Director Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter” opens with a pretty amazing and terrifying sequence involving a deadly Tsunami that rips through everything including the person of a vacationing star-reporter from France, Marie LeLay (played by exquisite French actress Cecile de France). After she’s found drowned and presumed dead, a couple of strangers make a valiant attempt to save her but it’s futile. She’s not breathing and has no pulse. Marie eventually revives on her own to choke the dirty water out of her lungs but not before spending a few minutes in the soft glow of the afterlife, an experience that will have a profound effect on the life she was sure she wanted back in France.
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Meanwhile, over in England, pre-teen twin brothers Marcus and Jason are dealing with their drug-addicted mother and an eventual tragedy that will blow a hole in their family — while back here in the States, Matt Damon’s George – a psychic who turned his back on a gift he now considers a curse, has to deal with a brother (Jay Mohr) who wants to commercialize him and the loneliness that comes with knowing everyone’s deepest darkest secrets.
You can see the obvious potential here and eventually the three stories will connect as the protagonist’s personal experiences involving death and/or the hereafter inevitably finds a way to intertwine and draw them together. As is the case with most Eastwood films at this stage of his career, the performances are uniformly good, the pacing unhurried, and directorial competence hangs over the full 129 minutes. The film’s problem, and it’s a fatal one, is Peter Morgan’s screenplay, which has managed the impossible in telling this story without advancing anything resembling a theme.
As you can see from the preceding three paragraphs, plot-wise I can tell you what “Hereafter” is about. But as far as an idea, a theme, a statement with some sort of narrative thrust that declares, “I’m telling this story to say this about this,” it simply doesn’t exist. “Three people brought together due to their own unique experiences with death” is a plot, not a theme. “There’s no place like home” is a theme. “How the unselfish example of a former flame turns a cynic into a fighter for the cause” is a theme. And yet, somehow, Morgan managed to write a screenplay exploring something as profound as what happens after we die without digging up anything resembling a Big Idea.
And you get the sense that he’s almost afraid to. Marie’s eventual decision to work through her personal trauma by writing a book about her afterlife experience and the topic in general is presented as something controversial and brave. Okay, maybe in secular France it is, but then she mentions something about how we shouldn’t be intimidated about discussing such things based on how church groups will respond.
What?
First off, this is the first I’ve heard that an investigation into the possibility of life after death (especially a non-religious one) rises to such a level of a controversy that you might lose your job and boyfriend. But to blame the controversy on the people who actually believe in life after death is patently absurd and comes off as an intellectual triple-twist-workaround to once again blame Fear Of The Truth on we religious types. No doubt this awkward throwaway allowed secular-Leftist critics to ease up on the mental tsk-tsks, but it was also a double-down in The Department of Implausibility.
The damage this lack of a Big Idea does to the overall narrative can’t be overstated. You sit there for well over an hour waiting for the first act to end, waiting for the film to say this is why you’re watching and here’s where we hope to end up. Without something as intriguing and mysterious as The Afterlife looming over everything, Eastwood’s three stories might have worked as a kind of big-budgeted indie about the individual struggles of three people at a crossroad in their lives. But The Afterlife is there – we even see it in the first act — and the wait for someone to tell you why it’s there completely distracts and swamps everything else that’s going on.
For the record, my complaint has nothing to do with the religiosity of the story of the lack thereof. For decades I’ve been one of Woody Allen’s most loyal fans, a nihilist filmmaker who frequently tells us we’re all doomed, there is no God, so grab life with both fists and cherish every moment.
I don’t have to agree with the storyteller, but an argument sure would be nice.