Word: helling
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...best moment in What Dreams May Come occurs when Max Von Sydow, the great staple of films specializing in theological torment, enters. The actor who challenged Death to a game of chess in The Seventh Seal appears as a Tracker to guide Robin Williams in his journey through hell. The casting of Von Sydow is uncannily perfect, suitably dramatic and humorous at once. Unfortunately, except for Von Sydow, Vincent Ward's film fails to reconcile its diverse tones. What Dreams May Come is a remarkably inconsistent work, failing at a very basic level to present uniform structure and characters...
Robin Williams, fresh from his Academy Award for Good Will Hunting, again leaves his comedic training behind him in his role as Chris Nielsen, who dies in a car accident and must travel from heaven to hell to save his wife (Annabella Sciorra) after she commits suicide in despair. The premise is fraught with difficulties. Although the plot is standard quest situation, it also demands that the film deal with questions of religion, God and the afterlife. The screenplay by Ron Bass gives the standard Hollywood compromise that eliminates God from the proceedings. By setting the film on earth, City...
When Robin Williams enters hell, the movie's visual style lags. Like Ward's heaven, hell is a collection of schoolbook cliches, but without the visual flourish that marked the earlier passages. The hell that Woody Allen presented satirically in Deconstructing Harry is far more frightening than the absurdity in What Dreams May Come. Perhaps no director could reconcile presentations of heaven and hell successfully--David Lynch could certainly do the latter--and in this situation, Ward fails at both tasks...
Annabella Sciorra has no room to do mediocre work, for her inscrutable character dooms any possibility for a good performance from the start. In various scenes she is a beautiful romantic, a warm mother, an edgy and depressed artist, a lunatic and finally a resident of hell. None of her various incarnations seem remotely connected to another, and in each she is given an outlandish haircut that does her acting for her. When she has the severe, cropped look of Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, you know that tragedy is imminent. We never know why Robin Williams would risk hell...
...which drive every new flick churning out of Hollywood's blockbuster factory. Godzilla and Armaggedon are the obvious examples--but the trend is beginning to infiltrate the once safe genres. What Dreams May Come, for instance, opens in theaters today with a love story that crosses both heaven and hell in order to make audiences feel. Do we really need perpetual "eye candy" to tell a story? Or more importantly, can a pure human drama still affect...