Movie review: What Dreams May Come "The tragic myth of heaven"

"It's not about understanding. It's about not giving up."

Just how do you spell "love"? Just how far would you go to prove it? For Chris Nielson (Robin Williams), it means choosing hell over heaven just  to be with his wife Annie (Annabella Sciorra). Literally.

I once thought dreams are simply blurred and distorted images made by our subconscious minds--meaningless, confusing and even nightmarish. I never thought it could be our heaven, because it's all in our minds after all.

What shook me to tears in Vincent Ward's What Dreams May Come (1998) was Chris's undying love for his wife. When he died, he was advised in heaven that his thoughts for her would fade away in time but he refused to let go and even searched for her in hell after she committed suicide, even if it means staying there with her.

The face of hell

Just how big is the commitment in such relationships? My mentor Ms. Josephine Bonsol once said love is not about feeling anymore for it only further breaks the connection with its subjective setbacks. Love does not require a single emotion, and you show your love because you simply want to. She said it's more of a decision while you give all the love even without saying it.

When Chris died, he still longed for his wife. Even if paradise was right in front of him, his paradise was still being with Annie, as he saw his heaven in one of her majestic paintings. He didn't listen to anybody and even risked losing his mind in hell just to bring back his wife. Maybe this is what soul mates--and true love--simply mean.

We would think how heroic it might be when one gives up his own heaven and takes a ship back to the one place we all pray to the holy ghost we would not fall into--hell. Out in the real world we all want to go to heaven because we simply hate suffering. But for Chris, suffering is part of life and he simply hates not being with his wife.

It took me to a lot of tears especially when Chris found his daughter Marie (Jessie Brooks Grant) in heaven disguised as a beautiful Asian woman named Leona (Rosalind Chao, The Joy Luck Club). The movie brought me to more tears when he finally discovered his son Ian (Josh Paddock) as he remembered "he would be with his son even in hell".

Ms. Josephine Bonsol was right: the movie was deeply touching as I cried over Chris's message to his wife, that he couldn't forgive himself because he once said "he couldn't join her" to insanity after their children died, as he tried to push all the pain he even distanced himself to "the woman he loves the most".

Sometimes when you win, you lose.

And sometimes when you lose, you win. What Dreams May Come is a story about not giving up, and a challenge for all of us to face and express what true love really means.