Afterlife is seen as
one big painting
In What Dreams May Come, heaven seems, for all its magnificence, like a rather lonely and isolated place.
What Dreams May Come, starring Robin Williams, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Annabella Sciorra, directed by Vincent Ward. Rated PG-13 for thematic elements involving death, disturbing images and language.
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| In heavenly realms: Robin Williams as Chris Nielson explores heaven, then hell to search for his wife in the new movie, What Dreams May Come. |
By
Peter T. Chattaway
ChristianWeek film critic
C.S. Lewis, in his allegorical novel The Great Divorce, once described a bus trip taken by the souls of the dead to the outskirts of heaven. One of these souls is a former artist who declares that he would like to paint what he sees there. He is gently rebuffed by a spirit who tells him that, while his paintings offered a glimpse of heaven back on earth, there is no need for them now that one is faced with the real thing.
But in What Dreams May Come, Vincent Ward’s adaptation of the Richard Matheson novel, the afterlife itself is just one big painting–or, more accurately, a series of paintings, many of them apparently culled from the 19th century, and all brought to vivid computer-animated life.
And what an eye-popping spectacle they are. Robin Williams stars as Chris Nielsen, a doctor killed in a car accident who, on arriving in heaven, finds himself surrounded by paint–paint flowers, paint rivers, even paint bird droppings. The clouds swirl above him like brushstrokes in search of a Van Gogh. Even when things come into sharper focus, the worlds Chris visits seem to be based on a series of antiquated visual fantasies.
Heaven exists in this form, for Chris, because it reminds him of his wife Annie (Annabella Sciorra), a curator and an artist in her own right. The afterlife, as seen here, is a projection and a literalization of the images and metaphors that pass through each person’s mind. Each soul creates its own reality, but this has the presumably unintended effect of making heaven seem, for all its magnificence, like a rather lonely and isolated place.
Chris is reunited with his two children, who had died in a car accident of their own some time before, but he apparently never thinks to hook up with any other relatives, nor does he meet anyone else apart from Albert (Cuba Gooding Jr.), a former mentor of his who serves as a sort of tour guide.
Where is God?
And where is God in all this? "Up there, somewhere, shouting down at us that he loves us, wondering if we hear him," says Albert, and that’s it.
Things take a potentially controversial turn for the worse when Annie, grieving over the loss of her family, commits suicide and goes straight into a hell of her own making. She is not, Albert makes it clear, being punished for her actions but, rather, by her actions. Suicide, he says, is the ultimate act of self-absorption, and no one who has ever died that way has been able to pull themselves out of their private torment.
Nevertheless, Chris decides that he must try to save her, and so he makes the proverbial descent into hell with the help of a so-called "tracker" (Max von Sydow). Opinions will differ on the question of purgatory and whether souls can ever leave hell–Lewis himself was open to the idea– but it’s probably worth noting that neither God nor Jesus plays any overt part in Chris’s rescue mission.
Moreover, heaven itself turns out to be a pit stop on the road to reincarnation. This marks a significant departure from the last wave of afterlife romances, such as Ghost and Always, which emphasized the finality of death and the soul’s progression into a newer life beyond. In those films, lovers learned to say goodbye and get on with their lives.
By comparison, What Dreams May Come just seems to spin its wheels. Life follows death follows life follows death, and the need for therapy hangs over both. The world is what you make of it, and God is either unable or unwilling to help. It’s a depressing vision, really, no matter how striking and beautiful the art direction might be.
