Mass-Market Metaphysics

SOME films are not merely bad. Bad will, understandably, always constitute a solid majority. Truly deleterious is a combination of pretentiousness and mendacity: the kind of movie that has the cheek to accost metaphysics, and to denature or pervert everything it touches. (Archetype: Ghost.) It peddles a transcendental feelgoodism, a trashy substitute for serious thought about death, offering fake solace to the gullible. Call it eschatological escapism. Such a film is What Dreams May Come, which, pretending to deal with life and death, heaven and hell, can truly be said to smell to high heaven. What makes it especially odious is that it is not the work of run-of-the-mill vulgarians but of fairly sophisticated hucksters. It is based "upon" a novel by Richard Matheson, a well-known sci-fi and horror-story writer, who has contributed to such cultural landmarks as Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It was adapted and executive-produced by Ronald Bass, one of cinema's most hyperactive polygraphers, educated at Stanford, Yale, and the Harvard Law School, who, we are told, "continues to write daily during the morning and is one of the industry's most sought-after writers." Judging by the number of his published or filmed works, he must write till noon, and spend the rest of the day being sought after. The movie was directed by Vincent Ward, a New Zealander whose earlier and chaster films held promise, but who was devoured by his pretensions in claptrap such as Map of the Human Heart. Ward went to art school and is also an actor, and he exemplifies the dangers of a little learning. For the looks of this film he cannibalized the paintings of Botticelli, Bosch, Dieric Bouts, Caspar David Friedrich, Turner, Frederick Church, Albert Ryder, Thomas Cole, and George Inness-enough for a small museum, but too much for a mere movie. The otherwise perfectly commercial score by Michael Kamen prestigiously incorporates the second of Alfred Schnittke's Three Sacred Hymns. High aspirations, these, the better to hurtle from and self-destruct. Chris and Annie Nielsen (earnest Robin Williams and adorable Annabella Sciorra) are a happily married couple: he a pediatrician, she a painter. Her painting of a Swiss landscape figures prominently in their happy home. They have a darling Dalmatian, Katie, which, alas, dies; two darling children, Ian and Marie, who, alas, die in a car crash. Annie attempts suicide, but Chris saves her by means of a picturesque sanatorium. Then he, alas, dies in a car crash (another one), and nobody can stop Annie from killing herself. He goes to heaven, but she is punished with hell. What sort of heaven? Vincent Ward has said, "one of the great ideas behind this film is that . . . you create your own paradise, and it's whatever you want it to be." Ditto, in some ways, for hell. This is where the various painters come in, not to mention innovative technical effects too numerous to rehearse here. We start with Chris's paradise, which is Annie's aforesaid painting, with the oil paint, for some reason, not yet dry on it, and proceed to various others. Chris gets an angelic guide, Albert (the black actor Cuba Gooding Jr.), who is really the heavenly reincarnation of someone Caucasian and extremely close to Chris, but I mustn't tell you who. When Albert is otherwise engaged, he delegates his consort, Leona, to escort Chris. In the person of the Asian-American actress Rosalind Chao, she is really another Caucasian who, on earth, was extremely close to Chris and Annie. Let me state that the film is nowise linear, thus majestically transcending the merely confusing into the utterly chaotic. The chief anomaly (or asininity) is everyone's ending up in his private concept of heaven. This might pass if he were alone in it; but it is full of others entitled to their own different conceptions. So the film visually conflates various notions of afterlife into a composite heaven that is fish, fowl, and good red herring, and way, way too much. As is obligatory in films of this nature, Max von Sydow shows up. He is an old man known as the Tracker, whom you might suppose to be God. Not so. When Chris asks Albert whether God exists, he is told, somewhat evasively, that he does exist all right, way up there somewhere-an absentee and, therefore, good (land)Lord. Meretriciously, the film wants to play fast and loose but at the same time not offend the orthodox, placating them with a conciliatory crumb. Hell is a veritable surfeit of inconsistencies. Albert tells Chris that no one can get there from heaven, but that it is not the conventional fiery furnace. When, however, the Tracker does lead Chris to Annie in hell-presumably thanks to the greatness of his marital love-we see some pretty standard flames. Next, some hideous, pretty standard devils. But also a sea of heads, forming a kind of moaning and recriminating carpet over which Chris galumphs, though at other times he can fly faster than a bird. The bodies belonging to the heads are stuck in mire, but at least one head still wears spectacles, no doubt a humiliating punishment for one who once enjoyed contact lenses. The entrance to Annie's much nicer, private quarters in hell is guarded by what is either a giant, crumbling cement octopus, or a peculiar pipeline system for infernal drainage. Chris cannot help Annie beyond warmly comforting her, distraught as she is. But never fear, the loving couple is reincarnated on earth in young kids looking just like them, and embarking on a prepubescent love affair. Sitting through What Dreams May Come will at any rate spare you the effort of having to invent your own version of hell.

Scarcely less wonderful is Love Is the Devil, written and directed by John Maybury and subtitled "Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon." This is another film full of hapless, albeit different, painterly excesses. We have moved from Bosch to Bacon, then onward to bosh. The film labors under two minor handicaps: a restricted budget forcing it to convey a trip to America with a mere Stars and Stripes waving in the background, and the Bacon estate's refusal to grant permission for the use of Bacon's paintings. A third and greater handicap is the unloveliness of the story and the unlikeableness of its characters. Luckily the sexual practices Bacon and his lover, George Dyer, indulged in can only be suggested on screen. We see Bacon in his underwear kneeling by the bedside as George winds a leather belt around his hand and lights a cigarette, but not for smoking. We do see, however, how the two met. Dyer, a minor criminal, sets out to burglarize Bacon's studio cum lodging and crashes through the skylight. Bacon makes him an offer he can't refuse: sleep with him and take anything he likes. Bacon abuses Dyer in different ways: reminding him of his lowly status, bullying him, humiliating him before his upper-class friends, locking him out when he, Bacon, sleeps with other men. Uninvited to a Bacon grand opening in Paris, Dyer dies, like Elvis, of a drug overdose while sitting on the toilet. But Maybury can redeem none of this by delving deeper into character and showing the connection between life and art. At most, he can suggest that a three-way mirror in Bacon's bathroom inspired the many triptychs the artist painted. Initially an art student, Maybury was set and costume designer to the late Derek Jarman, maker of some of the dreariest and most homosexual art films, notably one about Caravaggio, more interested in his catamites than in his canvases. Maybury experiments with distortions of sight (e.g., shooting drinkers through a bottle) and sound (e.g., heightening the loudness of paint being stirred), and manages to make much of his film unwatchable and unlistenable to. As a result, even so fine an actor as Derek Jacobi cannot quite bring home the Bacon.

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