Clint Eastwood has been involved with some odd films in his storied career (you might remember a buddy film with an orangutan) but, with the arguable exception of 'The Bridges of Madison County,' most have been rooted in the real world.
So it might be a surprise to see Eastwood addressing the supernatural with 'Hereafter,' a film offering honest-to-goodness psychic phenomena and instances of the dead watching out for the living. But given that, followers will not be surprised that the director takes the material at face value, combing through it to envision how real, non-genre-film characters might deal with knowledge of what happens after death.
And there are moments in which Eastwood's approach — in tandem with an unpretentious, vulnerable performance by Matt Damon — works, treating encounters with the afterlife as a burden that is more complication than comfort to the recipient. Damon plays a man who, even after casual physical contact with someone, is briefly connected to that person's deceased loved ones. After burning out on being a professional medium, Damon has gone into hiding and taken work as a laborer, resisting his brother's attempts to make money off his talent.
In a sequence that is the emotional heart of "Hereafter," Damon meets a lovely, lonely girl (Bryce Dallas Howard) in a cooking class, only to see his budding romance endangered when she learns of his "gift" and begs him to demonstrate it.
The two have been engaged in a delicate getting-to-know-you ritual already, and Damon assures Howard that it would ruin things for him to have sudden, intimate knowledge of her past. She doesn't believe him until it's too late.
But Damon's is only one of three stories here, and the other two, despite their virtues, don't mesh well to make a whole.
The screenplay is by Peter Morgan, who has done great things dramatizing recent history in films such as "The Queen," but he has less success here — wrapping real events such as the 2004 tsunami and London train bombings into his fictional plot, to sometimes melodramatic effect, and tying his unrelated plots together only at the end, with some pleasant but too convenient coincidences.
It doesn't help that one-third of the film — the story of a French journalist who becomes convinced the afterlife exists and endangers her professional credibility investigating it — has an odd, dated feel, almost as if it were meant for a late-'80s TV drama. Cécile de France's character faces an intriguing predicament — what happens when a hard journalist is drawn to subjects few others take seriously? — but factors ranging from her hairstyle to the segment's cinematography set it jarringly apart from the others.
After a half-century in the business, Eastwood has earned the right to follow his muse down odd paths. But in the end, "Hereafter" sits uncomfortably alongside his better work, and it isn't compelling enough on its own that we'd be inclined to take it seriously if it came from someone else.
'Hereafter'
Our grade: B-
Genre: Thriller
Running Time: 129 min
MPAA rating: PG-13
Release Date: Oct 22, 2010
About the Author
Keep Reading
The Latest
Featured
