Grade: B+
Were one to sit in on the first ten minutes of Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter” and for some reason have to leave the theater and miss the rest of the film, I think it’s fair to say that he or she would leave thinking they’d missed out on a modern-day foreign natural-disaster epic. Indeed, with French subtitles and an opening-scene tsunami of considerable brutality, “Hereafter” pulls a bait and switch in the most classic sense.
“Hereafter” is not a ghost story, nor is it a supernatural thriller in any way, shape or form, but a melancholy character-driven meditation on why it is that love endures long after it logically should and whether death is as bad for the deceased as it is for those they leave behind. The way “Hereafter” goes about addressing the issues surrounding death is what will divide audiences between the enthralled and the enraged.
Based on a complicatedly interwoven script by Peter Morgan, whose scripts are known more for their politics than pathos, “Hereafter” first introduces us to its characters each at a crossroads in their lives. Marie LeLay is Paris’s premiere investigative journalist, confronted with death at the outset of the film after being caught in the wake of the Indonesian tsunami. In America, George Lonegan is trying to lead a normal life after leaving behind a career contacting spirits of lost loved ones for mourners looking for a chance to say goodbye.
Complementing the older characters, in Britain we meet the 12-year-old twins Jason and Marcus, a couple of boys forced to grow up too quickly while trying to care for their drug-addicted mother.
If it isn’t obvious already, “Hereafter” is faced with an uphill battle of trying to simultaneously create three equally intriguing stories with a fraction of the time one would expect necessary to realize the potential of the characters therein. What results is a back-and-forth of deliberately slow pacing running contrarian against a constantly forward-moving story, trying to stabilize the three-country balancing act that ensues.
One of the difficulties of an effort such as this is an innate inability to remain neutral and equal in care to all stories. At first you find yourself trying to care equally, but quickly you’ll begin rooting for one story over the other two. Marie’s story, while the most “epic” in its introduction, is the most uninteresting of the three, though Cecile De France does her absolute most to make Marie work. The Marcus/Jason storylines don’t drag on like Marie’s, and they are helped along by real life brothers Frankie and George McLaren’s powerfully consistent performances. Nonetheless, their story often devolves into the melodrama inherent in a tale centered on children, drugs and death. Of the three, Matt Damon’s George Lonegan is the most compelling, and ends up as the driving force behind the film’s final act, though even this part has a scene or two in the middle that slow the movie’s pace.
Where the film fails in pacing, slogging through at times when it should be barreling onward, it succeeds at those points where its stories simply click into place; when a “round” of scenes manages to carry a compounding theme so well that you’ll find yourself quite suddenly invested after a long stretch of not caring at all. It’s odd when it happens, since the film noticeably struggles at points with what to do with the characters it has worked so hard to create, and you get the feeling it is perhaps just luck that it clicks when it does. Not to belittle the achievement, when “Hereafter” works and its complicated combination of character, story and theme combine in the way you feel they were meant to all along, the film stands to claim some of the most oddly affecting scenes of any you’ll see this year. It’s dark, it’s depressing and it’s tough at times to get through the slower parts, but at points it achieves, for lack of a better term, a cinematic nirvana; you’ll only wish it worked more often.
To draw a parallel with T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” the 1925 poem on love and life in the midst of death and the afterlife, Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter” certainly begins with quite the bang but doesn’t end with a whimper so much as a quiet sense of well-deserved resolve, and along the way manages to create one of the more unique films in style, structure and substance to have emerged in quite some time.
Contact the critic at vburnton@asu.edu
