What Dreams May Come

What dreams may come. That's what this is all about, one mans' unimaginable dream of heaven and of hell. Robin Williams is a happy man, married to a beautiful and artistic woman, he has two children. Then, the children are killed in a car crash. We flash forward four years to Williams treating a patient, he gets a call from his wife, she looks different, she is having a panic attack at work, he drops everything to help her. He gets killed on the way home.


He is taken by the spirit of his old mentor (Gooding Jnr.)to his heaven, which is the beautifully rendered world of his wife's paintings. Here he is content for a very short time, but he finds unbearable to even exist without to company of his wife, who, we later find out, he has a very rare connection with, even in death. In the world of the living, his wife is finding it harder to live without any family and eventually she commits suicide.


Now, it is the whole religious aspect of the film that makes it so interesting, because the story plucks ideas from different religions and makes for me a reasonably fair heaven and hell. Like the idea that who decides who goes up or down almost totally depends on the person themselves, which is the reason that Williams' wife is going to hell when she commits suicide she doesn't believe that she is one who should exist in Heaven. When Williams discovers this, he goes on a journey to find and save her in hell.


There are two main characters in this film Robin Williams and his wife. Williams gives a strong performance. He always has in this type of role, Dead Poets Society, Good Will Hunting, Awakenings and many others, he is well used to this by now. But this cannot be a solo act, so for this film to be pulled off there must be a real connection between the two leads, and that is what I did not get. I just felt that she was a total pain in the ass. If we were given more scenes of the two in more happier times, then we would realise why Williams would go to hell and stay there alone for her. But we don't get that.


Now, the imagery. This film is amazing . It's like begin instead a painting. At last we have a film that has a huge amount computer generated images and while watching it we don't care how flash they are, but its like we are watching an artist stroking his brush across a canvas. The images of Heaven really took me away. But the images Hell took me even more, for example a sea of souls really means just that, souls clawing over of other lost souls for eternity.


The importance of music in film. When a scene has the right music to accompany it, it just hits you at a gut level. Take the scene in "Platoon" when Charlie Sheen and Tom Beringer are retreating in the helicopters, and on the ground we see a speck begin chased by other little specks, and we realise that it is Willem Defeo and when we hear "Adagio For Strings" we just know he is going to die. He died tragically and one of the key elements in that scene is that music, that beautiful music. Its just a petty that the soundtrack is not up to the same standard as the imagery in this film because with good music some of the scenes could have had hit both for your eyes and ears, even as I write this I can think of one specific scene that would have been heartbreaking with the right music and instead it just got a bit boring.


I really liked film and I would encourage anyone to see this film. Because, even if you don't believe in Heaven or Hell I still think you would come out of this film thinking "Well, yeah, it may be possible". But its all a matter of opinion.

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