Hereafter (M). Director: Clint Eastwood. Starring: Matt Damon, Bryce Dallas Howard, Cécile De France, George McLaren, Frankie McLaren, Jay Mohr. 129 minutes
It would be too generous to excuse Hereafter as an old man's rumination on death (director Clint Eastwood will turn 81 this year). Eastwood achieves a sense of neither fear nor awe nor existential angst in his approach to this most human preoccupation.
The best that Hereafter seems able to muster is clichéd afterlife imagery (the dearly departed silhouetted by acid wash light) and half-baked characters pestered by half-formed thoughts of the 'hereafter'.
There are no great insights into the human condition or compelling questions about the mysteries of death to be found here. Instead Eastwood adopts an air of maudlin, shallow musing with an unearned aura of profundity.
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A near-death experience during the 2004 Asian tsunami offers holidaying French journalist Marie Lelay (De France) a glimpse of heaven (cue acid-wash silhouettes) that becomes her obsession.
Taciturn London schoolboy Marcus mourns the death of his garrulous twin Jason (both portrayed by the brothers McLaren) and toys with the idea of enlisting a medium to help him make contact.
Reclusive American psychic George Lonegan (Damon) resists his brother Billy's (Jay Mohr) urgings that he make a career out of his gift of contacting people's dead loved ones. 'It's not a gift, it's a curse!' he insists (of course), and the film dallies in a doomed-romance subplot to illustrate his point.
These stories unspool in parallel, before converging in the final act. Other filmmakers have adopted this kind of mutli-faceted structure (notably Babel and Amores Perros director Alejandro González Iñárritu) to good effect.
But the stories lack momentum, and Eastwood fails to imbue them with any sense of inevitability or of external forces driving these kindred but geographically distant characters into each other's orbits. This, despite the fact that the film's ridiculously mawkish, swelling-strings-laden ending seems to insist that Fate played its part.
In short, where Eastwood shoots for mysticism, he attains only tedium.
Hereafter wins a laugh or two with its portrayal of the chain of charlatanic mediums who attempt (and fail) to contact Jason — John-Edwards-Crossing-Over style — on Marcus' behalf. But these exist primarily to illustrate that, by contrast, Damon's George is the real deal. Clearly, Eastwood really wants us to believe.
Frankly, the film is utterly vapid, and vacuous. And this has serious implications.
Its explicit references to the Tsunami, as well as the 2005 London bombings, are redundant — unless it is to fuse