Hereafter | Director Clint Eastwood | Score: 5.4
Being a real psychic, one can imagine, would indeed be a heavy burden, essentially a conduit for everyone’s pain and fear. People would constantly come to you for answers, the weight of their expectations hanging on you like an iron cloak. This is the precise yoke to which George (Matt Damon) is affixed in director Clint Eastwood’s obtusely paranormal drama. He is a real psychic who can communicate with the dead, whether he wants to or not. Tired and haunted, all he wants is to be left alone and treated like everyone else. He no longer wants to immediately learn the dark secrets and bitter anguish of every person with which he comes into contact.
George, it turns out, used to have a thriving psychic business, but finally turned away from his “gift” in order to regain his own life, to the consternation of his business minded brother (Jay Mohr). Very much alone, George spends an inordinate amount of time staring down forlornly from his window, as ‘normals’ go about the business of their lives down on the street. Meanwhile, in Paris, a glamorous TV journalist, Marie (Cécile De France), having experienced a brief afterlife episode after getting swept up in a massive tsunami on vacation, tries to write a book about the experience, and loses her job and relationship in the process. Across the pond, in England, a young boy (Frankie/George McLaren) loses his twin brother in a car accident and gets shuffled around to a foster home while his junkie mom attempts to get clean. Missing his brother terribly, the boy visits various phony psychics and fakirs in order to communicate with his dead twin.
Naturally, these three disparate narrative threads narrative eventually weave together, but only in the film’s shakiest final half hour. So much time is spent on the characters beforehand as individuals on their various quests, it’s as if screenwriter Peter Morgan didn’t quite know what to do with the three of them when he finally manages to get their paths to cross. Despite a bravura opening — Eastwood’s staging of the terrifying tsunami is violent, horrific and breathtaking — the rest of the film seems determined to make a different kind of point. The problem is, the conclusion it draws is so obvious and slight — the afterlife is really cool, it turns out, but we still have to make the most of our lives on Earth — it makes you second guess the decent character work that lead up to that point. In Eastwood’s estimation, it’s not the destination, apparently, it’s the journey.
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Piers Marchant is a Philly-based writer and editor, and the EIC (and film critic) for two.one.five magazine (215mag.com). His reviews can be found on 215mag.com and his tumblr blog, Sweet Smell of Success. You can also follow him on twitter @kafkaesque83.
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