Leave it to Clint Eastwood to ham up the insanely complex topic of what happens to us after we die. After grappling with human loss in such unabashedly sentimental schlock as “Million Dollar Baby” and “Changeling,” Eastwood’s finally reached his nadir with “Hereafter,” a withfilm that attempts to convey the different ways in which we collectively deal with the possibility of an afterlife. “Hereafter” seems curiously empty, devoid of any greater message about the human experience at all.
Eastwood’s intention here seems not to answer the question of where we go after we die, but to convey that death holds a different meaning for each of us. If anything, Clint Eastwood’s earlier heroes, particularly in his Westerns, viewed death with a sort of unflinching strength. Here, though, we instead focus on three people who don’t exactly know how to deal with this spiritual reality. After drowning in the Indian Ocean tsunami and miraculously being resuscitated, Marie (Cécile de France), a French telejournalist vacationing in Thailand, is haunted by intermittent visions of this realm beyond. George (Matt Damon), on the other hand, is a San Francisco-based psychic handicapped by his ability to communicate with the dead. Finally, there’s Marcus, a 12-year-old London-bred boy who’s struggling to justify his twin brother’s death in a freak accident.
These stories, of course, are told with the same non-linear, interwoven cross-cultural structure employed by Alejandro González Iñárritu in most of his films (“Babel,” “21 Grams”), albeit with so little success that Eastwood’s attempt comes off as downright facile and childish. He presents the afterlife as something out of a Lifetime movie – heaven is, in his mind, a bunch of blurry silhouettes crowded into a room of bright, indiscernible light. There’s no real sense of interconnectedness between these people’s lives, either; we spend so much time away from each individual that we don’t feel a thing for any of these characters, regardless of the obvious tragedy of their day-to-day lives.
The actors can’t save this prosaic script, but, then again, who can? Cécile de France has the kind of airy, plaintive presence on the screen that in itself gives the film a feeling of mediation, yet her performance is hardly as complex as it needs to be. We don’t believe for a second that this is a woman who’s experienced a realm beyond human understanding, unable to make sense of this conspicuously materialized world.
Had he been given more complex source material, Matt Damon could’ve penetrated right down to this character’s soul, but he’s instead reduced to an angst-ridden fulfillment of the “angry young man” stereotype. Most excruciating, though, is Bryce Dallas Howard, who, from the moment she klutzes onto the screen in a brief supporting role, provides the sort of unintentional comic relief that merely underlines the film’s self-importance.
If there has been one auteur that has come to stand for a distinctively American way of filmmaking, it’s Clint Eastwood. Yet there seems to be a general unspoken notion among cine-philes that all of his work should be glorified, regardless of the fact that he’s succumbed to easy pathos as of late, skimming metaphysical themes with a surprising lack of subtlety. “Hereafter” is, perhaps, the most ill-conceived of his efforts. Sad reality, Dirty Harry – some topics are bigger than their directors.