What Dreams May Come (1998)

What Dreams May Come arrives from 1998 with a paint box, a grief-stricken pediatrician, and an afterlife designed by a production team that clearly believed heaven needed more saturation. Vincent Ward's adaptation of Richard Matheson's novel follows Robin Williams through a picturesque eternity and then into a less picturesque hell on a rescue mission for his wife. The film won an Academy Award for visual effects, and the reward is visible in every swirling, pearlescent vista. Plot, alas, is a different department. The story moves from tragic to maudlin with the efficiency of a car crash, and the dialogue often sounds like a greeting card left in the sun.

The social inventory is thin. Cuba Gooding Jr. and Rosalind Chao appear in significant roles, yet the film treats their presence as ordinary casting instead of a statement, which is its own quiet rebuke to the modern habit of announcing every hire. There is no same-sex longing, no racial thesis, no climate sermon, no attack on capital, no body-positive subplot, and no modern vocabulary of neurodivergence. Annie is a painter and a mother who becomes a damsel in the underworld, her suicide functioning as the engine for Chris's heroism. The film's moral seriousness is real, but it is the old-fashioned kind: love is strong, grief is hard, and heaven is a place where you can paint the sky.

What moralizing the film offers is soft and sentimental. It wants us to feel for Annie's guilt and Chris's devotion, and it handles suicide with a solemnity that occasionally slips into sermonizing. The message is that love can descend into hell and stay there, which is touching if we do not examine the theology too closely. As a cultural artifact, the film is a curiosity: gorgeous, soggy, and almost entirely untouched by the progressive fashions that would later colonize the multiplex. The afterlife, it turns out, has no diversity workshop.