Quietly Moving Hereafter a Spiritual Journey
George (Matt Damon) is a psychic living in San Francisco trying to put his gifts behind him and live a normal life away from anything supernatural. Marie LeLay (Cécile De France) is a popular French journalist whose near-death experience has left her shaken and has her questioning her own destabilizing reality. Marcus (George and Frankie McLaren) is a 12-year-old whose twin recently died in a tragic accident on the busy London streets.
Matt Damon in Hereafter © Warner Bros.
These three have nothing in common except for a connection to the afterlife. While one wants to break those ties, the others are eager to explore it more fully, Marie to understand what it was that happened to her and Marcus because he’s having trouble finding reasons to carry on without his brother. Circumstances will conspire to bring them all together, all of them learning things about themselves they never would have discovered otherwise.
Working from a script by Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon), director Clint Eastwood (Invictus, Unforgiven) once again goes in a direction no one ever could have anticipated with the multi-character drama Hereafter. Not so much about the afterlife as it is an examination of three disparate souls touched in distinct and individualistic ways by it, this is a movie that asks a multitude of questions but leaves the majority of the answers up to the audience to figure out for themselves. It is a movie that opens with a bang and goes out with a somber, and for me quite poignant, whimper, the human story at its core one I couldn’t tear my eyes away from.
I loved how intimate, how quiet this movie was. Eastwood’s signature, minimalist score (which, admittedly, sound an awful lot like the ones he’s written for some of his past efforts, especially Million Dollar Baby), almost never intrudes, the director allowing the voices of his cast and the sounds echoing through their environs to speak almost completely for themselves. Everything is staged as to maximize the emotional impact upon the central trio, everything constantly building and evolving as their stories drift in and out of focus heading for conclusions uniquely their own.
Marie’s story worked the best for me. There was something about it that kept drawing me in, kept me curious to see how she would deal with the psychological scars left by her near-death trauma. De France shines in the roll, and even when the movie starts describing her experiences in shorthand she always manages to keep thins grounded and human allowing for her experiences to resonate quite deeply.
Damon is also very good here, but George’s story is frustratingly the one were Eastwood lets some of his baser tendencies oftentimes come into play. While his relationship with a fellow culinary student (wonderfully played by Bryce Dallas Howard) is handled with believable and heartrending delicacy, the one between him and his narcissistic brother Billy (Jay Mohr) is just the opposite. Whenever the film turns to them the jokes are forced and the dramatic center is blunt and way too on-the-nose. It’s a weird seesaw that flip-flops between touching and heavy-handed, and while the character is a good one and Damon does his best, portions of this storyline couldn’t help but drive me bonkers.
Then there is Marcus’ section of the film. I’m not sure what to say about it. Both McLarens try their best to make the character work, but there is something way to ghostly and distant about him for his plight to ever resonate as fully as it should. And yet, at the end, right when this subplot needs to take off and soar, right when it needs to melt your heart and bring tears to your eyes, Eastwood and Morgan simply nail it. The moment Marcus and George finally come together is a borderline remarkable one, and any and all reservations I had suddenly disappeared just as quickly as the tissues I had hidden in my backpack.
I will say the biggest moments are all at the start, Marcus’ discovery of his brother, Marie facing down a massive tsunami, George using his gifts for the first time in years to help a troubled associate of Billy’s, and from that point forward nothing comes close to being as gut-wrenching or as awe inspiring. But I’m perfectly fine with that. There is a quiet grace to Hereafter, a believable melancholia that held me spellbound, and even when sections didn’t work as well as I wanted them to there was something about the simple, humanistic nature of the narrative that kept me eager to see what was going to happen next.
Entering the eight decade of his life and the sixth of an iconic career, Eastwood continues to take risks and go in directions those a fraction of his age would ever even consider let alone attempt. While not without its flaws, Hereafter can be a profound experience, the way it examines the human condition as it relates to death, mortality, love and faith at times deeply affecting. The final scene was one of almost ethereal beauty, and while it left multiple questions hanging in the air the way it allowed me to ponder answers exclusively my own couldn’t help but leave me both moved and undeniably impressed.
Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)
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