Tuesday, October 13, 1998
New Age movie deserves credit for stunning effects
FILM: Reviewers criticize plot, miss innovative use of famous
artistic works
By Richard Nilsen
The Arizona Republic
Imagine walking around inside a painting and you have the visual
premise for the new film ”What Dreams May Come.”
In that New Age treaclefest, Robin Williams plays a doctor who
dies and discovers that his personal heaven looks just like his
wife’s paintings. He finds himself among drooping wisteria trees
and enough royal-blue flowers to fill out the background for all
the animated Strawberry Shortcake cartoons ever made.
Critics have roundly trounced the movie as preachy, silly,
tedious, sappy and pretentious. It is all those things. But they
have generally missed the movie’s visual sources, the
art-historical references being made. Most of them call Williams’
computer-generated paradise a ”Renoir come to life” or a
”Maxfield Parrish vision.”
However, although there are a few Parrishesque lushnesses, its
central artistic vision comes not from the Impressionists and
certainly not from 20th-century magazine illustrators.
No, the film draws more than anything on early 19th-century
Romantic painters and their Victorian progeny.
It is interesting to see them show up on the screen because
among serious critics it is a period of art history that doesn’t
get much respect. Critics can talk about Eugene Delacroix without
sputtering and Joseph Mallord William Turner without condescension,
although both are admired mainly as precursors to the later
Impressionists; but critics tend to become more than a little
patronizing when discussing such painters as Thomas Cole, Frederic
Church, Caspar David Friedrich, Gustave Dore and – worst of all –
John Martin.
These are painters who, in the aggregate, made Cecil B. DeMille
possible. They gave us grandiose visions of gargantuan exoticisms.
Their subjects were the Deluge, the Plagues of Egypt, the Day of
Wrath, the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and – my personal
favorite – Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion. Human figures
are dwarfed not only by vast landscapes, but also by immense
architecture. Martin once painted a Balshazzar’s Feast as taking
place in a building that was projected to be a mile long.
So, there they are, all those impossibly high mountains,
painfully distant horizons, the longing of those waterfalls and the
nostalgia of those weeping trees.
It is the stuff our own century has made camp out of. It has
become translated to painted dinner plates sold in magazine offers,
a landscape populated with Hummel figurines. It is the mawkish
frontispiece of illustrated Sunday school texts.
What those painters were trying to depict, however, wasn’t a
suburban vision of a hereafter – one movie critic called the
current film version of heaven a ”McDonald’s in the Mall of
America” – but a vision of transcendence, a sense that the world
is larger, more beautiful and more electric than we allow ourselves
to notice in our everyday lives.
It is unfortunate that such an anagogic sense has turned so
bourgeois. What once was dangerous and radical has become sedate,
complacent and conservative.
It is the fatal flaw of New Age thinking that it is as
comfortable as an easy chair and an old pair of slippers. So ”What
Dreams May Come” turns into a retelling of the Orpheus myth with a
happy ending tacked on. New Age philosophy allows only for happy
endings.
Real philosophy is not a warm sudsy bath; life as we live it
tells us it has harder edges and less narcissistic concerns.
But it is not the fairy-weight thought that we take away from
the movie, but the sense of wandering around inside a painting.
So Williams climbs the infinite staircase from John Martin’s
manic engraved illustrations to Milton’s ”Paradise Lost” among
the floating angels of Philipp Otto Runge. When he descends to
hell, he boats through waters with floating nudes straight out of
Delacroix’s ”Barque of Dante,” and his ultimate resting point is
under the naked winter tree of Caspar David Friedrich’s ”Man and
Woman Contemplating the Moon.”
One after another, paintings from the early 19th century float
by and we enter and cruise through them.
Walking through art is not a new idea.
It is the expectation in Chinese painting, where the viewer is
supposed to imagine himself a tiny figure walking up the mountain
path among the pine trees toward that ”scholar’s cabin” at the
summit.
And even in film, there is an earlier and much better
attempt.
It is in ”Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams,” an anthology film by the
Japanese director from 1990. In one segment, called ”Crows,” a
young amateur painter, with his paint box on his back, visits
southern France looking for Van Gogh’s landscapes. He comes across
the master himself, played by Martin Scorsese, and follows him
through the countryside, which miraculously turns into a living Van
Gogh painting as they walk through it.
It captures the sense that the current film misses, that it is
the eyes of the artist, ever more awake and aware than we can be,
that see the world – in William Blake’s words – ”as it is,
infinite.”
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