Hereafter (2010)

Jean-Luc Godard had the amazing quality of producing gripping masterpieces which no-one understood. You didn’t know what was going on, but you saw it with mesmerizing attention. Clint Eastwood, a great master in his old age, has produced a gripping movie which is actually an utter bore, and that is quite an achievement. If you probe deeper, you see a very sensitive humane story, delicately handled, about three characters, with more than perfect character development, but which seems to go on forever and forever. You think that the character development will finish and the story of the movie will eventually start, until you realize that that development is precisely the story of the movie. It is a weird feeling, and brings back memories of movies of yore, of a sort of neo-realism, where everyday scenes constitute the action of the movie, and depth and emotion is given through the ordinary, where seldom anything happens, and what does is treated just like another piece of life, that eventually passes and you move on. When rumors hit that the next Eastwood film will be the third or fourth remake of “A Star is Born” (one loses count), staring none other than Beyonce, one believes that he can basically do what he wants in his old age, and do it well. “Gran Torino” was a masterpiece, “Invictus” had lesser value, but still it was highly watchable. “Hereafter”, unlike how it’s publicized, is not about death, nor psychics, nor talking to the dead. It’s about three people, and what their lives become after touching death in several ways. And we see their lives, scene after scene after scene. We see Matt Damon, a man who has the gift of talking to the dead, and who once made a fortune out of it, but who now works in construction because he couldn’t cope with it, and who constantly rejects his brother’s appeals to go back to that way of life. We see Cécile De France, a French journalist who had a near-death experience in the Tsunami, and so who now tries to write a book about the “other side”. We see little George (or Frankie) McLaren, a boy with a drug-addicted mother, whose twin brother died run over by a car, and so desperately seeks psychics to help him talk to his brother. Each of these scenarios are presented in turn, in as lengthy fashion as it is humanly possible to bare. Any slower and the movie would stall completely. As it is, it’s barely enough to be extremely captivating, which is a weird paradox. An entire movie could have (and has) been made out of a single segment. Slowly, the three characters converge to the same spot, where the movie will end, in the same tone as the rest of the picture. There are a few exaggerations (what is the point of Bryce Dallas character?, and what’s with that stylized ending?), but the strength of the movie is in its grasp of everyday reality. Death is just a catalyst for life, the life of these characters. If this screenplay is ever novelized, it will make a brilliant book. As a film, however, you really fail to understand why all the little details are shown, if the story, movie-wise, isn’t getting anywhere. It has a flavor of those mosaic movies, such as “Babel”, yet with less movie-cliché-things and more depth. At the end I was screaming for a “Hereafter 2”, because when you feel that you are getting somewhere the movie ends. The plus side is that I know everything about these characters. I feel them and I understand them, and they have touched me. The down side is that I spend two hours seeing them, the characters, and not a movie.