Clint Eastwood has to stop making films. I don’t care if Roger Ebert has lauded Hereafter with the type of praise most would reserve for well, films of exceptional quality. I don’t care if Eastwood is 80 and the sheer fact that he continues to regularly release one to two films a year of varying quality is an impressive feat. I just want Clint Eastwood and all of his rabid critic fans to fade away so tepid, half-cooked blobs of cinema like Hereafter can stop tarnishing the immense respect I once had for the actor-director. Hereafter is barely a film, rather a loose connection of story lines that laboriously plod towards a forced-together ending.
The film might
be called Eastwood’s discourse on the end of life, what
happens, where we go, who we see and so on so forth. George
Lonegan (Matt Damon) is a psychic trying to escape his
ability to see in to the afterlife; Marie LeLay (Cecile De
France) is a famed newscaster who experiences death in a
tropical tsunami; Marcus (Frankie and George McLaren) is a
twin who experiences the loss of his second half. The world
of the afterlife should be explored through these storylines
(so poorly crammed together in the films final half hour)
but Eastwood never says anything about death and all of its
stereotypes. Eastwood never truly says anything. Instead we
follow these three characters as they obsess, or run away
from the obsession, about death and where we go when the
lights go out, as this obsession changes their lives. But
instead of focusing on the conceptual aspects of death,
Eastwood focuses on the lives of his characters he seems to
make intentionally dull. As if Eastwood is attempting to
remove the mysticism of death from the film, but in the
process he completely robs it of any narrative pulse.
Instead we as an audience are forced to watch three
characters affected by death but with literally nothing to
say about it. Half-way through the film I found myself
wondering if Eastwood himself was interested in the idea of
death let alone this film.
|
