What dreams may come
Robin Williams, Annabella Sciorra and Jessica Brooks Grant are among the big names who star. Full page ads are being carried in the local papers to warn us we mustn't miss it. One of the production team described it as a movie to help us feel good about being human.
Yet one national paper described it as the biggest Christmas turkey ever and another said "I thought I was getting over a head cold before watching this moan-inducing, sugar coated dream puff pastry of a film, but afterwards my head was aching …. one of the worst cases of drivel to pop out of Hollywood in quite some time."
Well, it annoyed me too even though I'm no expert on the movies. Still, I'm glad I went to see it if only to try and understand how Hollywood taps into to our fascination with death. Death comes quickly in What Dreams. It has to, as it is largely set in heaven and hell so the stars of the film need to get there as soon as possible. Christy Nielsen (Robin Williams) dies in a car pile-up a few minutes after his children are killed in a road accident. Well, there are four years between the two events but its only five minutes on the screen - I've never seen so many funerals in the first twenty minutes of a movie!
Luckily for him he wakes up in an oil painting, once he has decided to stop
hanging around earthlings who don't know that he's trying to communicate with them.
An oil painting? Yep, an oil painting. For heaven is what your imagination wants it to be. Heaven is your ideal world and Christy's wife, being an artist, had an oil painting of their ideal place so that's where he wakes up. Soon Williams is prancing around covered with oil paint having teamed up with his old pal the family pet dog, deceased some time earlier.
Later Annie (Annabella Sciorra) commits suicide and winds up in hell.
When the news is broken to Christy he goes off to rescue her and bring
her to heaven. image All this creates strange scenes of tears in heaven
and romance in hell. I’ll not ruin it completely for you if you're intending
to see it but the ending is predictable enough, the usual formula of happy
ending stuff.
Why did it annoy me? A harmless film with some pretty good effects and virtual reality technology, what's the problem? Well the problem is that the message this movie is communicating in an effort to make us feel better about being human is actually very depressing. Everyone has their own private heaven because it's only what our imagination makes it. Heaven help us. Imagine being trapped for all eternity in the limits of your own imagination - nightmare! I'm hoping for something bigger, better, more worthwhile than the limits of my imagination.
But this sad notion is the product of some of the underlying ideas which the film communicates. Ideas such as, 'only thought is real - the physical is the illusion', 'heaven is big enough for us all to have our own private universe', voluntary re-incarnation (which is how the film ends), and statements like, 'hell is for those who don't know they're dead or choose to spend eternity in denial'.
God gets a very brief mention. Once in heaven Christy is told that 'God is up there somewhere shouting down that he loves us and wondering why we can't hear him' - pity no-one told him that on earth and anyway where is 'up there' when you're already in heaven - all very confusing.
Yet it is here that the problem with the film's message becomes obvious. In this film, like most of modern life, there is really no need for God - either because we just evolved by accident or we are all part of the Universal Consciousness that is God anyway. But if we just evolved from gases and microbes then there is no heaven, because there is no soul and there is nothing after death.
If we are all God then nothing is going to ever get any better - what you see now is (to pinch another film title) As Good As It Gets. When God, the creator God as he reveals himself in Bible, is left out of our thinking then we become incredibly self-centred. The heaven and hell in this movie are unbearably self-centred and terribly unjust.
So if you're going to see it (or already have) don't allow the visual effects and the emotional hype to melt your brain. Can this godless, self-centred smudge reflect any real hope for eternity? Most of us, movie goers or not, are interested in this subject of death and beyond so if you want something worth thinking about read the last two chapters of the Bible - stirring stuff!