Hereafter Review (2010)
With Halloween right around the corner the undead comes alive, at least in Clint Eastwood’s new film, “Hereafter.”
For Eastwood this film is completely different than his westerns, which makes this film intriguing. Yet, if this film were not an Eastwood film, would it still get such recognition?
“Hereafter” follows the lives of three strangers, Marie (Cecile De France), a French journalist, George (Matt Damon), a psychic, and Marcus (George McLaren and Frankie McLaren), a London schoolboy. Each has been touched by death in different ways, and all three characters will eventually connect with the hereafter.
The movie starts off tremendously strong with Marie in Thailand stuck in the middle of a tsunami. The seats start to rumble like a train is vibrating under the theater, and then the sound builds hitting the audience from all sides. The feeling seems so surreal until the hyperreal CGI of the tsunami appears on the screen. Everything about that scene felt tangible: the intensity was unnerving.
The sound effects throughout the film were also intense. Each time George made a connection with the dead, a thumping sound would boom into the theater. The sound felt like an exaggerated heart beat that when played felt like a throb through the chest. It gave a perfect effect to make the audience also feel that they could link with the dead.
Throughout the film there were more realistic scenes, packed with action and emotion; the issue was that in-between these powerful scenes was dead air, no pun intended.
The movie seemed to focus too intently on connecting these three characters that it lost its sentimental value. The characters development was not well played enough, and probably would have benefited using a different type of temporal patterning, similar to a Quentin Tarantino film or “Babel.” At least with "Babel" the audience knew that somehow these characters were all connected, but the film brought the viewers on a ride trying to solve where the connections were.
For"Hereafter," the manipulation of events would have allowed a more dramatic effects as well as surprises.
The audience could conclude that the characters would eventually meet by the first half of the film allowing no suspense. For a two-hour film, the mood was uninteresting: more sitting and waiting, then experiencing the hereafter or any type of action.
What saved the film was dark humor within the script. The pathetic character, George, who has this natural ability to connect with the dead views the talent more as a curse, disallowing him to make real connections with the living, had witty lines at each moment of despair. The dark humor came from Peter Morgan who also wrote “The Queen” and “The Other Boleyn Girl.” Morgan captured awkward moments perfectly for the characters and created genius lines to break the silence of the film, especially after a depressing moment.
Damon brings such sincerity to his character is awkwardly funny and tragic. De France and the McLaren brothers all did realistic interpretations of their characters, with their wide curious eyes allowing the audience to sympathize and connect on a more emotional level.
Though all the actors made their characters believable, the movie still dragged on. The film did take an interesting twist showing recent tragedies of the world and how people connected them, but other than that the film was as dead as the people George could talk to. The film deserves a C+. It got pretty bad towards the end when the audience was hoping for something drastic and devastating to happen to the main parts because of how slow it was. Personally, the film took a cheap cut at the end and tied a romance to the end. I feel if the audience wanted to go see a story of different characters connecting to make a romance they would have stayed home and rented “Love Actually.”