Philosopher physician Deepak Chopra has a story about two people who ride a roller coaster. For the first, this is a frightening experience and it fills his body with unhealthy adrenaline. The second loves the thrills and his body creates healthy endorphins. "It's not the ride," he says, "it's the rider."
That we create our own realities is a concept the "New Age" -- whatever that means -- borrowed from eastern religions and has become accepted as truth even among the western medical community. Stress and attitude are thought to be the leading cause of illness. How we see the world is how the world is. We control the ride, not the other way around.
Chris Nielsen (Robin Williams) can create his own realm. Literally. The only problem is that he had to die first.
Chris and Annie (Annabella Sciorra) have the perfect marriage. Soulmates, he is a pediatrician; she, a painter. They have two wonderful children. Then things fall apart. The kids are killed in a tragic car wreck and full-of-life Annie is devastated with all of her joy wrenched away. After an attempted suicide, she is institutionalized.
Four years later Annie has recovered and is back at work. Chris stops to help an accident victim and is killed when a car flips over onto him. When he comes to, he is in a wondrous afterlife where anything he imagines comes true. He can have anything he wants. Except Annie.
The death of her life partner sends Annie into a depression spiral and she succeeds in her second suicide attempt. People who kill themselves don't go to the same place that Chris did. He's informed that he can never see her again.
Chris refuses to accept this and begins his Orpheus-like journey into the underworld to rescue his lover.
Before I go on, I have to tell you that this is the most visually stunning film in recent memory. The movie is extraordinary. Far too often, special effects cause the audience to think "That's cool. I wonder how they did it." More successful movies evoke "That's cool" without pulling you out of the film. "Dreams" only allows "That's…" as you sit, mouth agape, in astonishment. You are not watching the film, you _are_ the film.
Chris' heaven is based on paintings. Before he understands how it works, his Monet surroundings not only look like paint, they _are_ paint and not quite dry. When he picks and squeezes a brilliant blue flower, it liquefies into pigment. As he runs down a hill stepping on bright reds and yellows, the ground squishes beneath his feet flowing into streams of combined colors. At first his world looks like someone went overboard with Photoshop on a Macintosh.
The heavenly city is a wonderful living Maxfield Parrish poster. Hell is a frightening combination of H. R. Giger and German Expressionism. The hundreds of condemned souls surrounding Chris' boat is more chilling than even the similar scene in "Titanic". When he reaches Annie, the color palate becomes monochromatic reflecting her state of mind.
The team of director Vincent Ward ("The Navigator"), effects supervisors Ellen Ward, production designer Eugenio Zanetti and cinematographer Eduardo Serra have given us a film that visually is beyond words. I'm wearing out my thesaurus looking up synonyms for "awesome."
Like myths of old, the story is a metaphor for life. Chris' afterlife is brilliant and full of wonders because that is how he sees the world. Annie's is gloomy and without hope because that's her view. The one message that I have doubts is that it is possible to save the damned by joining them in hell. That path leads not to salvation, but madness.
Annie's willingness to accept responsibility for the deaths (her housekeeper drove the children on their fatal trip because Annie was too busy, Chris was running an errand for her) is symptomatic of the depressed. She believes that she is so powerful that everything is her fault.
Every actor in the film is excellent. Williams exhibits none of his manic over-the-top personality yet is intense, determined and at the same time filled with joy. Sciorra is remarkable as Annie sinks further and further into the depths. Before her melancholy, there is a scene on a hill near Switzerland where, dressed in gauze, she is one of the most alluring women in cinematic history.
Chris' first heavenly guide is Albert, played likably by Cuba Gooding, Jr. In another excellent effect, when he first appears, he is blurry, out of synch with Chris. As he comes more into focus, he explains to Chris that "Thought is real. Physical is the illusion. Ironic, isn't it?"
Max von Sydow is the "Tracker," Chris' guide through hell. His extreme screen presence prepares us for the trip into the abyss. In another film he would stand out but here there is no character that it is possible to take your eyes off of.
Like the movie itself, the reviews for this are all over the spectrum from people who hated it to those who were amazed. Aside from obvious technical aspects, movie-going is often a subjective experience. What one person finds trite, another may experience as profound. What you bring into the theater is an important part of what you take out.
I suppose that I was ready for this film. There are problems: the final scene is a bit corny, some of the truisms are simplistic. But I didn't care. It blew me away.
After leaving the movie, I was in no shape to drive home. Walking over to the edge of the parking lot and gazing into the moonlit forest across the street, I lighted a cigarette and wondered why so often we chose to live in the gray world of hell when there is so much Maxfield Parrish out there.
