Who would ever have thought of Clint Eastwood wondering out visually what happens to us after we die? More than that, who would ever have thought he’d make a Claude Lelouch-like film about fate bringing three people together?
Knowing nothing about the film, out on DVD now, I wasn’t expecting it to invert Sam Goldwyn’s famous dictum that you should start with an earthquake and build towards a climax.
Well, Eastwood starts off with the result of a quake, a shocking tsunami, and builds towards A Man and a Woman handshake.
You can only do that kind of thing in Hollywood because you’re Eastwood, who delivers the goods as usual in that steady, assured way of his. Only he can take two comedy actors, Richard Kind (of Spin City fame) and Jay Mohr (of Gary Unmarried fame) and cast them in serious roles.
Eastwood and Matt Damon obviously clicked on Invictus and here Damon plays a San Francisco psychic who doesn’t like seeing into other people’s lives. After all, most of it is misery anyway. So he works as a labourer at a sugar mill instead.
Bryce Dallas Howard plays a smallish part as his cooking partner and proves, once again, that she’s a very good (and very beautiful) young actress.
The third strand to the story is a young boy whose mother’s a London junkie and his twin brother is killed by a truck after running away from a gang of young louts. He also misses a metro train bomb thanks to his brother’s cap being swept off his head.
So there you have it. Five things you’ve seen on your TV set recently. A tsunami, talking to the dead via a “medium”, a cooking masterclass, gang warfare on the streets of London – though a knife death would have been more pertinent right now - and terror bombs.
How will le directeur bring a laid-off American labourer with a strange talent, a high-powered French journalist who’s had an after-death experience (played by Belgian-born actress Cecille de France) and a sad little Pom together?
That creates about the only tension in this story, whose premise you either buy or don't, but it's really about unimportant things – politics, career - falling away and finding your inner courage. And that is still firmly Eastwood territory.
If the little-boy section of Hereafter is not entirely convincing, it’s still a gentle, slyly witty and highly original romance that doesn’t ignore the ugly realities of early-21st century life. But then neither does it celebrate or indulge them.
Neil Sonnekus
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