The new Clint Eastwood film "Hereafter" is distinctly an Eastwood film for many reasons. Though it is ultimately not among his best, it is his distinctive touch that prevents the film from falling victim to the artificiality that plagues most afterlife-related films.
"Hereafter" stars Matt Damon as George Lonegan, a psychic who can communicate with the dead by touching those who have lost someone close to them. The film features two other characters, a French TV journalist, Marie (Cecile De France), and a London schoolboy named Marcus, both of whom have both recently been affected by death. Marie died in a tsunami in Thailand and was brought back to life with CPR and Marcus lost his twin brother in a car accident.
When Marie and Marcus start looking for answers—Marcus in order to get back in touch with his brother and Marie to find out what it was that she experienced when she died momentarily—they begin to dabble in the understudied and discredited field of post-modern communication.
Damon turns in a great performance as a jaded and lonely psychic who has been unable to have any contact with people (literally, since he unavoidably sees their dead friends or family members when he touches them). He looks constantly tired and perennially wary of human interaction.
In fact, the majority of the acting in the film is totally satisfactory, and Eastwood's directing is well done too. In the opening scenes of the film—the suspenseful scenes during which we know someone is going to die eventually—he teases us with apparent deaths that do not occur then, only to then surprise us with a disastrous death when we least expect it.
Additionally, many of the scenes in the film are characterized by long intervals and pauses that have been lost in cinema during the age of Christopher Nolan assaults on audiences' senses. The space that Eastwood's direction creates affords us time to reflect on the film while in the midst of it. It also recalls the expanses of silence and still shots that populate the westerns of Eastwood's past.
Where Eastwood also succeeds is in his handling of the multiple-storyline plot, a convention that has been mishandled so often that it elicits a cringe from most audiences as soon as it is introduced. Often, filmmakers try to keep the different story lines totally independent under the assumption that, if they succeed, the ultimate fusion of the story lines will be surprising and monumental. It almost never is.
In this instance, the characters' individual lives stay separate for most of the film, but because we are able to see early on how the pieces should and will fit together, we are invested in the process and therefore engaged in the film.
Cinematographically, "Hereafter" is an effective endeavor as well. Somber, subdued tones of death and suffering contrast with the saturated and vibrant colors of vitality and existence. The afterlife itself is not portrayed so much as suggested; when Lonegan makes a connection with someone, the camera soars through a white space populated by shadowy figures, at once depicting a vision of where souls go after death while at the same time leaving it open to imagination.
Eastwood makes perhaps the most weighty subject imaginable seem ethereal, ghostly and worthy of our meditation. He does this by balancing his more crushing scenes with small quirks in the film that are beautiful, inventive or humorous.
For example, Greg goes to sleep each night listening to the books on tape of Derek Jacobi, partly because it takes his mind off his gift/curse, but also in order to set up a later scene in which Greg meets the actor at a London book fair.
Also, when Marcus searches for a mystic who will enable him to communicate with his brother, he comes across several hilarious quacks who contrast brilliantly with the downcast and modest character of the genuinely gifted Greg.
Where "Hereafter" falls short is in its writing; the screenplay does not fulfill the potential of this cast and it is obvious in certain scenes. With Eastwood's expansive directing style, every line counts; when those lines don't deliver, the scenes become cheesy and superficial, no matter how good the acting is.
Despite this, "Hereafter" successfully handles subject matter that is generally bungled, and the result is a hauntingly moving and surprisingly thought-provoking film.