By : Michael Redman
Source: rec.art.movies.reviews newsgroup
Rating: 0
The title comes from Hamlet 's "To be, or not to be": "To die- to sleep --To sleep! perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub--For in that sleep of death what dreams may come--When we have shuffled off this mortal coil--Must give us pause..."
But do not look for Shakesperean parallels in this sentimental, kitschy, would-be tear-jerker fantasy whose sole reason for being is its display of computerized special effects.
The film's preliminaries, made to coincide with the opening credits, have Chris (Williams) and Annie (Sciorra) meet cute on a lake bordering Switzerland, re-meet cute on land, do kiss-kiss (but no bang-bang), marry cute. Later their two cute teen-age kids die in a car crash. Cut to four years as we see Chris practicing pediatrics while being oh-so-warm and cute with a young patient and looking at the little girl's X-rays AND at slides of Annie's paintings. The sugar content keeps rising. Then Chris dies in a freak crash inside a tunnel.
He reappears in the hereafter which is a color riot of living (sic) elements (such as water he can Biblically walk on), of profuse vegetation, flowers, etc. --all seemingly inspired by Annie's artwork. The sights, made with advanced digital computer techniques, are impressive as gimmicks but don't get you anywhere. They look like combinations of paintings by French Impressionists gone berserk with acrylics and loading their canvases to the max, some unmistakable bits of Van Gogh swirling brushwork, and often heavily romantic 19th century German oils by Caspar David Friedrich and fanciful, massive scenes of the American West by Albert Bierstadt. The orgy of colors and special effects becomes oppressive and may give you visual overload with its lushness.
With hops, skips and jumps, more views appear, from flying, Peter Pan-ish people to graphics that mix the Book of Hours of the Duke of Berry with Byzantine icons.
Chris is, of course, in Paradise--though not in Heaven, since he learns that Annie, in her despair at her husband's demise, has committed suicide. An angel (though not identified as such) is Chris counselor-guide. His name is Albert (as in Bierstadt). He spouts cliches of sagacity, like "Thought is real. Physical [sic] is the illusion."
Chris, an Orpheus for our times, searches for Annie-Eurydice, even though there's no place in Heaven for the dead by suicide. Are you listening Dr. Kevorkian? "They go somewhere else" dixit Albert, who explains that Annie "has violated the moral order." The somewhere else is in the nether regions which Chris reaches via the Tracker -- the Virgil to Chris's Dante. The Tracker is Max von Sydow, wasted here, especially if your remember him from Ingmar Bergman movies.
The tour of the Underworld takes us to sundry dark locations. In one, flames are combined with Sisyphus-like beings who go up and down excavations akin to those of the much more powerful Hell on Earth images of Brazilian gold-mines workers in the documentary Powaqqatsi (1988). Yet another of Albert's profundities goes: "Hell is not fire and pain. The real hell is your life gone wrong." In this murkiness of sights and concepts, Chris also has to step by an immensity of human heads projecting from the ground -- a not-so-oblique derivation of Cambodia's Killing Fields.
Throughout, Robin Williams maintains forced expressions of smiles, beatitude or sorrow-- all forced, unconvincingly stiff and theatrical, all making you miss Williams the kinetic, wild clown. Annabella Sciorra delivers her lines flatly.
"What Dreams..." is the first American feature by director Vincent Ward, a talented New Zealander who had previously made Vigil, Navigator: A Mediaeval Odyssey, and Map of the Human Heart. He also wrote the story for Alien 3. Ward is very oriented toward imaginative visuals and ambitiously original stories, but I find his work frustrating, with a reach exceeding his grasp. Here, his movie is not so much frustrating as it is plain dull, what with too many poses and visual overkill,. The determination to be super-poetic makes it repetitive and pedestrian.
The film is, in fact, a very expensive production in two LSD genres. LSD One is the look of the picture, like visions and hallucinations under the influence. LSD Two is the very general subject Love is Stronger than Death, which has been around for decades in sundry movies about reincarnation, ghosts, etc.
I might suggest renting far more satisfactory titles. A sampling: Death Takes a Holiday, A Guy Named Joe (remade by Spielberg as Always); Stairway to Heaven (aka A Matter of Life and Death); Heaven Can Wait (by Ernst Lubitsch); Here Comes Mr. Jordan (remade as Heaven Can Wait though not a remake of the Lubitsch picture); and above all the delicious The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.
" Le mauvais gout mene au crime" (Stendhal)
By : Edwin Jahiel
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