Every time I watch a Clint Eastwood movie, I sit there wondering if he isn’t one of the best directors working in Hollywood today. After I leave the cinema, these thoughts leave my mind until his next film. His technique is efficient, unpretentious and sincere. I thought the same again, during Hereafter, but it’s not one of Eastwood’s strongest. The film, written by Peter Morgan (of The Queen, Frost/Nixon and The Damned United) follows three characters, each attempting to come to terms with this world’s delicate links to the next. Cécile de France plays Marie Lelay, a television reporter who survives the 2004 Asian Tsunami after a near death experience, replete with ghostly shadow visions. Child actor Frankie McLaren plays Marcus, a twin whose other half is killed near the beginning of the film. He spends his time having a crack-fiend for a mother and visiting some bogus mediums, before he comes into contact with Matt Damon’s George Lonegan, the real deal, a guy who died several times during an operation, and is thus left with the ability to see people’s dead relatives when he touches their hands. Needless to say, these threads, which begin in Thailand, then Paris, London and San Francisco, all come together for a meeting between the three leads. And let’s get one thing straight: Magnolia this ain’t. The screenplay begins to strain and groan as we get towards the film’s conclusion and it has to enact at least two totally implausible coincidences to get them all to Alexandra Palace. The writing falls down elsewhere, too, with the film’s scariest haunting being that of recurring and awful exposition.
Hereafter gets off to a Spielbergian start (not surprising, considering his producer’s credit) as we join Marie in a crowded Thai marketplace that is, moments later, submerged by a thundering tidal wave, announced by the view of the horizon’s palm trees being roughly deracinated. So far, so Jurassic Park. It’s undeniably shocking, and one wonders what emotional effect could be achieved if such technique was applied to a recreation of, say, Hurricane Katrina. But the Spielberg touch is evident elsewhere, in the final floating vision before Marie’s eyes as she begins to drown: a teddy bear, owned by a child whose hand she had just plucked from the crowd, staring dumbly down at her. It’s a childish ending to a sobering sequence, an indulgence with no parallel in the rest of Eastwood’s work, and a sign of a helplessly adolescent need for serious dramatisation. It sets the tone for the film to come. There’s another set-piece in the middle of the film: the 7/7 bombings. By this time, I’d sat through an hour or so of trite musings on the nature of the beyond, and was less inclined to be moved. The bombing now occurs at Charing Cross tube station (though it’s a Charing Cross that has been relocated to Farringdon and had a Jubilee Line extension – possibly the most optimistic detail of a film that depicts an eternal afterlife). It’s dropped into the middle of the story, features a character who is given no reason to be in the area at the time, and is barely mentioned again. To have the gall to hijack two public tragedies for the purpose of sexing up a hokey old ghost story is bad enough, but to totally relocate one of them – even if it may be out of respect – speaks to the fact that they shouldn’t be in this film in the first place.
Because Hereafter wants so desperately to be taken seriously. There’s not a shock, nor a jump, nor a scare in the whole film. In fact, it’s positively un-thrilling, all in the name of making a real, serious ghost story that can deal sensitively with some of the issues suggested by thrill-ride genre pieces. But in rejecting the trappings of genre, Morgan and Eastwood seem to forget that some of the most sensitive and interesting, not to mention probing portrayals of death and the "hereafter" have already been achieved in ghost stories, such as Don’t Look Now, a deeply scary film that addresses Hereafter’s subject with a confidence and insight that this film’s makers could only dream of. Hereafter is a film with so much potential that, in leaving genre in search of substance, stumbles into a whole new realm of bullshit. It’s an attempt at grown-up drama that – like 14-year-olds on a date – literally ends in a Pizza Express.
