Matt Damon

"Hereafter" is a solemnly reassuring film made by major talents working intriguingly outside their comfort zones.

Many love it and consider it yet another masterwork from director Clint Eastwood.

I think that sort of praise does a disservice to Eastwood's best pictures, "Unforgiven," "The Bridges of Madison County," "A Perfect World" and "Letters From Iwo Jima" chief among them.

The drama's problems begin to accumulate the second we're hit with a massive computer-generated tsunami better suited to "2012." Somewhere in Indonesia, accompanied on a trip by a plainly undeserving lover, a French journalist played by the superb Belgian actress Cecile de France gets creamed by an enormous wall of water. The scene cries out for an entirely subjective depiction, disorienting and scary; instead, we're handed an impersonally impressive digital-effects survey straight out of "The Day After Tomorrow."

Returning, shell shocked, to her Paris TV job, Marie is forever changed by her glimpse of what may lie beyond earthly matters. Meantime, in London ... a young twin (played by both George and Frankie McLaren) is growing up in a harsh situation with a drug-addict mother and a blessedly sane and protective brother. The brother's sudden death sends the surviving twin into an odyssey that brings him to ...

Narrative track No. 3, in which Matt Damon plays a troubled San Francisco psychic whose gifts have become a burden, and whose innate decency is a fine fit for Damon's easygoing authority. "Hereafter" takes the matters of sudden death and grievous loss seriously, as it should. The writer Peter Morgan has said in various interviews that he went at this script intuitively, without any sort of outline -- and without the historical-record background material attending his best known works, including "Frost/Nixon" and "The Queen."

As the three story strands intertwine more and more tightly, a viewer needn't have been exasperated by "Babel" or "Crash" to become a tiny bit antsy with "Hereafter." With his trademark blend of stoicism and savvy manipulation, complemented by many of his usual collaborators, including cinematographer Tom Stern, director Eastwood refuses to pump up the melodrama.

The man knows what he wants, and while he has tackled all sorts of projects in recent years, he is not afraid to restate his visual, musical and tonal preferences. (He's an auteur, in other words.) The Eastwood-composed musical score sounds like the simple, plaintive, sparingly orchestrated music from any number of other Eastwood films, whether the composer on those was Clint or his son, Kyle.

Visually, "Hereafter" plunges Damon, particularly, into such starkly delineated (and frankly hammy) chambers of half-shadow, half-light, that Stern's cinematography verges on self-parody.

Little of this would matter if the audience wasn't allowed to get so far out ahead of the characters' destinies. Morgan and Eastwood are scrupulous in keeping their notions of the afterlife as general and inoffensive as possible. They have no religious or spiritual worldview to sell. As I say: Many admire this film to no end. I found its use of recent tragic events, including the London underground bombing, to be more than a little cheap. Sometimes a major screenwriter's missteps become exacerbated by a major director's dogged, determined house style.

 

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"Hereafter" Movie Trailer

 

Oscar winner Matt Damon ("Good Will Hunting," "Invictus") stars in "Hereafter," directed by Academy Award winner Clint Eastwood ("Million Dollar Baby," "Unforgiven") from a screenplay by two time Oscar nominee Peter Morgan ("Frost/Nixon," "The Queen").

"Hereafter" tells the story of three people who are haunted by mortality in different ways. Matt Damon stars as George, a blue-collar American who has a special connection to the afterlife. On the other side of the world, Marie (Cécile de France), a French journalist, has a near-death experience that shakes her reality. And when Marcus (Frankie/George McLaren), a London schoolboy, loses the person closest to him, he desperately needs answers. Each on a path in search of the truth, their lives will intersect, forever changed by what they believe might—or must—exist in the hereafter.

The film also stars award-winning French actress Cécile de France ("A Secret") as Marie, and twins Frankie and George McLaren. The international cast also includes Jay Mohr ("Street Kings," TV's "Gary Unmarried"), Bryce Dallas Howard ("Eclipse," "Spider-Man 3"), Marthe Keller, Thierry Neuvic and Derek Jacobi.

 

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MPAA rating: PG-13 (for mature thematic elements including disturbing disaster and accident images, and for brief strong language).

Running time: 2:09.

Cast: Matt Damon (George); Cecile de France (Marie); George McLaren and Frankie McLaren (Marcus/Jason); Jay Mohr (Billy); Bryce Dallas Howard (Melanie); Derek Jacobi (as himself); Marthe Keller (Dr. Rousseau).

Credits: Directed by Clint Eastwood; written by Peter Morgan; produced by Eastwood, Kathleen Kennedy and Robert Lorenz. A Warner Bros. Pictures release.