Hereafter (**)

Directed by: Clint Eastwood

Starring: Matt Damon, Cécile de France, Frankie and George McLaren, Bryce Dallas Howard, Thierry Neuvic, Jay Mohr, Lyndsey Marshall

Seen: January 20^th 2011

** Out of ****

Hereafter starts off with a bang; French TV journalist Marie Lelay (de France) and her lover Didier (Neuvic) wake up in Thailand, and while Didier stays in their hotel room, Marie goes shopping on the streets, just before the Indian Ocean Tsunami hits. Mary drowns, but is pulled from the water and miraculously resuscitated. She glimpses the Hereafter, and it changes her outlook on things forever.

A second storyline is introduced in London, twins Jason and Marcus (Frankie & George McLaren) do their best to prevent social services taking them from their alcoholic, drug addicted mother, but as they manage the seemingly impossible in a fairly inventive way, Jason is killed in a freak accident on street, leaving behind the quieter Marcus, sent to a foster home when his mother decides this is her time to really get clean. Marcus is an empty shell, searching for any way to communicate with Jason; and in a strange turn of events he even gets saved from certain death in the 2005 London Bombings.

The last plotline starts off in San Francisco, where George Lonnegan (Damon) is hiding from his past as a psychic who can talk to the dead. His brother Billy (Mohr) keeps trying to convince him that what he has is a gift and not a curse, but George says a life filled with death is no life at all. For the purposes of this movie, George is the real deal; where many are shown as fakes, George really does talk to people’s dead relatives. In an attempt at a normal life, George goes to night cooking classes, where he meets the beautiful Melanie (Howard) and just as they seem to get things going in a sweet and innocent relationship, his ability scares Melanie off, and disappointingly she disappears from the movie. It’s sad that she didn’t give him a chance to be there, she just ran.

The movie constantly jumps between stories, and while Matt Damon’s screen time is filled with enough honesty and heartfelt drama, Cécile de France’s storyline starts losing steam soon enough after its earth-shattering inception of surviving a tsunami, as she withers away at work and starts, more and more, to investigate the afterlife, what happens when we die. The young Marcus’ storyline however, never gets off the ground, it just feels like too much of a contrived sad story right from the get-go, you feel as if the film makers definitely tried their very best to convey a certain sadness, but it comes of as nothing other than manipulation.

We all know the movie is headed towards the inevitable meeting of the characters (I use the word inevitable lightly, as it is only so because the story dictates they have to meet, not because of a well-written series of events leading up to it…), but it seems to take forever to get anywhere. The movie has a runtime of 129 minutes, and by 90 minutes, nothing had happened at all, and nothing continued to happen. The conclusion lacked power, as the stories just fizzled out, Marcus eventually making peace (of a sorts) with Jason’s death, and George and Cécile at last finding people that won’t make them feel like freaks. The last scene was truly laughable in fact, with George and Cécile meeting for the first time, but if you insist on going to see the movie I’ll keep quiet now.

I feel like I’m still waiting for something significant to happen in Hereafter, and I suspect that wait can go on indefinitely. Hereafter had a promising initial assertion, but it is squandered in the quiet mediocrity displayed on screen. I’ll pass on this one.