"Hereafter" is willing to sacrifice anything to be considered a serious film. Unfortunately, interesting characters and convincing plot developments seem to be the only sacrificed traits. By the time the movie finishes sermonizing the audience, both characterization and plot have been carted off and shot. What's left is a banal morality tale that plays out like a middle school dance with less grace.
In the film, three people have suffered encounters with death: Marie (Cecile de France), a French journalist, Marcus (played by both Frankie McLauren and George McLauren), a London school boy, and George Lonegan (Matt Damon), an American ex−professional psychic.
The details of their traumas presumably matter — or would, if the characters weren't too boring to care. What's really important is that these people have suffered in topical ways. Through the power of hokey sentimentality, the magic of the Internet and the science of talking to dead people, these people will meet and recover.
Honestly, that isn't a terrible plot, though it certainly presents challenges: Any movie that tries to ambitiously plumb the weighty concept of death and trauma is going to need a powerful cast that can reach poignant emotional depths. In the hands of a great director, its interwoven plot structure could bring the film to new heights of cinematic mastery. After all, this film has Matt Damon co−starring and Clint Eastwood directing. What could possibly go wrong?
Lots, apparently.
"Hereafter" begins with a terrifying depiction of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that occurs before the audience has time to care about the characters. This sequence is subsequently thrown out the window — the film only wanted to appropriate the disaster so it could draw the audience in.
The film then moves us to the more personal trauma of Marie, the pretty Western journalist. The cowardice of this move — bringing us away from a complex situation into a simple, comfortable setting — reflects a self−censoring trend the film pursues until its conclusion.
This tendency extends to George, whose characterization is a textbook case of telling and not showing. For instance, George always rolls up his sleeves before giving a reading. This is all the proof we need that he is the real deal, unlike the other charlatan psychics. If that isn't convincing, one of the other characters tells us directly that George is "the real deal." So there you go, characterization acquired.
We know George is tortured, however, because he says, "It's not a gift, it's a curse," just enough times to make the audience wish for a thesaurus or something to break the monotony of the phrase. There's one more piece of characterization: George loves Charles Dickens — and this is made out to be a sign of his rebellious intellect. "Everyone else loves Shakespeare," he says.
Marcus, on the other hand, receives no character traits at all. After all, he's cute. Audiences like cute kids. He just needs to act shy and determined, and by doing this, his actions reveal the filmmaker's opinions on religion and spirituality. Marie, on the other hand, boldly derides her former bosses at her television station, proclaiming that they are trying to hide the truth about the afterlife.
To be fair to the actors, none of them were given a lot to work with. But Matt Damon is especially disappointing. He plays his character in a restrained way, presumably to give himself depth. The result, however, is a contrived and, for lack of a better word, boring characterization. The plot does not help his cause, for it is clumsily strung together in a way that lacks the skill of such multi−plot films as "Babel" (2006) or "Amores Perros" (2000).
"Hereafter" proclaims everything with moral bombast, wanting us to think it is delivering a great and bold message about life in the 21st century. But none of the characters have anything approaching the level of psychological power needed to back up such a message, or they simply back off whenever they seem to get ready to push themselves. As a result, the film is too pretentious to make a good love story with New Age vibes, and too tame to make a good psychological meditation with romantic overtones.
If anything, "Hereafter" is like listening to existential Livejournal.com poetry read aloud for two hours, except you are expected to keep a straight face the entire time. Perhaps this makes it a good bad movie night candidate, but Eastwood can do better than this. This is cowardly filmmaking.
