What You Should Know Before Seeing This Film
Theme: First, keep in mind that this film is a story. It is fiction. It does not tell us about what happens when we die
because no one knows what happens when we die. So what is the purpose of the story? It must be about what happens to
us when we are alive. Watch the characters, watch the story, and be prepared to discuss what the film has to say about life
and how life should be conducted. At the same time the film is looking at our perceptions of the Afterlife? What really
happens when we die? How does life transfer into the Afterlife?
While Viewing: (In your journal…)
 What are the rules for how the afterlife is structured in this film?
 Where do the images, settings, and people Chris encounters come from?
 How is Chris’s mood affected by the various components of his afterlife?
 How is the afterlife personalized for each character?
Narrative Focus: Narrative focus tells us whose point of view we are getting. In this film, the narrative focus comes from
Chris Nielsen (Robin Williams). Almost everything we learn about the characters comes from what he knows. Therefore,
everything about what happens after the accident also comes from what he either knows or thinks will happen.
Remember, there is no evidence to prove that the events after the accident in the tunnel even happen. They are the events
that the character thinks will happen. What does he expect to discover if he dies?
Let me give you an example: Tomorrow, I die. What will happen? I'll tell you what will happen. The school will close -for a month. The grief will be too terrible for people to bear. The Greater Cincinnati area will go into mourning. Black
swathes of fabric will cover every doorway and at nine o'clock every night the lights of Campbell, Kenton, & Boone
counties will dim for fifteen minutes. When the month away from school is over and all of you return to Cher Caldwell
Memorial High School, there will be a portrait, a really big portrait, in the main lobby of the school which all of the
students, as they enter the school each morning, will delicately touch, closing their eyes and taking inspiration from the
remembrance of my life.
Like it? Yeah, me, too. But let's face it. This is strictly from my point of view. This is how I see it. The above paragraph is
entirely from my narrative focus. The reality is probably going to be much different. It will probably be grander, but my
own herculean humility prevents me from venturing any guesses.
Now, what does Chris Nielson think will happen when he dies? If the Afterlife is a thing we create ourselves, then where
and when he meets people is entirely under his control. How they behave is not how they behave, but how he thinks they
would behave if he met them. He is a great example of a solipsist. (sol·ip·sism [sólləp sìzzəm] n. belief in self as only
reality: the belief that the only thing somebody can be sure of is that he or she exists, and that true knowledge of anything
else is impossible).
Allusions: Remember-- An allusion is a reference to something in literature or history that the audience is
supposed to know. (It is not seeing something that is not there; that’s illusion.) For this movie, it is helpful for
the audience to know something about Dante’s Inferno. It would also be useful to know the story of Orpheus
[ORE-fee-us] (figure in Greek mythology: in Greek mythology, a poet and musician, who descended to the
underworld to seek his wife, Eurydice, after her death, but failed to bring her back) and Eurydice [you-RID-uhsee] (an oak nymph that was the wife of Orpheus who loved her dearly. Eurydice stepped on a snake and fell to
the ground leaving Eurydice dead) Another piece of information would be if you knew where the title of the
movie came from. It’s from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It is a phrase from Hamlet’s famous soliloquy “To
be, or not to be. . .” speech. Here is the text:
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.
"The unexamined life is not worth living."
~Socrates
What Dreams May Come
Directed by Vincent Ward
Cast
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Chris Nielsen: Robin Williams
Annie Nielsen: Annabella Sciorra
Review: Heavenly effects in What Dreams May Come
Web posted on: Thursday, October 01, 1998 12:26:24 PM
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Albert Lewis: Cuba Gooding, Jr.
The Tracker: Max von Sydow
From Reviewer Paul Tatara
(CNN) -- There's more than enough to hate about them, but my biggest pet peeve concerning most modern
blockbusters is that they're usually little more than excuses to march out all the latest developments in special
effects. One of my all-time favorite movie-going memories is of seeing "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"
on the night it opened in 1977, and being absolutely floored the first time those space ships went gliding down
that Indiana highway. So I can fully understand why some people might like to get an occasional jolt of the new
technology.
"Occasional" is the pivotal word, though.
How many churning fireballs are required for you to meet your lifetime allowance of churning fireballs?
How many buildings have to crumble to the ground before you're fully versed in the concept of crumbling
buildings? How many faces do you have to see morphing into other faces, wildcats, vampires, or rabid
wolverines before the thrill of the morph has subsided?
