What Dreams May Come

This one started off with a trailer for the new movie with two of the best actors of the Baby Boomer generation: Jeff Bridges and Tim Robbins. It’s called Arlington Road and concerns a professor who teaches a course in, I guess, the psychology of terrorists and his next door neighbor who may be a terrorist. The preview seemed to give away a little too much, but it looks pretty intense. I can’t wait to see the two of them in a movie together.

So it’s time for Hollywood to do angels again. I guess it’s been that time for a few years now. First there was Angels In The Outfield (ok family flick with Christopher Lloyd). Then The Prophecy (a pair of, I hear, really cool horror flicks about Gabriel and a war between Heaven and Hell). Then we had Michael (ok romantic comedy with John Travolta). Then there was The Preacher’s Wife (a remake of The Bishop’s Wife with Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston–why?). Then A Life Less Ordinary (sadistic angels–COOL!!) and City Of Angels (a remake of Wings Of Desire–why?).

Enough of a list? I thought so.

Well, maybe it’s over now because It’s A Wonderful Life. They weren’t. Now comes What Dreams May Come, the one that, I think, comes closest.

Chris Nielsen (Robin Williams in another Oscar caliber performance) starts the story off by meeting the most beautiful girl in the world on a lake. She is Annie (Annabella Sciorra) and just happens to be an American near the border of Switzerland. They keep meeting up and, of course, fall in love, get married and have kids. Chris becomes a pediatrician and Annie becomes an artist. The kids, Ian and Marie, grow up a little bit (13 and about 9 respectively) and then are killed in a car accident. Four years later, after Annie and Chris have rebuilt their lives, Chris stops to help someone in a car wreck and is killed himself. This starts his, and our, journey into the afterlife. Albert (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) shows him the ropes and tries to keep him out of trouble, a hard thing to do after he learns that Annie has killed herself out of grief because Chris now wants to find his soul mate. Whereas he is in a private Heaven, she is in a private Hell where she can never admit that she is dead and will never know anyone who comes to see her. Chris and Albert enlist the help of a Tracker (Max von Sydow) to help them, what else, track her down.

That’s the basic plot. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s hard not to. It doesn’t really matter too much because this is a journey whose resolution doesn’t really matter too much. It’s the journey itself. Kind of like The Odyssey. Who cares what happens when Odysseus gets there, it’s what he does and what he sees before he gets back home.

The movie is full of some of the most beautiful cinematography I’ve seen in a long time. When Chris first builds his version of Heaven he does it in the image of one of Annie’s paintings. The world is literally made out of paint. I’m not sure how they did it, but it’s amazing. Robin and Cuba actually interact with a world of paint. The images of Hell are pretty amazing, too. I wouldn’t say that it was beautiful, but it was definitely an interesting place to visit.

There are a lot of great performances, too. Robin, as I said before, at least deserves another nomination. Cuba is really gaining my respect. Jerry Maguire was a little too stereotypical for me, but he was funny. As Good As It Gets was great and against type. This is just an all around deep performance. Even the usually non-responsive Annabella Sciorra does pretty well. Max von Sydow was made for roles like this. Of course, most people now know him for movies like The Exorcist or (shudder) Needful Things, but at one time he was known for Igmar Bergman films the most famous of which is The Seventh Seal (no, not the one with Demi Moore and devil worshipers, this is the one with death playing chess without having a bogus journey). He was known for playing characters who were torn between God and Godlessness. Is there life after death? Is there anything up there? The person casting this movie was obviously a fan.

Vincent Ward (the director) did some pretty interesting stuff with this one. All of the scenes on Earth and in Hell were pretty grainy (could this be a comment on society? hmmm.) while Heaven is very colorful and crystal clear. Then again, maybe the film was just out of focus. The credits at the end seemed pretty grainy, too. But he did the same kind of thing with an earlier film, Navigator: A Mediaeval Odyssey back in 1988. That was a pretty cool sci-fi movie about Scottish people in the Mediaeval times coming through a wormhole (or something) to 1988. The modern times were in color while the ancient scenes were grainy black and white. Aside from quite a few pretty glaring continuity errors it was technically handled really well. (Make sure that, if you hand someone a sandwich with a bite taken out of it, the bite stays out of it.)

A lot of people haven’t liked this movie because it was so dark. It is a pretty dark movie compared to what they show in the previews. That really doesn’t bother me, though. I haven’t read Dante’s Inferno, but someone told me that it had pretty much the same storyline. That automatically tells me it’s going to be very dark. Where’s the problem? The movie posed some pretty interesting ideas, too. The afterlife as an individual image instead of a collective place. Re-incarnation is optional. God isn’t necessarily in Heaven. We can be anything we want to be after we die. Suicide ISN’T painless.

Then there’s what Dr. Laura said about it. Highlight the blank line for her thoughts. It sort of gives away the end. She said that Chris and Annie gave up their kids for good sex. I really don’t think she saw the same movie I did. If she did then she completely missed the point of it. They never once even mentioned sex through the entire movie.

A critic at the Daily Texan (our newspaper at U.T.) said that it was an ok movie that was hampered by a stupid title. Two words: Ham-let. That’s all I’ve got to say.

Basically, it’s a great movie. It’s not your typical Robin Williams fare, but he’s been pretty atypical in the past few years. Anyway, if you want to see a movie that will make you think about what’s to come go see this movie.

Oh, and, Dr. Laura: The kids were well taken care of.