Well Worth Watching Movies

After publishing the Lovely Bones movie, i remembered this movie with Robin Williams. This is also a movie dealing with people after their Death. The fantasy element of this film is so colorful and bizarre that it leaves a lasting impression. The plot has a very moving theme to it too. The colors used in the filming of the scenes and the backdrops are incredibly original and dream like. I have decided to add this movie to the archive here for posterity, for this is a classic fantasy movie which is not so well known to all people.
The film won an Academy Award for its visual effects awarded to Kevin Mack, Joel Hynket, Nickolas Brooks, and Stuart Robertson. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Art Direction. It won the Art Directors Guild Award for Excellence in Production Design.

The Title of the movie is taken from a line in Hamlet’s To be, or not to be soliloquy.

Watch Movie – What Dreams May Come

Soulmates Chris (Robin Williams) and Annie (Annabella Sciorra) have an idyllic marriage together. However, following the death of their two children in a car accident, Annie becomes isolated and mentally unstable from guilt, and is institutionalized. After four years, the couple reconciles, but on the anniversary of the event Chris is killed in a car accident, finding himself in a Heaven derived from his wife’s paintings.

Despite the paradise he now inhabits, Chris is unhappy without Annie. When she commits suicide in guilt over Chris’ death, the act consigns her to Hell. Determined that they belong together, Chris commences a quest through Hell to rescue her, in the process discovering a number of characters from his past.

After meeting on a lake in Switzerland, Chris Nielsen and Annie Collins marry, having two children: Ian (Josh Paddock) and Marie (Jessica Brooks Grant).

Years later, after Ian and Marie are killed in a car accident, Annie becomes mentally unstable and attempts suicide. She is institutionalized, and although the couple nearly divorce as a result (Chris wanting the divorce much more than Annie, not sharing the depth of her grief at their loss), they reconcile and she eventually recovers. However, on the anniversary of the day the couple decided not to divorce (which they call their “Double-D” anniversary) Chris is involved in a car accident, dying a short time later. For a time, Chris attempts to influence life on Earth, specifically trying to communicate to Annie that he’s still there, watching over her. However, after seeing that being around her as a ghost only causes her pain, he gives up and heads for the afterlife.

Chris awakens in Heaven, adjusting to his new self-manifesting fantasy environment with the guidance of a man (Cuba Gooding Jr.) whom Chris recognizes as a Albert, his friend and mentor from his medical residency. Both are surprised when a Blue Jacaranda tree appears in Chris’s personal section of Heaven, which matches a tree in a new painting of Annie’s. Albert indicates the couple are soul mates, receptive to each other’s thoughts even after death.

Later, Chris meets a woman named Leona who shows him a children’s realm in Heaven. Chris recognizes her as Marie, after realizing the location is a diorama she loved in life, and Leona explaining that she took the form of an Asian woman because when they travelled to Singapore, her father smiled at an Asian stewardess with name tag writing |Leona|. He told the daughter that Asian women were lovely, graceful and smart. Since then the daughter always wanted to be like that.

In parallel to this, Annie, distraught at the loss of her entire family, kills herself with poison. Albert breaks the news to Chris, whose initial relief that her suffering is over quickly turns to anger when he learns that suicides are sent to Hell. Albert claims no judgment has been made against her by God; it is simply the nature of suicides to create “anti-fantasy” worlds based on their psychological pain, similar but opposite to Chris’ fantasy world in Heaven. This is a reference to Dante’s Inferno, where the seventh level of Hell is reserved for sins of violence — including violence against oneself.

Chris is adamant that he will rescue Annie from Hell, despite Albert’s insistence that no one has ever succeeded in doing so. Chris is undaunted, and Albert eventually agrees to find Chris a “Tracker” to help find Annie’s soul.

Journeying to Hell and encountering hundreds of damned souls (one of which is a cameo by German director Werner Herzog) Chris finds himself recalling memories of his son, Ian. Chris had been disappointed with Ian’s underachievement but eventually, after an earnest conversation, told him “if I was going through fucking hell, I’d only want one person in the whole goddamn world by my side.” Seeing Albert about to confront a violent group of damned, Chris realizes Albert is actually Ian. Ian explains that he chose to appear as Albert because he was the only person Chris would ever listen to. Ian returns to Heaven, while Chris and the Tracker continue the search.

Arriving at what the Tracker calls their “private deck”, Chris finds a field full of the faces of the damned (a further reference to Dante’s Inferno). Chris sees Annie’s face but as he runs towards her, the ground gives way and he falls into a vast, upturned cathedral. Chris recognizes his and Annie’s house at the bottom. The Tracker warns Chris that if he stays with Annie for more than a few minutes, he may become permanently trapped too. The Tracker then reveals that he is Albert, who has been waiting for many years to do Chris a favor. He fears, however, that all he can do is allow Chris to tell Annie goodbye, and “give up” on saving her.

Chris enters the house to find Annie pale and withdrawn, still tortured by her loneliness and her surroundings. Chris is unable to make Annie recognize him and decides to “give up”, but not in the way Albert had expected. He chooses to join Annie forever in Hell, even if she will never know who he is. This is the antithesis of his behavior when Annie was institutionalized, and his final words to her echoing that time enable Annie to finally “wake up” and recognize Chris (who is succumbing to Annie’s hellish reality), and carry him with her to Heaven.

Chris and Annie are reunited in Heaven with their children, but Chris suggests being reincarnated, so the pair can experience meeting and falling in love again, hopefully without the tragic ending. The film ends with Chris and Annie meeting as young children, in a rough parallel of their original meeting. The last line is a repetition of the opening line by Chris: “When I was young, I met this beautiful girl by a lake.”

Alternative Viewing Options;

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The special edition DVD shows an alternate ending — which is the ending from the novel — in which the reincarnation is not a choice, but part of the natural order. Chris and Annie will meet again in their new lives, but Annie must atone for killing herself — her new incarnation will die young, and Chris will spend the remainder of his new life as a widower before the two are once again reunited in Heaven. The film then goes to Sri Lanka where a woman is giving birth to a little girl, presumed to be Annie. In Philadelphia, a little boy is born, presumably Chris. This ending was left roughly edited and unfinished.