What Dreams May Come (GA)

Reviewed by RUSSELL BAILLIE

Cast: Robin Williams, Cuba Gooding jun, Annabella Sciorra

Director: Vincent Ward

Rating: GA

Ward's odyssey -- the continuing adventures of a difficult Kiwi director, chapter five.

In which Vincent the Visionary finds himself playing about with proper film stars, a Hollywood-sized budget, a Hollywood screenplay that is the latest in the run of celestial-themed deep and meaningful dramas, and a whacking great special-effects computer.

Yes, it looks fantastic. In What Dreams May Come Ward's respective renderings of heaven or hell should leave your optic nerve happily frazzled and dazzled. Even if you can't quite pick the painterly references -- er, Van Gogh? Monet? Bosch? That Yes album cover from 1976?

It's just as well the eyes have it, as its efforts (a Ron Rainman Bass screenplay of the Richard Matheson novel) at being deeply meaningful about life, death, and what lies beyond emerge deeply unsatisfying. And with Robin Williams as the central figure to its afterlife proceedings, there's one artistic influence that's all too prevalent throughout -- that of Schmaltz in his very-late-20th-century period.

We first meet Williams' Chris encountering his wife-to-be in a sequence that looks alarmingly like the old Cadbury's Flake advertisement. They marry, have two kids and life goes on. He's a paediatrician. She's an art dealer with a painting hobby. The kids die in a car accident. Then, a few years later, he does too.

He wakes up in a heaven of his own making -- a landscape from the canvas that a grieving, despondent Annie is still working on back home.

Cuba Gooding jun's Albert is the guide to his luminous new neighbourhood, his flying instructor and counsellor. And boy, don't they talk! They gab so much you start to want them to just get out of the way of the lovely scenery.

Thankfully the meditation on all things celestial eventually turns into an odyssey when something (which it would ruin things to explain here) happens that forces Chris, Albert and Max Von Sydow's crusty old tracker down into the bowels of hell -- and Ward's hell sure outdoes his heaven in the style department.

But at the same time the slight story, which has already suffered a stop-start momentum, really unravels. So does Williams' performance.

It ends up a strangely unengaging exercise which tries but fails to be something far more than a variation on Ghost where a tankerful of oil paint has replaced the pottery wheel.

Ward's latest is certainly about love, life, and death and where they might intersect, but it really only touches the retina while leaving the heart unscathed.
* * *
-- Weekend TimeOut, 07/11/98