Remember That Movie: What Dreams May Come
In case you don’t remember, What Dreams May Come stars Robin Williams, Annabella Sciorra, Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Max von Sydow and is based on a novel by Richard Mattheson (its title originates from a line of dialogue in Hamlet). The story is about a recently deceased husband and father traveling through heaven and hell to reach his soul mate.
The movie starts off lovely. A young couple meets, falls in love, laughs a lot, sprays each other with water, has kids, and makes out while their kids spray each other with water. It’s all down hill from there. The kids die. Then one of the couple, Chris (Robin Williams), dies. And then their dog dies. Things get very depressing.
That’s what makes this movie fall short of the emotionally sweeping saga it aims to be. Its tone is too sincere and melodramatic. It’s as though a hack director decided to take a crack at material on the level of a Bergman film: it’s an attempt so outside his reach that it becomes a fool’s errand, resulting in a mediocre product that hits all the plot points about love, life, and death, but lacks any of the power or gravitas. I’m not comparing Mattheson’s source novel to the austere excellence of an Ingmar Bergman film. The novel is a religious dissertation that challenges the reader to care what the author has to say in its final pages. This movie is fun by comparison.
The other hurdle this movie has is its female lead (played by Sciorra) is unbearably melodramatic, making it tough to understand what Chris (Williams) loves about her, aside from some great shared moments. We only see enough of her before the death of her children to know she wasn’t always this depressing and somber. The rest of the time, she’s drab and unpleasant, uttering such groan-worthy comments as “A whole family lost in car crashes… it’s enough to make someone buy a bike.” It’s understood that she suffers from depression, but we’re so disconnected from her that we only understand her feelings in a general sense and are unable to sympathize with her completely.
However, the movie isn’t the complete drivel its reputation purports it to be, especially during the second half. Once the film turns into a valiant quest through heaven and hell things pick up and get more interesting. The special effects improve at this point and many of the ‘memory’ scenes are genuinely moving, particularly those of the kids. I don’t quite understand why Chris loves Annie, but I believe that he does because Robin Williams sells that passion.
Overall, What Dreams May Come offers a strong performance by Robin Williams and has many powerful and moving moments (yes, I was still moved to tears at times). It is terribly sincere, failing to make for a fun night for many people, and it does back itself into a corner in the end (only to cheat its way out). Yet What Dreams May Come is a slight improvement over the source as a somewhat powerful love story that unfortunately falls short of its ambitions. That said, this is not a film for cynics.
5/10
Should you see it? Rent
What Dreams May Come is available on DVD.