MCN Columnists
Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

TIFF Review: Hereafter

After a pretty spectacular opening scene, I was hopeful that Clint Eastwood‘s highly anticipated film, Hereafter, with a script by Peter Morgan, was going to be something special. Then it became evident that the setup is a triptych, which is really hard to weave together into a coherant story without it feeling enormously contrived.

Unfortunately, the conceit of the film just never pays off in a satisfying way.

Our trio of tales kicks off with Marie (Cécile De France), a French television personality on vacation with her boyfriend when she’s caught in a devastating tsunami, nearly dies, and is brought back to life. Marie’s near-death experience has a profound effect on her, and when she returns home she finds she can’t focus on anything but researching and writing about her experience; her obsession with death and the afterlife quickly isolates her from her friends and colleagues and threatens her career.

The second parallel tale concerns George (Matt Damon), a blue-collar warehouse worker who’s hiding out from a gift — an ability to touch a person and connect with their dead family members. After previously making money off his talent at the encouragement of his brother, who seeks to profit from his talent, George has retreated from the world, a lonely, isolated man whose gift has become a curse that keeps him from having relationships with others.

He signs up for a cooking class, desperate for companionship, and there meets a charming woman (Bryce Dallas Howard) with whom he feels he might be able to connect for the first time in his adult life. But when she learns of his gift, it threatens the tentative connection they’re building.

The third of our three stories concerns Marcus (Frankie McLaren) and Jason (George McLaren), twin brothers in England whose mum is addicted to heroin. When tragedy strikes, Jason seeks desperately to find answers about what happens after death, a path that ultimately leads him to George’s old website, which was never taken down.

The thing is, each of these stories on their own — or even George’s story in sync with just one of the others, would probably have made for a much tighter story. Individually as meditations on both the affect on the living when they lose someone they love, and the questions raised when a person is technically dead (or at least, very near death), and then brought back to life, are certainly something many of us ponder when we’re not too busy running around in our lives to pause and consider that every day we run full speed ahead is just bringing us another day closer to the end.

George’s part of the story, in particular, is quite well-written and Damon, as a man gifted with a rare talent that nonetheless serves to isolate him from the world around him, turns in a strong performance. Howard, in the brief time she’s a part of his story, is a powerful and emotional force. De France is also very good, and her journey fairly engaging.

The trouble is that after being fairly interesting for its first 2/3 or so as we catch up with the individual tales, the necessity to bring everything together causes a serious nosedive into the realm of unwieldy contrivance that forces the characters to converge for the inevitable sappy ending. I stayed with it for quite a while … until a moment that smacks you upside the head with exactly where the film is going. Then I hoped against hope that Eastwood and Morgan really weren’t going to be as obvious as all that – surely they weren’t! But they were.

The thing is, I don’t have an issue with Eastwood exploring ideas of what happens after death; as a spiritual person I find those kinds of meditations interesting, and after all, most religion is built around the need for humans to derive some sense of comfort in thinking we have an answer to what happens to us once we depart this life. The need to believe we don’t just cease to exist, like the flame of a candle blown out, is very strong, and with a bit less contrivance this could have been a better meditation on the subject.

Unfortunately, while there are interesting ideas here, and some solid performances in the film, the sum of the parts just never adds up to a deeply satisfying whole. Bummer.

Be Sociable, Share!

One Response to “TIFF Review: Hereafter”

  1. kt says:

    you write good reviews….thanks – easy to read…lol to Matt D – he knows to pass up bad roles, but unless he is in charge of the movie, it wont be as good as it could be…He is movie magic for us females….

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon