Review: HEREAFTER - Looks Into The Afterlife: And It's Not Pretty

rating: 2

Clint Eastwood's love affair with Matt Damon continues in his latest film Hereafter. But far from the politically charged sports movie of their previous collaboration, Hereafter is a meandering journey through this life and the one beyond. So focussed is the film on death that I wonder if it's aging director might be becoming a little wary of his own mortality. Sadly, any personal attachment Eastwood may have to the subject matter did not seem to help him or screenwriter Peter Morgan create particularly true-to-life characters. Though they are quite interesting on paper. George (Matt Damon) lives alone, works in a factory and is generally pretty lonely. The reason for this is that his special skill, the ability to commune with the dead simply by touching the hands of a living relative, has turned out to be a curse. He wants to escape the clamour of voices from the afterlife and live his own life here. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, two more people are struggling with death themselves. French journalist Marie Lelay (Cecile de France) was enjoying a nice sun-soaked holiday when a tsunami came and swept her away. Her brush with death has left her shaken, and with a strong desire to investigate her experiences further: whatever the cost to her career may be. Over in England, Marcus and brother Jacob (George and Frankie McLaren) have problems of their own. Social services are baying for their mother's blood and her drug addiction is getting no better. Things are about to take a turn for the worse too, as a careless van driver soon runs down Jacob and leaves Marcus alone and frightened. As the three try and come to terms with their connections to the afterlife, strange events (many of them very, very hard to believe) start to pull these interesting and disparate characters together. As some of you may know from my controversial The Blind Side review (I never did get that therapy...) I don't especially like being preached at. What I like even less is when the subject matter being preached doesn't even make any sense. So ridiculous was Hereafter that I laughed at out loud several times at the ill thought-out quasi-spiritualist philosophy it vomited from the screen. I mean whatever people may think about one organised religion or another, at least they're just that: organised. When someone tells me that books that have lasted thousands of years are very important to them, I can understand and respect that. I might not like a manipulative film implying that this particular book is the only right way to live, but I respect that some people think it is. When a film declares that there is 'undeniable proof' that after we die we fly off into a white light, wherein we are everything and everyone, but still act and sound like our physical selves immediately prior to our death, AND that we can commune with the living as easily as we like, well, that's just silly. If there is undeniable proof, show it. Don't just tell me it's there and expect me to believe your mindless nonsense like some lonely Scientology recruit. Outside of the spurious subject matter, the film struggles to attain the heights previous scaled by Eastwood. The cinematography is predictably polished as it carries you between the bright and baffling real world in which the protagonists are now struggling to survive, and the shadowy rooms and corridors in which they contemplate the Hereafter that they are now so obsessed with. The effects that created the tsunami early on are quite impressive, though sadly the visual skill applied here isn't transferred so adeptly to our occasional visits to the spirit realm. The acting is equally inconsistent. Matt Damon is predictably impressive as George, and even managed to inject some credibility into some pretty ropey scenes. Likewise de France handles the switch from confident journalist to rambling spiritualist adeptly. The only problem, and it's quite a big one, comes with the child actors. I don't expect children to be born with Laurence Olivier's diction, but I am a firm believer that child actors cannot spend the entire film reading from cue cards just behind the camera. Nonetheless, Eastwood seemed to think this was a good tactic and the result is that every scene these kids are in is wrecked. Still, if you can switch off to the nonsensical spiritual ramblings and awful child actors, you might enjoy parts of Hereafter as a sort of oddball tale of isolated individuals finding hope among other human beings. The plot turns that take them there are clunky, and the score that tries to carry our emotions is crude, but the inexorable union of these three lost souls remains a powerful core to this film which most of us will be able to identify with in one way or another. Hereafter opens in the U.K. tomorrow