Just about as deep in goop as you can get. The initial steps are forewarningly soggy, traversing a love-at-first-sight and whirlwind courtship in the Alps, a wedding, the raising of two teenagers, and the attending of their double funeral, all before the end of the opening credits. The father follows his children into the afterlife after a four-year time jump, and the mother comes along shortly. But the father died by accident, so he gets to go to a heaven of his own making; and inasmuch as he is, or was, an aficionado of fine art, his view of paradise is all Monet and van Gogh and Poussin and Claude Lorrain and Maxfield Parrish and God-knows-who-all. (The van Gogh sequence in Kurosawa's Dreams will come to some minds, much solider in memory and in comparison: much solider, for sure, than when our voyager first passes over, and the new world is like unset Jell-O, all liquid and squishy and Impressionism-in-motion.) The mother, meantime, died of her own hand, so she must go to a private hell, all dark and gray and stony and dead, a total downer. Her husband, undeterred by the pessimistic prognostigation of so authoritative a voice as Max von Sydow's, sets off like Orpheus to find his Eurydice and bring her back with him. The movie is based on a novel by the same author as Somewhere in Time, Richard Matheson, and like that other romantic fantasy, this one tells of a love so powerful, so fou, so surreal, that it can cross the barriers between worlds. It proves in this instance, however, to be not a love so powerful that it can cross the endless bog of computer-generated imagery and greeting-card kitsch. Nor is it helped in its travels by being borne in the breast of Robin Williams, whose idea of somber emotion is a mouth with the corners turned down, and whose idea of turbulent emotion is a mouth in search of the fishbone in a bite of trout. Annabella Sciorra, Cuba Gooding, Jr.; directed by Vincent Ward. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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