What Dreams May Come Worth a Second Glance

A Film About Love and Death, and Surviving Both

Oct 17, 2008

During its release in 1998, it was passed off as a romantic tearjerker that was beautiful to look at, but without substance. 10 years later, it deserves another look.

The film begins with Chris and Annie, played by Robin Williams and Annabella Sciorra, colliding boats on a river in Europe. Their eyes connect, and it is a classic case of love at first sight. A short time later they run into each other again on the side of a mountain and exchange some playful banter, and it's obvious they're both completely smitten.

The Plot

Years pass and the couple marry and have two children, Ian and Marie. The kids are now pre-adolescents, and the viewer watches a scene in which the family is having breakfast together. Marie is asking her mother to drive Ian and her, but because of work, Annie tells her that the housekeeper will have to drive them. After the children die in a car collision Annie blames herself, believing that if she'd been driving, her maternal instincts would've saved them.

Several years later, a nervous, dependent Annie calls Chris in a panic. She needs to choose a different batch of paintings to hang in the gallery, and she’s frightened that she’ll miss their “Double D” Anniversary that night. With Chris’s help, she chooses the new paintings, and Chris reassures her that he will pick them up at the warehouse after he leaves work. On his way to pick up the paintings a traffic pile-up occurs, killing Chris.

After losing her children and now her husband to car wrecks, Annie is inconsolable. Chris hangs out for a while in spirit, trying to comfort his wife, but when it seems that all he’s doing is adding to her pain, he leaves her to begin his afterlife in heaven. With the help of Albert, another spirit, Chris begins creating his new universe, based on a landscape Annie had painted.

As in Life, So in the Afterlife

Chris discovers that he and Annie are soul-mates after a bright purple tree she drew appears in his world. He’s ecstatic at the fact that their connection goes beyond death, but realizes how much pain she’s in when the tree begins to fall away, the result of her destroying it on the canvas.

Not long afterwards, Albert tells Chris that Annie has killed herself, and “suicides go somewhere else.” Albert tells Chris that suicides’ hell is of their own creating. They are unable to recognize what they’ve done, and their hell is basically “their life gone wrong.” Even though Albert tells him that “no one has ever seen a suicide brought back,” Chris refuses to give up on Annie, and begins a journey to hell to bring her back.

Painting Heaven

The special and visual effects in What Dreams May Come are especially stunning. The film won an Academy Award for Best Effects, Visual Effects, and received a nomination for Best Art Direction-Set Direction. Annie's paintings literally became Chris' heaven, so getting the lush, vivid colors of the landscape to match her visions was extremely important to the film.

When Chris first enters his afterlife "home" his inability to fully accept his death is shown by the fluidity of everything around him. The paint on his home is still wet, the bird flying overhead looks is defined in brush strokes, he trudges through the murky swamp of indigo, flame red, and forest green acrylic paint. It is only when he begins to become more comfortable with his death that the paint begins to dry, and everything in his new universe becomes real.

While talking with Andrew L. Urban, director Vincent Ward had a few things to say about the special effects used. "The film uses some 260 SFX shots" he said. "One of the challenges was to create moving painting over time, which has never been done before, combined with live action footage."

"It took two years of research and development to design the software used in the film, and for the last eight months, there were 50 people working on that alone," said Ward. "There were a number of significant breakthroughs engineered in the making of the film, and the result is that you can shoot a scene traditionally and then change everything in it, add objects to it, change backgrounds, skies, the lot."

The Power of Love

What Dreams May Come is based on the 1978 book of the same name by Richard Matheson. It is a poignant look at what leads people into despair, the power of love, and how sometimes people get too caught up in who they think their family members are, that they can’t see who they actually are. What Dreams May Come has its clichés, but those are nothing compared to the beauty and insight of this wonderful film.

The copyright of the article What Dreams May Come Worth a Second Glance in Romantic Films is owned by Jennifer L Mashuga. Permission to republish What Dreams May Come Worth a Second Glance in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.