Clint Eastwood the director, like Clint Eastwood the Western gunslinger, inhabits a world of absolutes: good and bad, right and wrong, from the audience’s perspective it’s always fairly cut-and-dried.
It’s a ham-fisted approach that has worked for the former action hero’s previous outings as director, but Hereafter lacks the punch and the purposefulness of a Million-Dollar Baby or a Gran Torino, much as it lacks the calibre of film-making you’d expect from Eastwood at this point in his career.
As it collapses in hindsight, Hereafter feels like a story gone wrong, a misfire of an M. Night Shyamalan collaboration on an unabashedly soapy intersecting-lives cliché crossed with a bad X-Files episode and a juvenile riff on Polanski’s Ghost Writer (anything at the nexus of conspiracy and reportage), but with substantially less at stake.
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Hereafter Directed by Clint Eastwood |
French TV journalist Marie Lelay (Cécile de France) becomes a victim of the Indian Ocean tsunami while on assignment in Thailand, drowning and briefly experiencing death – a foggy vision of beckoning figures – before two men rescue and resuscitate her.
The tsunami provides a thrilling opening sequence (even if the hereafter itself looks hardly distinct from the decade-old special effects associated with X-Men’s Cerebro device), but Hereafter sacrifices a lot of momentum by front-loading such a climactic scene. The film never subsequently regains this level of excitement, particularly as a traumatized Marie spirals into listlessness in the aftermath.
On leave from work, she travels to Switzerland where an expert in near-death experiences – one of those egregious director mouthpiece characters who insists, petulantly and baselessly, that the data she has compiled irrefutably prove the existence of an afterlife – urges Marie to write a book.
So she does, which is one thing, but for her to then excitedly submit Hereafter: A Conspiracy of Silence to her publisher in place of that long-promised biography of François Mitterand – only to feel crushed by its rejection – seems awfully silly.
In London, 12-year-old Marcus (Frankie McLaren) loses his identical twin brother Jason in a car accident as they strive to safeguard their drug-addicted mother against an investigation by child protective services that will break up their family. Essentially, Marcus is living out a catechismal episode of Skins; but even as the best of the Hereafter troika he is still inhabiting an overly familiar fable about loss and tribulation that typically has the support of the entire story instead of serving as one leg of an ungainly tripod.
The third is former psychic George Lonnegan (Matt Damon), a retired medium who gave up his lucrative trade in legitimately conversing with the dead to work a hard-hat factory job. Lonnegan’s ability is given the traditional boon-or-burden treatment, though it is so feebly articulated one wonders just how much rewriting the script underwent.
Lonnegan says the same thing twice – “it’s not a gift, it’s a curse” – in the exact same words, and we are left to accept that the plot is built around this meaningless Hallmark platitude: that his unique ability is unbearable because it cost him his “normal life.”
But heavy-handed is the Eastwood signature, as when we are shown a typical psychic, a con artist whose one wrong assumption makes a fool of her to the character through whom viewers are vicariously watching. But the character plays along, so the woman’s own audience simply applauds, none the wiser. When Lonnegan later performs a bona fide reading for the same character, however, the results are equally unsatisfying, the messages from the other side equally superficial and trite.
The only way for Hereafter to redeem itself as its heroes trace broad arcs through their paint-by-numbers universe would be for it to offer something novel and substantial in the way of the afterlife. Something more, not less, creative than the fanciful post-mortem visions of The Lovely Bones, or more, not less, meaningful than the closing sentiments of Never Let Me Go.
Instead, our three plotlines intersect briefly and lazily, as if that were the whole point: a cursory confluence of stories and characters leads brusquely to a closing rendezvous which feels transplanted out of a Bourne movie’s coast-is-clear finale.
If this is Eastwood’s response to the narrative machinations of Crash and other tightly plotted films of that ilk then it’s a case of the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction, because Hereafter seems all the more preposterous for its feeble character and plot arcs and their vague, unsatisfying commingling.