Eastwood dealing with death

Be under no allusions. Clint Eastwood's currently filming Hereafter, scripted by Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon, The Queen), will be a fascinating motion picture in the legacy of a rare cinema icon when it comes out in Dec. 2010. Quite possibly more than any other picture he has made in his life, Hereafter could be the one that most exposes Eastwood's true feelings towards death, as he himself reaches closer to the hereafter with each passing year. He'll be 80 by the time the movie comes out. When directors reach this age, I guess they are all looking to leave behind their version of The Seventh Seal, if they haven't already kicked the bucket, or gone insane. What the trades originally tried to bill as a supernatural thriller in the vein of The Sixth Sense, is according to Movieline who have read the script, actually closer to a quiet drama about three damaged characters trying to look beyond the landscape in front of them, to work out if anything exists after we die. They are €” a blue-collar American (Matt Damon) a French journalist (Cecile De France) and a London school boy...

Damon€™s character is the most overly supernatural figure in the script: GEORGE, a €œhandsome, shy, soft-spoken€ factory worker with a psychic gift of, well, seeing dead people. We don€™t see his hallucinations, though €” in fact, George is doing his damnedest not to see them himself. Meanwhile, across the world, two different plotlines play out that are touched by tragedy. Beautiful French journalist MARIE (think Marion Cotillard or Audrey Tautou) recovers from a near-death experience in the 2004 tsunami, then becomes increasingly gripped with questions about what she saw before she was revived. At the same time in London, 12-year-old MARCUS loses his twin brother and shuts down emotionally while searching for any way to contact his lost family member in the afterlife.

Ok so I can see the "seeing dead people" link to The Sixth Sense but that review above sounds nothing like a supernatural thriller of the M. Night Shyamalan variety, despite the recent casting of Bryce Dallas Howard, an alumni of Lady in the Water and The Village, who has just signed on for an unknown role. I'm expecting a much more contemplative picture than Eastwood's last few offerings, something more like the pacing of Unforgiven.