Just as Woody Allen keeps depressingly reiterating his desire to leave behind a legacy of quantity over quality, America’s other favorite Great Director, Clint Eastwood, now also seems intent on putting out as many movies as he possibly can before he heads for the hereafter. The strategy paid off in spades around the first half of the last decade when, after over five years of misfires like “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” and “Blood Work,” the filmmaker reasserted his formalist and dramatic chops, first with the operatic police saga “Mystic River” in 2003, and then in a powerhouse return to the screen a year later, with his Best Picture winner “Million Dollar Baby.” For a minute there, it looked like Eastwood had returned to the glory days of his mid-’90s artistic high, seemingly recreating the muscular/melancholy diptych of his “A Perfect World” and “The Bridges of Madison County.”
Eastwood would manage to leverage his triumphant return into another career-defining work (if not maybe one of his best), the ‘Iwo Jima’ twosome “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letter from Iwo Jima,” then spend the next few years, like Allen, pumping out a string of duds, including last year’s ham-fisted Obama allegory “Invictus” and the hysterical cluster-fuck that is “Changeling.” The most frustrating thing about both these films is that, unlike the ‘Iwo Jima’ block, you can’t really blame their flaws on Clint’s screenwriters exclusively—”Invictus” climaxes in one long sports cliche that grossly undercuts its attempted emphasis on communal catharsis, and “Changeling” is a wretched cocktail of tonal fissures and narrative digressions, moral inconsistencies and truckloads of didactic tedium. One should be excused for having severely lowered expectations at the news that Eastwood’s next picture would be a Peter Morgan-scripted supernatural romance mosaic, with plot descriptions summing up some ungodly fusion of “Phenomenon” and “Crash.”
But here’s the thing about both Eastwood and Allen: for all the maddeningly dumb techniques in their arsenal, there are certain motifs and recurring themes that endear them to us, and there’s an appeal to that which not even volumes on auteur theory could entirely elucidate. “Hereafter” drops the dense plotting of “Changeling” and the sandwich-board politics of “Invictus” to expose the resonant, character-to-character dynamics that have been the hallmark of Eastwood’s best films over the last decade-plus. The director hasn’t been this tender and non-confrontational since “The Bridges of Madison County,” and while some will find this script’s relative uneventfulness (the main action takes place in the first reel) to be “Hereafter’s” greatest failing, there are few filmmakers that do somber reflection and melancholy quite like Clint. The film is sentimental to a fault and, as is almost always the case, Eastwood is working with severely sub-par material, but he invests it with such world-weary humanism that it cuts deeper than it really has any right to.
“Hereafter” is essentially a treatise on accepting death, dealing with three parallel stories of grieving and eventual catharsis. Matt Damon has gotten the lion’s share of attention, but his thread, about a San Francisco psychic who forsakes his lucrative gift when he realizes it’s ruining his life, shares equal screen time with the other two. The least successful of these is built around French TV journalist Marie (Cécile de France), who survives a near-death experience during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, while on vacation with her producer boyfriend (Thierry Neuvic), and becomes obsessed with leveraging her celebrity into a book deal, hoping to meet others who may have seen the same divine images as herself. This thread is more remote and privileged than the other two, and de France is so wooden that the emotional momentum Eastwood hopes to gather in her narrative never quite materializes. More successful is the third story panel, which finds eight year-old Marcus mourning the untimely passing of his brother, Jason (real-life identicals Frankie and George McLaren, respectively), and searching for a medium who can open a line of contact between the siblings. Unsurprisingly, these three threads eventually converge in a series of transcendental encounters that say about as much about the human condition as the communal pity party at the end of “Crash.” But it’s what Eastwood does to get there that stays with you.
Offsetting its supernatural hokum—recurring graphics that look like something out of TV’s “Medium,” if not “Casper the Friendly Ghost”—Eastwood’s greatest conceptual bid posits that the “hereafter” of his film’s title refers to a purgatory state the grieving wait in until they’re ready to pass on into the next stage of life. Think of “Hereafter” as a miniature take on the last season of “Lost” that never explicitly spells out that series’s symbolic conclusion. It’s a technique that only gradually reveals itself as the film goes on, through Eastwood’s use of visual motifs (all three principals are, at least at one point, shot against a looming sky), and through the nuances and shades of melancholy the filmmaker evinces. Damon seems perfectly in sync with this, turning in his most somber and reserved performance while mostly sidestepping histrionics. It’s the second time he’s elevated an Eastwood movie, after more or less nailing his role in “Invictus.” This isn’t really awards-caliber acting, but it’s the kind of performance that lends itself to the tonal strengths of Eastwood’s aesthetic. Also memorable is Bryce Dallas Howard, as the Damon character’s brief love interest, who doesn’t have a particularly large part but does get the film’s most emotional scene.
It’s great to see Eastwood getting back to a more intimate mode, and it’s refreshing to see a film with spiritual inclinations largely avoid the topic of religion, but even the most staunch Eastwood defender won’t deny “Hereafter” is severely compromised. It’s failed by a frequently inept screenplay, especially in its final act, and by plainly generic dialogue (not once but twice does Damon’s character espouse the angst-ridden cliche, “It’s not a gift, it’s a curse!”). Not even with a reliably strong score and evocative use of shadow and contrast can the director consistently make his roundelay narrative as engaging as it needs to be. But the good news is it may be too early to put Eastwood’s trajectory of decline into the same class as Woody Allen’s. While the latter has alternated between the same two templates for the better part of two decades, Eastwood continues to actively pursue diverse material, bringing at least a distinctive directorial identity to everything he involves himself with. There’s been a few good ones and, recently, quite a lot of bad ones, and if “Hereafter” isn’t quite applicable to the former category, it also doesn’t deserve to be grouped with the dregs of Clint’s filmography. Instead, it lies somewhere in between. Which would seem appropriate. [C+] Sam C. Mac via In Review Online