by people in mourning. The team behind this project, though, are surprisingly
content at several moments to shove aside such huge issues of life and death to show you a peacock leaping
through the air or a city filled with floating angels. The scenes are very striking, but they are also
interruptions. "Hey," you want to murmur, "weren't we just talking about something kind of heavy?"
Robin Williams clenches his jaw and squints his face into a smile four or five times in the first ten
minutes of this picture. As we must all know by now, good old Robin has two modes of movie-acting. One
method favors the Tasmanian-devil energy and gonzo comic spirit of The Fisher
King, Good Morning, Vietnam, or his voice-only work in Aladdin—which still probably
counts, ironically, as his best screen performance. Within that manic whirligig of laughs and gimmicks,
though, there is a more serious Robin, the one who plays doctors, psychiatrists, and teachers. While this
second career occasionally produces impressive work (as in Awakenings) or works at least well
enough to swipe a pat-on-the-back Oscar, Serious Robin all too often allows himself to be Treacly Robin, a
bleeding-heart philosopher king who uses these roles to force too-familiar and often hackneyed bits of
"wisdom" down our throats. There's something really smarmy and off-putting about this second persona
of his, twinkling his eyes and doling out modest grins as though he thinks that we in the audience
can't wait to jump up in our chairs and deliver the "Oh captain, my captain" mumbo-jumbo to this saint
among comic-actor men.
The preview alone of Patch Adams makes clear that the film is Treacly Robin's field day (inheriting
the title from previous owner Dead Poets Society), and so I have avoided it like a bad case of
distemper. Besides, What Dreams May Come, featuring Robin as Pediatrician, gives the man plenty of
time to go teary and sappy, but three major factors save the picture, especially in its first hour, from
spelling total doom. One is that Robin is a little more restrained than he sometimes gets with this Tears
of a Clown stuff, though not for lack of opportunity. In the first five or six sequences of What
Dreams May Come, Robin's Chris Nielsen meets cute with Annabella Sciorra's Anne while they are
piloting different sailboats on a lake high in the Alps. They marry two scenes later, and with the
revenues of his medical practice and her art gallery, the couple are able to afford one of those "only in
the movies" modern mansions that come equipped with two smiling kids and a Dalmatian. Not ten minutes
into the film, the kids die in a car crash; it's not long before Chris also meets his maker in another
highway accident. Just to let you know that Sciorra is one cursed chiquita, we find out in a flashback
sequence later on that the Dalmatian had already died before her owners started following suit.
Anne, understandably, takes all of these events pretty hard, and now sits at home in her stern Louise
Brooks haircut trying to paint landscapes and fantasy scenes that express her vision of her life without
her family, or else her imagining of what the afterlife might look like; either way, she'd have no trouble
selling them as cover art for Enya CDs. Chris hangs around the apartment, the graveyard, and even his own
funeral trying to let Anne know that he hasn't stopped watching over her; he ignores the advice of Albert,
a glowing angel played by Cuba Gooding Jr., that only by leaving Anne alone will he diminish her palpable
sense of loss, and thereby allow her grief to lessen.
If you think you've already seen the movie where a black spiritual medium helps a white guy nobly killed
in a chance accident to assuage the pain of his living artist-wife...well, you have. What Dreams May
Come, in addition to lacking any arousing pottery-as-foreplay scenarios, also fails to establish the
metaphysical limits and felt experiences of the dead Chris as succinctly or simply as Ghost
outlined what exactly Patrick Swayze could or could not do as a walking spirit. Swayze could walk through
walls and follow the living without being seen; he could not at first move physical objects, but he could
acquire that skill once he learned to concentrate and focus his disembodied energies. What Dreams May
Come goes for a different vision of the afterlife that is less carefully described but gives the word
"vision," as it applies in this sentence, a whole new meaning. Chris, accompanied by Albert, enters a
limbo-world of his own imagining, which happens to be a verdant paradise as imaged in one of Anne's
paintings. In fact, the world itself—which, Albert tells us, is composed according to Chris' own wishes of
how the world should look and act—is made of "real" paint, so that impossibly vivid blossoms actually
squirt and melt when gripped too hard, and Chris' footsteps squelch as the green grass beneath him smudges
and bleeds.
