Only connect: Eastwood's "Hereafter"

New York Film Festival

Film Society of Lincoln Center

Hereafter

Clint Eastwood (director)

USA. 2010. 126 minutes. Warner Bros. Pictures

Vacationing with her producer/lover on a Pacific island, a stylish French news anchor stops at an outdoor market to buy trinkets. Moments later, a tsunami roars through town, wreaking unimaginable destruction and death. In London, twin boys and their drug-addicted mother protect one another until separated by tragedy. Desperate to reclaim some measure of normalcy, a blue collar worker in San Francisco rejects and tries to conceal his former profession as a psychic medium with genuine, powerful ability. As he plainly tells his manipulative brother, "A life that is all about death is no life at all."

Writer Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon) and director Clint Eastwood present the world as a hazardous place, all the more horrific for the impersonal nature of most of this danger. We're helpless in the face of earth's changes, terrorist plots, downsizing industries, dysfunctional people. It's not about us, but the bad thing comes ripping through, and we are simply in the way. 

Life is hard--at the very least baffling, disappointing, lonely--and then you die.

And then what?

Psychic George (Matt Damon), tv superstar Marie (Cecile de France) and poor young Marcus (Frankie McLaren) all have good reason to ask. Morgan and Eastwood hurtle them through this film as through a classic mythic quest--with Damon's George as reluctant participant while the other two are valiantly driven. Because this is an Eastwood film, you know that geography will not separate these three questers for very long. In fact, only through interconnection will each one begin his or her true journey.

And then what?

With Hereafter, the 80-year-old Eastwood explores human vulnerability. At every turn, he renders his audience as vulnerable as children. The tsunami hits just a few minutes into the film; its amazingly realistic visual and sonic effects truly terrify. You almost feel the weight of the water, the impact of overturned vehicles slamming into structures and bodies. Camera work rushes the waves at you and submerges you. And that's only the beginning. Later scenes--depicting disasters large or intimate--are equally visceral, and we are given absolutely no time to shield ourselves. 

Eastwood displays, as always, the dry-eyed, old-school humanism of a tough guy with a basic sense of decency and compassion. Morgan's characters work our emotions; we find ourselves in them. In fact, with Eastwood's direction, McLaren and de France are, in every moment, almost too real. Only Damon--perhaps because we know this actor all too well--appears to be acting, sometimes spelled with a capital A. But very often something quieter, subtler, more intuitive comes to the fore--as in some cooking class scenes shared with his fellow student, a pivotal role overplayed to distracting, cutesy effect by Bryce Dallas Howard. Ignore Howard and watch Damon.

When George touches his clients hands, he gets brief flashes of information about their deceased loved ones. He tours the preserved home of Charles Dickens and touches objects that make him feel closer to his idol. The film concludes with the inevitable, though almost missed, clasping of hands. For Eastwood, touch--human connection--seems to be the only answer to the awesome, perhaps unanswerable questions about this world and whatever may follow.

Public festival screenings:

 

Sunday, October 10, 8:15pm (Walter Reade Theater)
Sunday, October 10, 10:00pm (Alice Tully Hall)

National release: October 22

Walter Reade Theater and Alice Tully Hall

Broadway and 65^th Street, Manhattan

#1 to 66 Street

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