I know this stuff looks cool; I'm not blind. But I'm amazed how people will keep lining up to see a re-hash of
something that only really sprang from someone's imagination the first time around. I'm convinced that if Jerry
Bruckheimer released an effects movie called "Been There, Done That," it would make millions. And so would
the sequel.
Chatty, New Age-y, but beautifully done
Thankfully, Bruckheimer's black hand is nowhere in evidence in "What Dreams May Come," even though a
lot of the movie is set in hell. Robin Williams and Cuba Gooding, Jr. are there, though, and so are some of the
most awe-inspiring, brilliantly designed visual effects that I've ever seen. Though the movie's chatty focus on all
that's good and lovely and wonderful in our lives starts to wear out its welcome by 40th New Age sermon, I was
pretty moved by parts of it. And, for the first time in many a moon, the visual wizardry I was looking at wasn't
an amped-up version of the same-old "new thing."
Williams plays a doctor named Chris who's madly, deeply in love with his wife, Annie (Annabella Sciorra.)
Man, that Chris and Annie dig each other; they smooch endlessly and expound on their dreamy coupling like a
couple of ecstasy-addled poet laureates. No doubt about it, life is one big Goo-Goo Cluster for these two ... that
is, until their two kids are killed in a car accident. Then Annie tries to commit suicide and absolutely everything
about their lives together falls apart. Things fall apart even further than that, though, when Chris is crushed by a
runaway car one night while attending to an accident victim in a freeway tunnel.
From there, we pass into the afterlife with Chris, and that's when the fun starts. He's immediately met by a
heavenly guide when he gets there, a gently understanding young man named Albert (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) who
was an old man that Chris cared for in the hospital years earlier, back in the real world.
That's generally how the movie operates, so you'd better get used to it. People move around in bodies that
they previously didn't inhabit, love shades into anguish, hell is an inescapable state of mind, etc. In other words,
you're dead now, so the writer (Ron Bass, adapting Richard Matheson's novel) gets to make it all up and there's
nothing you can do about it.
Vivid vision of heaven and hell
That free-for-all spirit eventually takes its toll on the viewer, but the effects team and production designers have
devised a vivid vision of heaven and hell that you won't soon forget. You've never seen anything like this before, no
matter how times you watched "The Fifth Element" or "Dark City." Soulmate Annie is a talented painter, so Chris' initial
impression of heaven -- Albert explains that our minds conjure their own versions of the perfect world when we die -- is
that of a vast, painted landscape. And I mean literally painted.
Globs of reds, greens, blues, purples, and yellows spread out before him and wash into a Van Gogh-inspired swirling
sky. When Chris reaches down to touch some violets, they squish through his fingers and drip into the other colors.
There's no way to convey the fun of the visuals through words. Unlike any movie since "2001: A Space Odyssey," this
is cinema as the ultimate hallucinogenic trip. It's as if the effects team (lead by Ellen M. Somers, who fully deserves an
Oscar) mated John Lennon's acid visions with the ethereal landscapes of the CD-ROM, "Myst." To top it off, there's the
joyfulness of Williams experiencing this fantasy environment. The effects' only purpose is to be supremely gorgeous,
instead of atom bomb destructive, and that's exactly what they are.
Oh so sticky-sweet
But that's just the first part of the journey. Chris then goes looking for his children, and more or less finds them, in a
city that looks like a Magritte painting, with beautifully dressed men and women floating above golden beach fronts. His
favorite dog is there, too, bounding through the lushness. If all of this sounds like it might give you cavities, you're right to
some degree. The visuals are sometimes too life-embracing by a couple of steps.
This gets leavened considerably, though, when Chris meets up with a mystical guide (Max Von Sydow, creepy as
always) who leads him on a boat journey across a churning ocean full of pale, screaming bodies. The lost spirit of the
now-deceased Annie is trapped in hell, and Chris is off to find her, much against Albert's advice.
Hell, as you might expect, is no cakewalk, sort of a cross between "Dante's Inferno" and Detroit in the mid-'70s. One of
the more startling images in the film is a huge field down in Beelzebub-ville that's covered with the anguished faces of
people who are buried up to their necks in the earth. (There are also, incredibly enough, a couple of decent laughs in this
sequence.)
[End of Review]