All of these effects, though the special-effects trickery is a little more obvious on the small screen,
are diverting enough that we do not mind as much as we should. They comprise Reason #2 why What Dreams
May Come does not become the same-old Robin as Crusader for Love and Deep Feeling fable that we are by
now so tired of, or at least I am. Ward and art director Eugenio Zanetti, preserving the
more-is-more approach of his Oscar-winning work on Restoration, never tire of mounting new
monuments to their own eye-popping notions of heaven, hell, and the reaches of a mind's eye. Meanwhile,
they also have the good sense to cut back and forth every now and then to Sciorra, whose despair seems not
to be diminishing as she writes angry inscriptions in her diary and destroys her own paintings shortly
after completing them. Sciorra remains a dark and convincingly doleful presence throughout What Dreams
May Come; her vastly interesting performance is the third major ballast weighing against the
temptation of this picture to topple utterly into New Age preciousness.
Unfortunately, however, the difficulty of Ron Bass' script to establish exactly how this afterlife world
is constructed and how its appearances are able to change prefigures a general confusion in the picture
about how life and death intersect with one another, and to what degree dead souls are able or unable to
reach one another. It does not reveal too much, I don't think, to say that Anne commits suicide halfway
into the picture, unable to cope with the losses of her last five years of life. Chris hears the news
from Albert, and he determines immediately that he must journey to Hell, where Annie, because she took
her own life, has been sent after her death. Both Albert and another spiritual guide played by Max von
Sydow—a sly addition to the cast, having played Jesus and the Devil in his career, as well as Death's
vigorous adversary in Bergman's The Seventh Seal—attemptd to explain how Chris might win Annie
back. Their accounts don't make much sense in themselves, unfortunately, and furthermore their two
descriptions do not seem to match up any more clearly in combination.
It is in the last forty-five minutes of What Dreams May Come, as Chris attempts to find and redeem
his wife, that the picture gives itself entirely over to spectacle, at the expense of story. Some of
Ward's most powerful images, such as an Inferno-inspired mudfield paved with the gasping heads of
immersed, miserable souls, appear in this portion of the picture. Still, we are not quite sure how Chris
is travelling from place to place, and the directions of the film seem increasingly arbitrary and hard to
understand. The afterlife starts to seem alarmingly random and haphazard: in other words, the exact
opposite of the film's original notion, where everything in Heaven or Hell appeared as a direct, organized
reflection of what the dead soul wished to perceive around them. Von Sydow never looks quite sure what he
is doing here, and Gooding Jr., though his appearances grow less and less frequent as the film goes on,
has none of the charm or appeal of his Oscar-winning Jerry Maguire work. I
thought at the time that his Academy victory would prove rather flukish in an unremarkable career, and so
far his post-Oscar offerings—mainly this film and 1997's As Good As It
Gets—have only made more puzzling the question of where that one stellar performance came
from.
The end of What Dreams May Come is its most shameless instance of starry-eyed, obscenely romantic
"magic". In one way, this last-minute turn for the worse does not matter. The jumbledness of the script
and the blandness of most of the characters have already made clear that the film only exists to dazzle
the eye; without question, What Dreams May Come has lived up to that ambition at least enough to
keep the viewer interested. Still, what happened to moviemaking that didn't have to drop story and
character to mount an engaging visual feast? Plenty of films have achieved this kind of balance. The
counter-example most explicitly invited by What Dreams May Come is a simple, delightful film from
Iran called Gabbeh, made in 1997; many of the same effects are present in
the two films—natural beauty that colors with actual pigment the hands that touch it, fabrics and clothing
that figure prominently in the narrative—but Gabbeh weaves a mystic, fable-ish love story amidst
its dazzling palette, while What Dreams May Come selects too large a story and then treats it
abruptly and without real care.
Finally, if you are going to throw aside characters in the interest of visual pleasure, why not do what
Dark City or Babe did, and make the characters purposefully broad or fanciful enough that we
do not resent the short shrift they receive? It seems particularly wrong to force the audience into
watching Sciorra's character lose everything she cares about but, rather than allowing us to understand
and spend time with her pain, diverting us instead to stare wondrously at a shimmering lake, or a
resplendent palace, or a coffee cup that melts back into paint. Serious situations inevitably elicit a
certain compassion and interest from the audience; Ward and Zanetti's vision would have been better suited
to more purely escapist material. In the end, What Dreams May Come is a grand success in the one
area where it really tries to prove itself; the other dimensions of the film are allowed to wither into
something far less interesting, either to us or to the filmmakers. What silver-screen dreams of richer,
fairer entertainments may come when Vincent Ward commits his exciting imagination to a story he actually
cares about. Grade: C
- Academy Award Nominations and *Winners:
- Best Art Direction: Eugenio Zanetti
- *Best Visual Effects