Life After Death: Eastwood Style
This week, Clint Eastwood proves once again that "age ain't nothing but a number", as the 80-year-old filmmaker mounts his nearly annual Oscar-contender film, the Peter Morgan-scripted Hereafter, starring Matt Damon and an international cast of rising British and French film and stage stars. And along with his last major performance to date in 2008's Gran Torino, this film marks what some might think, given its subject matter, as a sort of coda to his career, by dealing with an issue not far from the minds of most people in his age group -- what happens to us after our lives in this dimension are finished.
Not unlike Mark Romanek's recent Never Let Me Go (reviewed here) Eastwood's low-key, unobtrusive directorial style in this movie is almost anti-auteurist, dedicated solely to showcasing the actors and their stories. Peter Morgan's distinctly European screenplay is clearly the voice of this movie (he wrote the film following the death of one of his closest friends). Morgan has heretofore been acclaimed in both film and the Broadway and London stage for writing two-person power struggles between authority figures (Frost/Nixon and the fictionalized battle between Tony Blair and The Queen.) While a moody, ethereal piece like this one might seem quite a departure from his usual brand, in actuality it fits in quite nicely -- as the question of what (if anything) awaits us after death, and what ability we have to control it vis-a-vis God or fate, is the ultimate power struggle of all.
The movie opens with a successful French TV anchorwoman, Marie (Cecile de France, in a nuanced, standout performance) on a winter vacation with her news producer lover in Indonesia. She decides to go shopping on a stroll through the local street bazaars on what looks to be a lovely day. But her boyfriend sees differently, when he watches from the relative safety of his high-rise hotel a (rather obviously partly CGI'd, but still terrifying) demonic ocean sucking itself up in preparation for the horrendous December 2004 tsunami wave, which is the death of Marie -- nearly.
Marie experiences the first hints of a life after death (going "into the light" with other strangers) and is completely altered by this experience -- like her boyfriend, as a well-educated woman in largely secular, postmodern France, she believed death to be permanent blackout beforehand. Marie embarks on a journalistically spiritual journey (not unlike Peter Morgan's own), writing a book based on "scientific" findings of life after death, including that of a motherly Swiss hospice doctor, a kind of blond and glamorous version of the US's late Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.
From there, we go to San Francisco, and meet our central character, George (an excellent Matt Damon), who is just a regular blue-collar schmo. Or not. George is actually sort of an anti-Mentalist -- a for-real psychic who had made a living giving readings (aided and abetted by his eager businessman brother, played by Jay Mohr with ace comic depth), until he got tired of being bled to death by the incessant neediness of his desperate clientele. A powerful scene with Bryce Dallas Howard as a potential girlfriend illustrates why George views his gift (which the film goes out of its way to illustrate is genuine) as a curse, and is perhaps the biggest emotional gut-punch in the movie.
The last of the movie's rotating triumvirate of stories focuses on a young British boy named Marcus (Frankie and George McLaren, both top-drawer), who adores his outgoing fraternal-twin brother Jason, and their single mother, a good-hearted but drug-and-alcohol-addled "slag" who is about one second away from being declared unfit by Child Services. Knowing this, mom has finally made the decision to go on methadone and alcohol-withdrawal patches. She sends Jason to the pharmacy to pick them up, but the youngster is sadistically bullied by some street punks, eager to get their hands on the methadone, and runs into the street to get away from them -- right into the path of an eight-wheeler "lorry". (It's no spoiler to reveal this -- the scene so clearly prefigures what's going to happen with him, the considerable suspense comes from waiting for when, not if, Jason will meet his end.) Quiet, shy Marcus is completely devastated by his outgoing "older" twin's death, as he is taken into foster care, and is desperate to find some way -- any way -- to reconnect.
At one point, while convincing her skeptical French publisher and TV network executives to greenlight her story on life after death (they had been expecting a conventional political biography), Marie growls that this material "is very political!" Though it would be hard to find a more iconically American director than Clint Eastwood (someone whom not even Ann or Rush would confuse with a typical "Hollywood liberal"), he totally embraces Morgan's distinctly European, noncommittal vision of our final visions. In some ways, this very spiritual movie is a sort of "My Blue State Heaven." The thriving fundy-gelical culture of America and Canada has no place is this film, aside from a couple of YouTube sorties where an eye-rolling young Marcus sees a hellfire-and-brimstone minister from America (preceded by a chanting Muslim imam), while cruising the infinite possibilities of the 'net to see what might lie ahead in actual infinity. Even words like "God" and "Christ" are seldom heard.
Indeed, the only parts of the story even set in America are in it's two most iconically liberal and diverse cities -- San Francisco and New York -- something that the Palin Power set will no doubt sadly interpret as a coded Hollywood attack on their values. (There is another revealing bit of dialog at the publisher's office, where the "elite" European head editor decides that any book seriously arguing for a literal afterlife would "have to be written in English for the American market.") This probably won't (and shouldn't) deter most audiences in New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, or anywhere else among literate viewers seeking a thought-provoking meditation on life's meaning. But in our polarized times, the film cannot help but be seen as a backslap to America's often reductive, by-the-numbers conception of heaven (or that scary other "H" -- which is never really mentioned.)
As Eastwood and Morgan's touching and memorable film partially illustrates, what each of us come to (or just want to) believe as to life after death, while not nearly so obvious as race or gender or sexual preference, cuts as deeply as any of those more identity-politic labels do. It is the glass that refracts how we view the very meaning of our lives and those nearest and dearest to us. It will also decide whether you view this deliberately and literately ambiguous film as a provocative work of art, or as a slightly pointless or even offensive shoulder-shrug.
In this critic's opinion, while this movie poses no threat to the equally buzzed The Social Network as my vote for "Best Picture" so far this year, Hereafter's signal achievement is walking this razor's edge with as objective an approach as perhaps possible. "Death is a mystery we will all get to solve," as the great pop-critic Ric Meyers wrote in his 1989 book Murder on the Air, and while there are many people who profess that they are "certain" what will -- or won't -- happen to them (or to us), the fascination of eternity, or the lack of our ability to conceive it, is that it is largely beyond the ken of our three-dimensional, land-locked selves, except in bits and starts. Hereafter shows its very inscrutability as something that both adds to the richness of our lives here and is nothing to be afraid of afterwards. And when Marie said that this material is political -- indeed, in some ways, nothing could be more political -- she was not kidding.