Hereafter

A true Clint Eastwood film, exploring what lies beyond. Except, here he succumbs to the Hollywood cuteness he once mocked

Hereafter opens with a terrifying scene in which rushing water from the 2004 Tsunami in Southeast Asia knocks out a French TV journalist vacationing in Thailand. She is found lifeless, but is resuscitated and later reports an ‘out of life’ experience. By coincidence, the film opened in India on Friday, 11 March 2011, the day the devastating tsunami hit Japan, and created eerily similar images.  Happenstance and near-death experience, the strikingly similar aspects of its reportage from across the planet, is what Clint Eastwood’s film examines.  Using the narrative of global interconnections, so vividly articulated in Babel, he threads characters together from San Francisco, London and Paris.

Marie Lelay (Cecile De France) in Paris can’t concentrate on TV journalism after the 2004 Tsunami nearly drowned her. She takes a sabbatical and works on a book on the afterlife. Contrarily, in San Francisco, psychic George Lonnegan (Matt Damon) wants to get away from conversations with the dead. He takes a plane to London to connect with his real passion—the fictional world of Charles Dickens.

In London, 12-year-old Marcus (Frankie and George McLaren) has lost his twin brother in an accident and has identified George as the clairvoyant he wants to talk to. Meanwhile, Marie arrives in London to release her book, Hereafter: A Conspiracy of Silence.

Hard-nosed realism is the general flavour of Eastwood’s cinematic style. In fact, scepticism on the hereafter marks his films. In Million Dollar Baby, he pulls the plug on his protagonist when she wants to die. In Gran Torino, he stage manages his own spectacular death. Yet, ironically, in Hereafter he succumbs to a Hollywood cuteness that his screen persona and directorial vision have traditionally mocked.

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