Clint Eastwood's 'Hereafter'

We imagine death as another place— another realm, be it Hades, Heaven, Hell, Valhalla. Just as Nature is said to abhor a vacuum, so does the human imagination. When imagination is balked, or when we're moving from one realm it has conjured to another, we sometimes reject the idea of postmortem survival as fantasy.

Of course that's what it is, but whether this is because there is actually something on the other side of death or nothing at all is beside the point. We don't know the truth about death until we get there, and if there is, simply, no truth at all, then there is no one to experience the fact. If death is the absence of truth, then it's the purest paradox. Therefore, we go on populating it.

The older one gets, the more intimate death becomes. Clint Eastwood is 80, and he's not the Blondie of his spaghetti Westerns or the Dirty Harry of his early middle age. That Clint dispatched his villains— "punks" all— without a thought about where they might be going.

Lately, he's shown a softer side, and in Hereafter he takes the beyond for his subject. Rest assured, he's not getting religion, and there's nary a priest in sight. But death is, like almost everything else in our modern world, an object of commercial speculation. Like his poncho-clad gunslingers of yore, biting down on a dollar to see if it's genuine, Clint wants to know if there's anything in the product before he buys it.

Swept away

The first several minutes of Hereafter are as visually spectacular as anything seen on the screen in recent years. A tsunami hits the Asian resort where the French TV personality Marie Lelay (Cecile de France) is vacationing with her lover. We see Marie rising in her bedroom for a morning of shopping, long shots of the beach with tourists at play, the sea's sudden sharp intake of water— no one panics at first— and then the tiny, fleeing figures as the giant wave rears up.

The obliterating force of the water— seen at first in a long shot, then as a surge on top of the viewer as it bursts into crowded streets— is a terrific onslaught, Mother Nature at her unpredictably deadliest. (The tsunami that just struck Indonesia again was similarly sudden, thanks to a failure of the warning system.)

Marie is swept away, then struck by a car chassis swept up in the torrent as she clings to a branch. The blow looks fatal, and as Marie sinks back underwater, clearly unconscious, it seems we've seen the last of her.

Marie is rescued, though— we don't see how— and, vomiting up seawater, she's miraculously uninjured. She has died, though, and seen a vision beyond the grave, of shadowy figures in a penumbral light. It seems almost of a piece with the watery tumult on which it's projected, and we believe it too, because we've seen it with her.

Marie tries to resume her former life, but she's haunted by the vision and sets about to track it down in the murky world of paranormal psychology. A Swiss psychologist (Marthe Keller) offers her clinical "proof" that her vision is a shared one, but of what sort we aren't told. It's only suggested that there is a conspiracy to keep the lid on the good doctor's findings. Why that should be we're not told either.

Man with psychic gifts

Marie's story is intercut with two others. George Lonegan (Matt Damon) is a man whose psychic gifts have ruined his life; he's able to communicate with the dead, but finds much less success with the living. When Melanie (Bryce Dallas Howard), an attractive girl who approaches him at a cooking class they've both enrolled in, asks for help in communicating with the father she's just lost, he reluctantly consents, only to bring back Pa's apologies from beyond for having abused her as a child. We begin to see that some of George's problems may stem from an underdeveloped sense of discretion, for of course Melanie, mortified by the disclosure of a terrible secret, flees from him at once.

The third story involves 12-year-old Marcus (George McLaren), who seeks contact with the twin brother he's lost to street violence and who winds up in foster care. Marcus wears his brother's cap religiously, and when he loses it in the London Underground he misses a train that, seconds later, is blown up in a terrorist attack. Later it's suggested that brother Jason may have saved his life by deliberately knocking the cap off, which would add foreknowledge and agency to the powers of the dead. Like much else in Hereafter, though, the claim is never asserted straightforwardly.

Mellow but mischievous Clint

These three plot lines develop independently and at much leisure before finally intersecting at a London book fair when the three protagonists meet and sort out each other's lives. You pull for an unhappy ending of the sort Eastwood has reliably provided of late, but this is Clint in a mellow if still slightly mischievous mood.

The result is a film that seems at first to offer a different take on the generally cutesy genre of the beyond— think Staircase to Heaven, Heaven Can Wait, or meddling Clarence, the would-be angel of It's a Wonderful Life— but turns in the end to feel-good comedy. It isn't, though, that we expect some real revelation about the hereafter; it's rather that the three damaged principals deserve to have their complexity respected.

Marie Lelay is a successful career woman overwhelmed by a trauma that forces her to confront the emptiness in her life; George Lonegan is an ordinary man with a gift whose mystery he can't fathom; Marcus is a lonely child who's lost the one anchor in his life. None of these hurts can be assuaged by a script that wants to leave no loose ends, and thinks that the riddle of death can just be solved by more life.

Land of the bland

As to that riddle, Eastwood has declared himself personally an agnostic, and his screenwriter, Paul Morgan, has remarked about entering the "realm of the absurd" in making the movie, though marketing appears to have been more on his mind than theology. Yet, although the film contains its acidic touches, as in the scene with a phony medium who preys on the credulity of her audience, we're clearly meant to take George's gifts as not only genuine but inerrant.

This is far too pat, and far too bland. I'd prefer the ghost of Melanie's father to be unrepentant rather than guilt-stricken, and Jason to be as miserable without Marcus as Marcus is without him.

The idea that death solves anything is insulting. That, and a horror of the idea of an orchestra of harps, is my chief objection to Heaven.

All this is a pity, because Hereafter is craftsmanlike throughout, and in many ways wry and sophisticated. A film that can deftly satirize American business, British social work and French media politics with throwaway panache has much going for it. But Billy Wilder should have script-doctored the end. Whatever death is, it's not a dating service.