REVIEW: Hereafter

LIVING WITH THE DEAD

Clint Eastwood is going mushy on us in his 80th year. Not necessarily in a bad way. But Hereafter, scripted by Peter Morgan, the writer of The Queen, isn't exactly his most accomplished work. Even though it's as visually controlled and brimming with humanity as almost all of his films. Unfortunately, there's a slight disconnect between the director's intent and the lumbering, morose meditation on afterlife that rumbles on screen for over two hours. 

No wonder Matt Damon looks so sombre. He can barely manage a smile and spends much of his time carrying a heavy burden on his stiff shoulders. Like Haley Joel Osment, he too can see dead people. They come to him in flashes, against a pristine white backdrop each time he 'connects' with a grieving person seeking contact with a loved one. "A life that's all about death is no life at all," he tells his brother who believes he should capitalise on his 'gift' (or 'curse' as Damon's George appropriately describes it) both to get rich and to provide solace to others. George doesn't appreciate this idea one bit, and prefers to listen to audio tapes of Charles Dickens' stories to lull himself to sleep and joins an Italian cooking class in an attempt to get himself a life.

But before that, in another part of the world, Marie, a famous French broadcaster (Cecil de France) is holidaying with her boyfriend at a beach resort, looking out at the calm, soothing ocean and innocuously walking through the local bazaar scouring for knick-knacks, when a Tsunami strikes, devastating the town and taking Marie in its sweep.

This grand opening sequence has to be the most accomplished piece of visual artistry ever seen in an Eastwood film. We aren't talking standard-issue disaster movie spectacle here. It's intimate -- the entire sequence is shot from Marie's POV -- and hence, chilling. Nothing gimmicky or ostentatious, just a horrifying CGI-assisted cataclysm.

Marie survives, but returns to Paris shaken to the bone.

Ditto for little Marcus (George McLaren and Jason Frankie McLaren) a little English lad living in London with his junkie mother and twin brother Jason. One day Jason gets knocked down by a truck in an accident, plunging Marcus' life into eternal gloom.

I've always felt, nobody tells sweeping tales of global disquiet through inter-connected strands as well as Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. His narratives are invariably about lives colliding in random ways. Eastwood attempts the same genre, but his coincidences don't quite fall in place as spontaneously as they do in Amores Perros, Babel or Biutiful; nor do the intercuts between the three stories appear seamless. Early in the film you know that these three people living in different cities and afflicted by different kinds of sorrow will eventually meet and change each other's lives in fundamental ways. The manner in which it happens though is entirely contrived. 

In isolation, each story touches a chord. Particularly little Marcus, who is put into foster care after his brother's death. Eastwood's innate compassion is in ample evidence in the way he sketches the character of Marcus' mother. She's not simply an addict, but a troubled woman torn between her love for her little boys and the life of hardship she hopes to escape through a drug/alcohol-fuelled daze. In George's story, his despair at being unable to forge a single meaningful relationship on account of his 'curse' is touching. People don't mind his being a medium, but its too much to actually consider a normal everyday association with him.

Marie's character is the most interesting of the lot. Her near-death experience makes her unfit for the competitive world of broadcast journalism, a life of complacence and comfort and a relationship that looks superficial from the start. Each of these individuals is isolated and lonely because of accidents that none of them had any control over. They must fight their own individual battles to come to terms with and to face the world of the living, which expects them to operate in set ways. 

Nobody seems to like meditating on death. Almost everybody deludes themselves into believing it only happens to other people. We're all equally clueless and ill-equipped, even as religions around the world romanticise afterlife. Eastwood's approach may be sentimental, but Hereafter raises genuine concern about the meaning and purpose of life and the enormity and inevitability of death.