Clint Eastwood’s latest movie, Hereafter, is an improbable success, though it may not be a commercial smash (art rarely is). Complicated, leisurely, old-fashioned, futuristic, romantic and thrilling, it’s about the intersection of life and death, played against lovingly treated backdrops of Paris, London and San Francisco. It’s a film of finely grounded detail that deals with the largest of issues.
Matt Damon plays George Lonegan, a medium who lays on hands to connect someone to a sorely missed departed. Cecile De France plays Marie LeLay, a celebrity news reporter on French TV. Brothers Frankie and George McLaren play Jason and Marcus, winsome London brothers.
George wants out of the psychic business because, since death is his only available connection, he feels he can’t fully live. Marie grazes death in the June 2004 tsunami in which 200,000 died in Indonesia. Marcus loses Jason in a car accident following a brutal assault by a gang of young thugs.
How the three come together is the plot of a dignified, provocative movie that, like Eastwood’s The Unforgiven, Letters From Iwo Jima and Mystic River, uses silence and space to convey gravitas. The acting is understated, particularly Damon’s, whose tense, thick performance is as muted as the palette of his clothing. De France, by contrast, is sensual, skinny, stylish and riveting; the opening sequence, a computer-assisted recreation of the tsunami, sets her into high relief as a half-dead survivor who wants – no, has – to figure out the meaning of life. Marie’s quest is the unifying thread, leading her from celebrity to pariah to would-be political biographer to, finally, an authority on near-death experience.
Peter Morgan’s script fills this two-hour-plus movie without fattening it, creating effective back stories for the main protagonists. George is working on the San Francisco docks and simply wants a normal life, but because of a childhood illness that reconfigured his chemistry, he’s cursed with a kind of second hindsight, a “talent” his brother Billy (Jay Mohr, his hair particularly pitch-perfect) wants to commercialize. Each time George holds hands with someone, he can’t help connect to a solarized vision of the person his handmate misses most, rendering impossible any other form of relationship. Marie wants to make her mark as a celebrity journalist, but the tsunami forces her to go deeper, to examine what really matters to her. And Marcus, whose addicted mother leaves him so she can be rehabilitated, becomes a ward of the state and misses his brother so badly, he gloms onto George when he Googles an old psychic site.
Ratcheting up the tension: a subway bombing in London in July 2005, Eastwood’s way of grounding the film in real time. Also escalating the thrill: George’s affection for Dickens, which leads him to the London Book Fair for a reading by the great actor Derek Jacobi – and the encounters that cap this fascinating, satisfyingly literate movie. The sophisticated, romantic ending is a perfect coda to a film directed by an extraordinarily versatile 80-year-old. Eastwood also composed the delicate, perfumed music. Hereafter is the work of a man who may be in his twilight years, but is without a doubt a man at the peak of his powers.
Hereafter is now playing at local cinemas.
