Being there

What Dreams May Come raises hell

by Jeffrey Gantz

WHAT DREAMS MAY COME, Directed by Vincent Ward. Written by Ron Bass based on the novel by Richard Matheson. With Robin Williams, Annabella Sciorra, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Max von Sydow. A PolyGram Films release. At the Cheri, the Harvard Square, and the Circle and in the suburbs.

"Hell is other people," Sartre wrote in No Exit. What Dreams May Come, endorsing a different theology, turns that on its head: Hell is the absence of other people. What's more, Vincent Ward's film replicates the highs and lows of its hero's vertiginous trip from Heaven to Hell and back. When this movie is good, it cuts to the bone of human existence, descending into depths where few Hollywood movies have dared to go before. When it's bad, it follows a trail blazed over and over by Tinseltown, into cloying sentiment. Like Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, What Dreams May Come (title courtesy of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy) is at its best when its characters are in Hell and at its worst when they're in Heaven.

It all starts on a lake at the Swiss border (Geneva? Bodensee? Lago Maggiore?), as the boats of Christy Nielsen (Robin Williams) and Annie Collins (Annabella Sciorra) go bump in broad daylight and their hearts follow. After a few scenes from a marriage, we see their two children, Marie and Ian, being driven off to school -- and, moments, later, two coffins in church. Flash-forward to four years later, where Annie's art gallery (she's also an artist herself) needs some paintings picked up and her pediatrician husband volunteers to get them on his way home. Sooner than you can say Robert Rauschenberg, Christy runs into a pile-up (in a tunnel that looks like Hell) and is wiped out by a careering car as he goes to help. After some further flashbacks -- Marie's dog has to be put down; father and son have a serious talk in the rain -- Christy finally shuffles off this mortal coil and wakes up in Heaven.

Which is where both the film's theology and its aesthetics go technicolor. Christy finds himself in what looks like a field of flowers but is actually paint -- it turns out that if you have an artistic bent, you can create your own Heaven. Christy's is informed by Bosch, Brueghel, John Martin, and Caspar David Friedrich, but also by Victorian kitsch, Oriental kitsch, Maxfield Parrish, and maybe a touch of Boris Vallejo. He's joined by his Dalmatian ("I screwed up, I'm in dog heaven," he thinks at first) and then his physician mentor, Albert (Cuba Gooding Jr.), with whom he shares some quality buddy time as they both act like kids. It's an oddly underpopulated Heaven: Albert intimates that our first impulse is to create our own personal afterlife; and when Christy asks about God, Albert answers that He's "up there somewhere, shouting down that he loves us, wondering why we can't hear him." Not exactly the multifoliate rose of Dante's Paradise.

Annie, meanwhile, is having a rough time of it back on earth, not just grieving but racked by guilt (she didn't drive the kids to school herself; she asked Christy to pick up the paintings). There's an imaginative sequence where she paints a new tree into an old work and it shows up in Christy's Heaven -- but when she gives in to despair and spoils her tree, Christy's loses all its leaves, and you can see the anguish registering in his face as everything blows away. Eventually Annie kills herself and goes to what passes for Hell in this cosmos. Suicide here equals solipsism, which means she's in the one place where Christy can't join her.

Christy has other ideas, of course, and with the help of the ancient-looking "Tracker" (Max von Sydow), he descends through a truly hellish post-Mad Max nightmare world, with derelicts the size of the Titanic and an Inferno-like field of heads through which he must step, till he finds Annie in what looks like a ship's hold -- the wrack of their house, and her life. She doesn't recognize him; she doesn't recognize anything outside herself. The Tracker tells him that if he stays with her, he'll lose himself.

This turns out to be the key to their salvation, and though it's a theologically valid one, What Dreams May Come would have been more convincing if Christy had needed more than 30 seconds to turn it. All too soon we're back in Heaven and confronted with odd notions of celestial employment and pop reincarnation. But you shouldn't let this treacly triumph distract you from the flashback to Christy with Annie in the sanatorium after her first suicide attempt, or the way he eventually "finds" his children in Heaven, or the way the film uses water and boats (that first meeting) as a recurring motif. Williams is, no surprise, a little soft-centered, and Sciorra is a little giggly, yet they create some piercing moments together. Its Heaven can wait, but when Dreams goes to Hell, it's a helluva movie.