Hereafter - % % %

Why was this movie made?

Is a film deserving of three stars because it's well-made, well-directed and shot, and well-acted? But lacking in convincing me of its need to exist?

I suppose this film was intended to delve into the pessimistic resistance to an after-life by a skeptical society created by a man approaching the end of his life. Clint Eastwood, who directed and produced and composed the music, was 80 at the release of this film in 2010. He is approaching his end-time and has an extraordinary career recently capped with two Oscar wins for directing suspenseful adult dramas about murder, human sins, redemption and guilt, "Unforgiven" and "Million Dollar Baby". In interviews he compared this to a French film, and perhaps that explains why one of the three interwoven stories of the film is centered in Paris. This is the story of a French journalist who has a near-death-experience in a tsunami in south-east Asia, a twin boy who loses his brother and Matt Damon, a psychic who can't come to grips with his ability to communicate with the dead.

I credit this film for taking a premise I hold with enormous skepticism, a psychic who has visions when he makes psychical contact with others, and getting me to empathize with the character and suspend disbelief for the sake of the plot. But every time the film moves to another story, I am reminded that I don't understand why this film exists.

The French journalist experiences a great deal of resistance to her pursuit of the story and writes a book about the conspiracy to resist information about near-death-experiences and the possibility of an afterlife. In conjunction with the Matt Damon story, in which he has difficulty sustaining a regular life because of his ability's forced intimacy, and its physical and emotional strain upon him, the film seems to indicate the perspective that it's hard to deal with death but cruel to resist its presence in our lives. And yet, the issue of an afterlife feels unnecessary to this point. It feels hokey.

Furthermore, the other plot line involving the sweet boy who's twin brother dies in a car accident is extremely pitiful and feels designed to elicit the most pity possible from the audience. His mother is addicted to heroin and can't really take care of the boys. After his brother is beset by bullies while picking up their mother's methadone prescription, he escapes them by running into the street. The surviving brother is the shy one who depended on the gregarious other to make decisions. He is shy and must be placed in foster care while his mother goes into rehab. And his brother's funeral is short and his foster parents put a second bed in his room so that he can feel closer to his dead brother, who's cap he now wears. The character is out of a Dickens novel. He's played by a boy with saucer eyes, pale skin and weak shoulders. It's all too much. Of course he tracks down Matt Damon to talk to his dead brother and begs him to come back because he can't be alone. 

It's overcompensating for the resistance that the audience may have to the idea of an afterlife and it can't. Perhaps there is an afterlife. Many, many people think so. But if this were a film about death, and the ramifications of just death, it would be nearly the same film. It's not a persuasive film. It's more philosophical than that. Yet it never drew me in enough for me to apply the film to my own life. Perhaps I haven't lived enough or am not old enough to really consider my own mortality. Or perhaps I have considered it enough to think that an end to life without a hereafter is an important motivator to seize the present and that a hereafter in which we are floating with our loved ones isn't appealing enough to find comfort in. I prefer the idea that we just end. Life stops and there is nothing after death. It's also a kind of relief to think that this is all there is and there is an ending. An after-life is only interesting if such a story were appealing. This timeless, floating with our loved ones sounds a lot like retirement to me, or a really good Christmas or family reunion.