What Dreams May Come (1998) 113 min.
It's terribly frustrating to have read a book that no-one else you know has. As it stands, I know but one other person who has read Richard Matheson's life-after-death novel 'What Dreams May Come', and that's only because I made her read it over a decade ago. Now that the film version has hit the screens, I find myself at another level of frustration: that the film and the book are not quite the same thing, and I'm right back where I started from. I still can't share the experience.
This shouldn't come as any surprise. Matheson's intensively-researched novel was captivating because it took subject matter that was dangerously new-agey, pseudo-religious, or just plain gooey, and turned into something that managed to be thoughtful and somehow authentic. Obviously, such metaphysics lend themselves to the printed page more readily than the cinema screen, which is why I had never entertained for a second the idea that this book would ever be made into a film. Yet here it is, with NZ director Vincent Ward at the helm. So far, so good. Ward has a history of powerful visual imagery in his work to date and is an intelligent, discerning film-maker. This is also the director who walked out on his first Hollywood assignment (ALIEN 3) as soon as it departed from his original concept and has refrained from taking on any other project since, so it would seem safe to assume that Ward would handle Matheson's book with some integrity.
WHAT DREAMS MAY COME is titled after Hamlet's famous soliloquy about death, so it should not come as much of a surprise when Chris Neilsen (Robin Williams) shuffles off his mortal coil ten minutes into the story and eventually finds his way to an afterlife created by visual cues from the memories of those who inhabit it. There is no judgment in this world, no heaven or hell save their simulacra. For a while we share Chris' exploration of his new world, and it is as blissful as any you could imagine; but, as David Byrne says, heaven is a place where nothing ever happens, so it isn't too long before Chris is going further afield (read: hell) to reconcile himself with his wife Annie (Annabella Sciorra).
The first half of Ward's film depicts a heaven-world so beautifully realized that it's almost as if he and his crew went there to get location footage. It is like nothing else you've ever seen on film. For a while the vivid colors and intricate detail make this a spectacle which can be seen only on a large canvas. But then something peculiar happens - as the story shifts from heaven-world to hell-world, the visuals become less impressive. Furthermore, just at the point where Chris is finally taking action and doing something, the story gets piled up with flashbacks that interrupt the narrative and prevent his quest from becoming the epic it deserves. Given the impressionistic, painterly world of 'Summerland' (as Matheson refers to it), it's only natural to expect Hell to be influenced by the works of Bosch, Hogarth, or even Gustave Dore. Initially, the journey is promising (I like the way that Chris and Annie's initial boating encounter is perverted into a shoreline of wrecked vessels) but in the end Hell becomes gloomy and run-down, and Ward shoots most of the sequences there with Williams and Sciorra in close-up so that we don't even really get to see a lot of it. This may all be a dubious strategy on his part: just as the devil gets all the good lines, it is easy for a dramatic, chaotic hell to upstage a meditative, placid heaven. So Ward's solution is to make Hell boring. After ten minutes we're pining for the wide open spaces of Summerland again, which is where everyone in this story belongs, and of course, ends up.
WHAT DREAMS MAY COME is a difficult film to gauge - you don't want to be unfair to it because it does manage to take you places you haven't seen before in the movies. Yet the journey may just be too careful, too measured, and too contemplative for its own good, which is why it is not for all tastes (although anybody who is genuinely interested in film should check it out for its cinematic qualities alone). Also, for a non-religious afterlife there seems to be an excess of guilt around, which gets a little wearying. And even after Chris gets everything he wants, he still wants to get back to the 'real' world. It's just as Schopenhauer has always said: satisfaction in human beings is impossible, because whenever one desire is fulfilled, ten others jump in their place; and even if they were all fulfilled, satisfaction would only become boredom. I guess we all know this deep inside, which is why the final scene doesn't seem as corny as it otherwise might (the last line is really sweet, in a karmic kinda way).
I appreciate the intelligence behind this film and the bold way it is set almost entirely in the afterlife, and ultimately, I felt that it did not do the book a disservice (as for visualizations of hell, it still doesn't beat a Strontium Dog comic I read serialized in 2000 A.D. when I was a teenager), and I suppose I should be satisfied with that: yes, it takes us into Hamlet's 'undiscovered country', and quite convincingly. It does at least make me want to read the book again. And maybe this time I won't be the only one. So if you liked the movie, read the novel. And if you didn't like the movie...well, read it anyway.
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