"Hereafter"

By Matt Duncan
Coastal View News

Somewhere between the here and now, and the great beyond—between life and death—lies the hereafter. This ethereal realm is a maze of backlit, monochromatic shapes. Much like the world it seeks to capture, Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter” is neither here nor there. It is neither memorable nor forgettable, neither compelling nor dull, neither good nor bad. In this movie, Eastwood shows his talent, but also shows that the talented sometimes strikeout.

“Hereafter” follows the story of three individuals in the grip of facts and forces beyond the realm of the physical world. George Lonegan (Matt Damon) is a psychic in denial; he sees his ability to communicate with the dead as a curse rather than a gift. Without intending to do so, George jumps into the misty world of the dearly departed just by making physical contact with any other person. Needless to say, George does not experience the touch of another in anything like the same way that a normal person does. Instead of feeling a human connection, George feels a superhuman connection; instead of warmth, he feels only the cold of death.

Marcus (Frankie and George McLaren) has the opposite problem. Marcus is a small boy who loses someone who is very dear to him, and so is all too familiar with the struggles of the present world. Whereas George wants only to be bereft of the dead, Marcus wants nothing more than to be reunited with the lost. Thus, while George runs from the hereafter, Marcus seeks after it.

Marie Lelay (Ceclie de France) is somewhere in the middle. After having an after-death experience, Marie begins to doubt the firm grounding that was once the wellspring of her success. On the one hand, Marie wants to pretend that her mystical experience was reducible to extreme stress and trauma. On the other hand, Marie cannot deny the deeper reality of what she saw. As a result, Marie meets both internal and external conflict; she struggles to make sense of her experience while also learning more about life after death.

In the end, the stories and needs of each of the characters collide. George, Marcus, and Marie find that they can meet each others’ needs in ways that their friends and loved ones cannot. They each have very different needs and very different abilities, but together they are able to make cohesive sense of some of the bigger questions.
“Hereafter” is sometimes very compelling and interesting, but at other times it is painfully cliché. That is to say, this movie is very uneven. At times, director Clint Eastwood puts his genuine talent on display with carefully crafted scenes that are absolutely stirring. Other scenes that have tremendous potential are ruined by trite dialogue or unnecessarily cheesy talk of the supernatural. Still other scenes are too excruciatingly cliché to even get off of the ground. The end result is a movie that is paradoxically both memorable and forgettable.

Thematically, Eastwood is out of his depth. Certain concepts that are at very least interesting are treated with kid gloves and some genuinely deep questions are answered with mind-numbing shallowness. For instance, when Marie asks her boyfriend if he believes in an afterlife, he responds by saying that he does not believe in an afterlife because he figures that, if there were an afterlife, someone would have discovered it already.

Now, I know that the intellectual depth of a movie’s characters is not tied to or constrained by the brains of the writer or director. But really, in a movie that attempts to take the afterlife seriously, that is the answer?

In all, “Hereafter” is a squandered idea.