Starring: Matt Damon, Bryce Dallas Howard and Cécile de France
Directed By: Clint Eastwood
Written By: Peter Morgan
Produced By: Clint Eastwood, Kathleen Kennedy and Robert Lorenz
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: Approximately 129 minutes
Website: hereafter.warnerbros.com
Budget: $40,000,000
Genre: Drama
Release Date: October 22, 2010
Leave it to Clint Eastwood to zig when you expect him to zag. The man who once embodied vigilante rage in Dirty Harry and co-starred with a monkey in at least two movies, Eastwood shed his rough leading-man image to become a popular and prolific Hollywood director. It would have been easy to work the niche for which he had become famous as an actor – tough guys and cowboys – but Eastwood instead has chosen a mix of the visceral (Gran Torino, Changeling, Unforgiven) and the cerebral (Invictus, Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River). It’s hard to predict what subject matter he’ll tackle next, and it turns out his follow-up to his meditation on freedom and unity that was Invictus is an equally ponderous exploration on death and what it means to the living.
Hereafter’s ad campaign would have you believe that Matt Damon is the star of this movie, and while his character serves as a touchstone for the others, there are really three different stories going on here. Damon plays George, a psychic who is able to “connect” with the dead by touching their loved ones. George feels burdened by his abilities, denying his talents and once-thriving business for a life of blue collar anonymity in San Francisco. Meanwhile, in Paris , newscaster Marie (High Tension’s Cécile de France) recovers from a near-death experience in a natural disaster and finds the experience turns her life upside down in unexpected ways. In London, a young boy named Marcus (played by twins Frankie and George McLaren) mourns the untimely death of his brother by looking for answers in all the wrong places.
Marie, Marcus, and George do eventually enter each other’s orbit. The circuitous route of their meeting is as inevitable as the death they all seek to understand, and that strange inevitability is the focus of Eastwood’s philosophizing. Hereafter isn’t a movie about M. Night Shyamalan-style twists or supernatural thrills. The script is by Peter Morgan, known for talky think-pieces like The Queen and Frost/Nixon, and Hereafter is in that same mold. Given a sensational premise, Morgan keeps things decidedly un-sensationalized. Hollywood loves a premise like this – troubled psychic played by famous actor can speak with the dead – but the movie has more in common with art-house dramas than supernatural scares. There probably need to be more movies that tackle the topic of death and what comes after with such restraint and ambiguity.
It’s a shame, then, that so little of it works in Hereafter. Despite uniformly excellent performances from the ensemble cast (an Eastwood trademark at this point), Hereafter’s payoff is labored and ultimately disappointing. This film is all about connections: between people, between life and death. The inevitable meeting of the three main characters is meant to tell us that everything happens for a reason, that the machinations of fate and chance are unfolding in ways that we can’t comprehend. Life progresses in unexpected ways, the movie tells us. Fate and chance, at least in the Hereafter cosmology, apparently works in some very conventional ways. When he’s not brooding, Damon’s George spends most of the movie trapped in a romantic comedy with would-be love interest Melanie (Lady in the Water’s Bryce Dallas Howard), one of those perky, witty, gorgeous movie girlfriends who can’t seem to get a date despite being perky, witty, and gorgeous. The George-Melanie plotline is perhaps an intentional tweak of rom-com expectations, but it’s among many frustrating turns in Hereafter. Marie and Marcus’s stories progress in similar fits and starts, and it’s what detracts from the many fine qualities of the movie.
Hereafter is not a movie that offers answers. We are explicitly told by George, the one character with a definitive link to the beyond, that even he doesn’t know where we go when our time is done. That ambiguity haunts most of the movie, but doesn’t stop the characters from reaching understanding in very pat and convenient ways – even George gets something of a happy ending. There’s a lot to admire in Hereafter, from its artful direction to its pensive tone, but it’s outweighed by an unsatisfying and unwieldy script that gambles on the strength of the characters outweighing the lack of real momentum. Like life, Hereafter is long, frequently frustrating, punctuated by moments of brilliance, and response to how it all ends up will vary based on the individual.
Grade: 2.5 stars (out of 5)
