'Hereafter' (English)
Director: Clint Eastwood
Cast: Matt Damon, Cécile de France
We’ve all heard the cliché that likens death to a sentence-terminating punctuation mark. Allow me, if you will, to briefly co-opt this analogy, assume a semblance of free will and extrapolate. As we all write the sentence that is our life, do we consciously adopt syntax? Are we aware if what we are crafting must end with a question mark or an exclamation point?
A majority of us of course, will probably end with the mundane, yet eternal favourite — a period.
But in our zest for terminations we forget the effect our deaths have on the lives of those we leave behind. Maybe we must explore the idea of death as a comma or a colon in the sentences that await completion. ‘Hereafter’ is interested in perceiving death this way: As an event that has a ‘during’ and more particularly an ‘after’ rather than a termination. The film opens to a vast expanse of blue reminiscent of Belegaer, which is befitting given the film’s preoccupation with the great beyond. It is even more appropriate that Clint Eastwood, that seemingly timeless master, brings us this minimalist meditation on mortality.
After all, is he not the Elrond of the middle earth that is Hollywood, having seen the fountain of fantasy devolve from its most creatively vibrant patterns to the format films we see today? His latest offering to wash up on our shores is more Altman than average formulaic feature: a character study that delves into the intersecting lives of three people who have all had discomfiting brushes with death.
The intersection, however, is achieved through extremely contrived means and it is far more enchanting to watch the characters grapple with their realities. We are first acquainted with Cecile, a famous French journalist, who miraculously survives a natural catastrophe while on vacation.
It is through her that we first experience the phenomenon the film postulates is the ciaprés. Her portions of the film function as a meta-story for near death and recovery. She gradually loses the life she is familiar with because of her obsession with what she saw in the depths of her unconsciousness. If it is an anonymous sailor whose CPR skills that reach out and pull her back from the depths the first time, it is her editor who throws her a lifeline when it seems like her personal and professional lives have both been irrecoverably lost.
The second and by far most interesting character is George Lonegan, who, it appears, has never fully returned to the realm of the living since a near-fatal childhood illness gave him the ability to see into the netherworld. His gift, or curse as he would prefer to call it, has doomed him to an existence observing the human race at its weakest. We are treated to a recurrent image of George standing by his window, watching people whose life he has touched stumble away into the darkness — some whole again, others completely broken.
Not surprising then that his solace lies in audio books of Dickens, that patron saint of orphans and painful childhoods. Thrice we watch as he struggles to find peace through the bildungsroman that is David Copperfield. Marcus, who completes the triumvirate, may well be a modern day Dickens character himself. Losing your older (and emotionally stronger) twin to a road mishap and your mother to rehabilitation from heroin is first-chapter material if we were looking to contemporize Dickens. He is also the poster child for the first Kubler-Ross stage of loss and how susceptible people in denial are to being parted from their money.
As we watch a series of charlatans trying to exploit the grief of this young child it is impossible not to hark back to the manipulations that mark the other episodes in the film.
Didier, Cecile’s producer and lover, lies disingenuously that her professional stature is unassailable while a ready replacement waits in the wings. George’s brother Billy looks upon him as the proverbial golden-egg laying goose.
Billy Lonegan never misses an opportunity to needle his brother on the revenue that his capabilities can generate, even painting his self-interest with larger philosophical tones. “You can’t run away from who you are.” He shouts after him, as if to suggest that the only way out is further in. With such subtle threads interwoven between the stories it is disappointing that these three characters are brought together through rather simplistic mechanics.
If one is willing to forgive such contrivances ‘Hereafter’ makes for a placid viewing experience. None of the darkness or preponderance one normally associates with death for the octogenarian at the helm of this film. It floats along weightlessly and well lit, much like the visuals of the after death experiences it simulates.
Barring the moments where Lonegan reaches out to Marcus’ twin, a scene that is sure to bring a lump to the throat of even the hardest of hearts, there is no heaviness in this film. And while this may be refreshing, one can’t seem to shake the feeling that we’ve been conned into a low-fat, low-sodium macrobiotic meal instead of an indulgent spread.
The result is a lingering feeling of an experience that has just missed the spot.