Review of Hereafter (2010) by Paul S — 03 Feb 2012

In what constitutes contemplating your navel, Clint Eastwood has brought us an allegedly thought provoking film that.... Doesn't provoke any thought. I suppose it's nice that Clint is of an age where he might be ruminating on such a subject, and I found it refreshing that the G word was nowhere to be found here, but the film, and here I'm guessing again, failed to provide any answers because it didn't WANT to.

You are left with a bland supposition that an afterlife exists, but what, why, when and how are left drifting in the wind. Taken at face value you have a script that shows three characters all searching for something. A French journalist survives a near death experience and subsequently can't stop thinking about it and what she believes she "saw" while "officially dead". A young twin is lost without his recently deceased brother and thinks that he should be able to communicate with him.

The 3rd character is Matt Damon, who can see past the veil of death and communicate with dead people. Yeah, he really can, and as he tells us, it's a curse, not a blessing. When he touches a person he gets a kind of shock wave and then can see dead folk who are hanging around in purgatory or some such, waiting to contact the real world. This is kind of unnerving and really makes it hard for Damon to carry on a "normal" relationship (Clint and Co do a nice job with this aspect - showing a potential girl friend who, upon being told by Damon that her father wishes forgiveness for what he did to her, feels that there should be secrets in a relationship so dumps him).

All this is fairly interesting, and Clint directs with a sure hand. The cinematography is beautiful (longtime Clint partner Tom Stern is again the Director of Photography), and yet, for all its earnestness and the tightening of circles within circles involving the three characters, the film simply lacks something... it's as if the three stories just don't have any pizzaz on their own - and only by weaving them together do we get any spark of narrative. Even the ending, which makes perfect sense in a way, left me uninvolved when I should have been happy for the outcome.

In the end, I freely admit that we're all searching for something - be it the face of God, or simply a good hamburger, but while I certainly enjoyed my theology courses in college, I really couldn't get involved with the characters nor the big question of the film: what happens to you when you die? As the journalist's colleague states, getting to the gist of it "the lights go out and there's the endless nothing". I don't really agree with that point of view, but I certainly don't adhere to the conventional notions of heaven and hell either - so maybe Clint has point here after all - just wish the film had more going for it in the here and now.