In terrific Hereafter, Clint Eastwood explores life after death

After decades of cinematically blasting people into eternity, the eternally curious Clint Eastwood has now decided to investigate what happens in that “undiscovered country” of death, as Hamlet had it. As many commentators have noted, Eastwood wouldn’t seem to be the ideal director for a film about life-after-death; his work as both actor and director is about as concrete and clear-minded as it gets. Writer Peter Morgan seems an unlikely choice for this project as well. His previous films, such as The Queen and The Damned United, are powerfully of the here-and-now.

But the collaboration works beautifully in the movie Hereafter, with the writer and the director’s ability to ground their subjects and make them seem real (which Morgan even managed to accomplish, with Helen Mirren’s considerable help, with Queen Elizabeth, who, come to think of it, lives in a kind of heaven herself), artfully knitting the potentially hokey material together with the very real fabric of our anxious lives.

And—they have Matt Damon on their team. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that Damon can do anything, which includes playing the saddest man in the world, as he does here.

Damon’s character, George, is the focus of one of the film’s three storylines. He’s an unlucky psychic, one who is “cursed” with the ability to see and communicate with the dead. In his eyes, his power has ruined his ability to have anything approaching a normal life.

In another storyline, the wonderful, and wonderfully named, Cécile de France plays Marie, a French journalist who is caught in the tsunami of 2004 (spectacularly filmed in the great set piece of Eastwood’s directorial career), dies, and then comes back to life. But not before she has a vague, poorly lit vision of the afterlife. Marie has been a thoroughly rational French atheist all her life, but she’s changed by what she saw when her lights went, and she can’t go back to grilling CEOs on French television.

Marcus (Jay Mohr), the third leading character, is a heartbreaking young Londoner who loses his beloved twin brother under tragic circumstances, and who spends the bulk of his screen time talking to hucksters who claim to be able to speak to the dead, hoping on some level that he’ll be able to persuade his lost sibling to come back home.

This film isn’t perfect. None of the characters is in a particularly original predicament, and the way Eastwood and Morgan bring them all together in the end feels both forced and anti-climatic. We learn little about the afterlife, except that everyone there is weightless, which maybe means I can drop this depressing diet I’m on now. All we really learn about life-after-death is that it exists, and that anyone—priest, imam, or psychic—who claims to have the inside dope on what happens there is a con artist. Finally, the story ends with more of a whimper than a wow.

Still it’s a terrific film, one of the best I’ve seen this year. That’s because Eastwood is able to maintain an absorbingly tranquil, almost hypnotic tone throughout. I’d never taken the old ass-kicker for a contemplative before, but here he seems to be more interested in pondering the human condition than in telling a dramatic story. Some reviewers have responded by calling the film boring.

For me it’s more a highly affecting tone poem, obviously made by a man who has entered his twilight with his powers intact and his curiosity piqued.