What Dreams May Come (1998) Life is Beautiful with Robin Williams (vol.8)
“When I was young, I met this beautiful girl by a lake”
Well I promised myself I wouldn’t cry and I almost made good on my own self-imposed and self-regarding nonsense of a promise to myself I knew I’d never keep. I nearly made it, but then a soulmate finds the light of his life that he refuses to allow to be dimmed even in the darkest, bleakest and blackest pits of hell that dominate the second half of Vincent Ward’s otherwise surreal and brightly coloured living painting of a film, and a film I’ve loved for over half my lifetime. What Dreams May Come isn’t quite the masterpiece I remembered it to be but this in no way impinges on my love for this masterful work of real invention (for its time) or for its scope and depth and flat out ambition to be a film unlike anything you’ve ever seen and through it all and even my own myopic and biased love, there’s the one word that encapsulates this film: love. For the craft of filmmaking perhaps and no doubt a cliched passion project for all concerned before we tiptoed into a new Millennium, but human love, longing, compassion and a desperate need to be with the one person who rings your bell in the key of life like no other, and there are no boundaries to what you’ll do to be with that soulmate for all eternity, and even the next one too.
Winner of an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and based on, but differing significantly from the 1978 Richard Matheson novel of the same name, What Dreams May Come is a beautiful existential take on what it means to be alive as well as the soul destroying spectre of death and loss and the human destruction this can leave in its wake. I can only describe it visually as the imagining of our own personal heaven(s) and in the case of “Dr Chris Nielsen” (Robin Williams) a living and breathing colour rich representation of a painting where he and wife and soulmate “Annie Collins-Nielsen” (Annabella Sciorra) intended to live their idyllic lives together for the rest of their days. A living painting, strawberry fields forever where “nothing is real” and a heaven full and populated by Chris’ imagination as he’s aided and abetted by an at first ghost-like apparition and then fully formed being in the shape of “Albert Lewis” (Cuba Gooding Jr) and a “missionary” intent on “saving lost souls”. For Chris is a lost soul, caught between the worlds of the living and the deceased, earth and a reluctant acceptance of death into his own personal heaven that has everything, real or otherwise, everything that is, apart from his soulmate. From the surreal and vibrant colour of heaven we descend into the grey foreboding darkness of hell accompanied by “The Tracker” (Max von Sydow) as we navigate a hellscape of unimaginable horror: Ghost ships, nightmares, the undead dead and faces of the damned to hell for all eternity (one is somewhat amusingly voiced by director Werner Herzog) as Chris foregoes his own heaven in search of the only person he wishes to share eternity with, even if by decree it shall be in hell.
Reincarnation. Heaven and Hell. New Age Philosophy. The Bible. Even a little Shakespeare and an occasional barbed joke befitting Robin Williams is thrown in for good measure, I still love this film, I still can’t help linking it to the first love of my life and I still can’t help being a blubbering mess at the end!
“When I was young, I met this beautiful girl by a lake”
And through the unshakeable and unexplainable human bonds of love, they will meet again.
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.
Whilst you’re here I may as well brag about the release of my trilogy of recently self-published books. Beautiful covers eh! As the title(s) would suggest, this is my life at the movies or at least from 1980 to 2024, and in volume 1 you’ll find 80 spoiler free appraisals of movies from debut filmmakers, 91 of the very best films appraised with love and absent of spoilers from 1990–2024 in volume 2, and in volume 3 you’ll find career “specials” on Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino together with the very best of the rest and another 87 spoiler free film reviews from 2001–2024.
All available in hardback and paperback and here are some handy links:
"A Life at the Movies Vol.1" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.2" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.3" - link to Amazon