Hereafter

It’s almost impossible to get mad at a film Clint Eastwood directs anymore. The much-respected director has pulled off enough startlingly wonderful films in recent years that it would seem in bad taste to tell him that one of his movies just wasn’t very good. Unfortunately, “Hereafter” just isn’t very good. But you get the sense that it’s the movie that’s letting Eastwood down, and not the other way around.

The film tells three stories: one concerns a former psychic turned factory worker named George Lonnegan (Matt Damon) whose brother tries to rope him back into the psychic trade. Another story centers on Marie Lelay (Cécile de France), a French television journalist who survives the 2004 tsunami while in Thailand and tries to recompose a life that’s been marked by death. And in the last story we have Marcus (Frankie McLaren), a 12-year-old boy living in England whose twin brother, Jason, has just died.

For a film about death — a broad, boundless topic — Peter Morgan’s script has surprisingly little to say. I respect his desire to avoid presumptions, but one feels that he’s not even trying. None of the stories seem to say anything about death; they simply revolve around its concept in order to have some needed thematic connection. There’s some spare otherworldly imagery, but the film doesn’t want to commit to any singular vision of death and in this way it begins to lose credibility. Toward the end, the film tries to tell you to enjoy being alive. As pleasant as this notion is, it would be nice of a film about death to be about death for once.

Damon is good here; painting a restrained portrait of a man whose fear of his connection to death has kept him from living at all. France, unfortunately, is more hit and miss. We see her transformation, but we don’t experience it. The film implies that Marie is a guarded person, but it’s France’s own guardedness that won’t let us see past this.

Eastwood as director does what he can and his rendering of the tsunami is powerful. Eastwood is not known for special effects of any kind and the fact that he employs special effects with such aplomb is surprising. But Eastwood has let the philosophical weightiness of Morgan’s script get the better of him. The sense of intimacy he lent to “Million Dollar Baby” would have benefited “Hereafter” enormously, instead the movie begins to feel distant rather than deliberate.

The film’s slack pacing and general melancholy attempted profoundness does not help either. However, by the time each story has been properly interwoven, there’s a kind of an odd silliness to the whole thing. Eastwood usually makes gritty and intimate films. A movie this Hollywood is so not Eastwood and there’s something both fascinating and frustrating in his directorial escape from the conventions he has established for himself. It’s nice to see Eastwood working outside of his comfort zone; one just wishes he had picked a better script.