Clint Eastwood ’s movie Hereafter plays no game with its supernatural premise . There ’s never any uncertainty that these type are really connecting with the afterlife . This is what a fantasy made by an unflinching realist looks like .
So here ’s one more paragraph of spoiler - free assessment of Hereafter before we get into discussing detail . I managed to see this film without knowing anything about it beforehand ( somehow I even missed watching the trailer ) and I vex a pot out of it that room . It ’s not a film that bank on suspense much , but you do get sweep up in these characters ’ journeys . So if you ’re already plan on seeing it , you should probably stop learn now .
And now , we get a bit more spoilery …
So Hereafter is not on the same story as Eastwood ’s greatest works as a director , like Unforgiven , Million Dollar Baby or Gran Torino . The main trouble is the playscript by Peter Morgan , who ’s score in the past with historical recreations like Frost / Nixon and The Queen , but seems to reckon the interview needs thing spelled out in naut mi - high letter this time around . But Hereafter is still a good , thought - provoking film , and it benefit enormously from Eastwood ’s unflinching regard .
There are basically three main storylines in the moving-picture show :
Television show legion Marie LeLay ( Cecile de France ) gets caught up in a tsunami and has a near - destruction experience , after which she stops caring so much about her career . She prevent watch glimpse of the human race of spirits that she see when she was numb for a moment , and she slow come to realize that she ’s not alone , and she wants to order others about this .
George Lonegan ( Matt Damon ) has the power to communicate with the dead , but he no longer works as a medium because he did n’t want his whole life to be about dying . He ’s sequestrate because anytime he touches someone , he sees the stagnant the great unwashed closest to them . But people keep want him to do reading for them , and his pushful sidekick require him to get back into the lucrative medium business , so he can never escape from his unwanted gift .
A young boy named Marcus ( Frankie and George McLaren ) loses his matching brother , and is left all alone in the world . He becomes obsessed with communicating with his dead brother , and come out travel to a bunch of charlatans and imitation mediums , none of whom can help him with the huge gaping void in his life . Meanwhile , his drug addict mom has gone into rehab , so he ’s stuck in surrogate maintenance .
So like I said , Eastwood and Morgan do n’t play any tricks with their premise — it ’s made quite clear , early on in the moving-picture show , that George really can talk to dead the great unwashed . And Eastwood is very careful to show us that the realm that George is accessing with his talent is the same one that Marie bring down during her near - decease experience . In oecumenical , this movie goes out of its way to avoid being slippy — everything is precisely what it seems at first glance , and there are no surprise twists , which is surprising in itself for a film about the realm of the preternatural .
The secret in Hereafter are much more closely connected to the mysteries that we all sell with in real life , in particular : How do you cover with death ? How do you admit its grandness in our lives , without have it take over everything ? And not surprisingly , Hereafter is n’t about the hereafter at all , it ’s about death , and how it affects the living .
So the three independent graphic symbol approach death from three very unlike directions . George is trying to escape from hoi polloi ’s obsessions with the stagnant and with the afterlife . Marie is battle people ’s skepticism about the hereafter — but really , she ’s fighting against our denial of death itself . So they ’re almost like two slope of a coin . And then there ’s Marcus , whose only companion is a beat out , hapless grief .
None of these three main character ever quite becomes as unforgettable as one of the booster in Eastwood ’s classical films . They ’re all maybe a bit too one - dimensional , and you’re able to pretty much see where their stories are go most of the clock time . But at the same clip , each of these fictitious character has enough foible and random tic that they do feel like real people . ( George bed Charles Dickens , for example . ) Plus each of the film ’s three protagonists has mo of existent emotional say-so where you experience how out of their deepness they are , and there ’s one moment deep in the film that will totally kick your arsenic .
In the workforce of a less managing director , Hereafter would be just another melodrama about the great unwashed grappling with mortality and the meaning of death . But Eastwood manage to elevate the cloth , through a mixture of incredibly gorgeous visuals and keenly observed human moments , to the horizontal surface of wideness . For a film that ’s ostensibly about death , Hereafter is bursting with life . Everything from the atrocious beauty of the drown bodies in the tsunami ’s waters to theC&H Cane Sugar factorywhere George works is attractively note , and the world that all three characters inhabit feel gorgeously realized .
Eastwood takes the supernatural film and render it with the boring stride and gradualness of his Bridges of Madison County . The result is a novel form of phantasy picture : one that ’s more contemplative and soul - searching and less focused on big spectacle or Brobdingnagian discoveries .
In the oddment , Hereafter deliberately avoids devote us any vast answers about death , or about the hereafter — even though the afterlife is veridical in this film , it remains deep and unknowable . What we can know is the mode that death pretend our lives . There ’s another domain , in which everything we ’ve lost and everything we venerate is waiting , bathed in a white light that ’s either disturbing or comforting , bet on how you look at it . This realm of the dead , which ca n’t aid infringe on the livelihood , is always present , no matter what you believe . And , Eastwood suggest , you have to make ataraxis with this land before you take up citizenship there .
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