With a scatter-shot screenplay that weaves from disaster film to mystical drama, social satire to romantic comedy and back again, Hereafter found a lucky fate with Easwood at the helm.
Screenwriter Morgan seems generally ill-fitted for the material. The overt contemporary setting (involving both the 2004 Tsunami and 2005 London Tube bombings) clashes with unrealistic clichés of heroine-addled mothers with sensitive latch-key twins, an ambitious then broken career woman sleeping with her callous producer, the burdened mystic and his opportunistic brother. As death and the dead strike them, Morgan writes with an emphasis on ambiguity as to whether their beliefs in the afterlife are a truth of the film's reality, or a combination of illnesses, dreams, hopes and hallucinations.
Thus, it's a credit to the actors, mostly graceful cinematography and Eastwood's (whose own score goes a long way) choices that the moody tone casts such a spell and the characters elicit real empathy in their plights (though some of the supporting performances, notably and somewhat understandably given Eastwood's one-take directing style, the young twins, are stiff and don't hold up to the captivating Damon and De France). Nice, if contrived, details by Morgan do offer some light diversions and help to fill out the film, e.g., the psychic's obsession with Dickens, a wink to a writer who often explored death, redemption and fate.
And yet, over and over, just at the moment where viewers would expect to be floored, most necessarily when the characters at last converge in a cathartic ending, a not-quite-believable special effect is implemented, the dialogue doesn't come through, or the acting falters, and the audience is instead left, at best, touched, or at worst, ponderous.
Which might partially be the point. But as it is, Eastwood's masterfully directed a non-believer's screenplay as a believer, and the finished work is left, like the dead of the film may be, in a beautiful, sprawling limbo.
Screenwriter Morgan seems generally ill-fitted for the material. The overt contemporary setting (involving both the 2004 Tsunami and 2005 London Tube bombings) clashes with unrealistic clichés of heroine-addled mothers with sensitive latch-key twins, an ambitious then broken career woman sleeping with her callous producer, the burdened mystic and his opportunistic brother. As death and the dead strike them, Morgan writes with an emphasis on ambiguity as to whether their beliefs in the afterlife are a truth of the film's reality, or a combination of illnesses, dreams, hopes and hallucinations.
Thus, it's a credit to the actors, mostly graceful cinematography and Eastwood's (whose own score goes a long way) choices that the moody tone casts such a spell and the characters elicit real empathy in their plights (though some of the supporting performances, notably and somewhat understandably given Eastwood's one-take directing style, the young twins, are stiff and don't hold up to the captivating Damon and De France). Nice, if contrived, details by Morgan do offer some light diversions and help to fill out the film, e.g., the psychic's obsession with Dickens, a wink to a writer who often explored death, redemption and fate.
And yet, over and over, just at the moment where viewers would expect to be floored, most necessarily when the characters at last converge in a cathartic ending, a not-quite-believable special effect is implemented, the dialogue doesn't come through, or the acting falters, and the audience is instead left, at best, touched, or at worst, ponderous.
Which might partially be the point. But as it is, Eastwood's masterfully directed a non-believer's screenplay as a believer, and the finished work is left, like the dead of the film may be, in a beautiful, sprawling limbo.
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