“The story is King” says Clint Eastwood and his attraction to the screenplay of Hereafter seems to be that it offered the challenge of linking three fictional lives in France, America and England.
The fact that this story also has elements of a kind of supernatural thriller also appealed more than any serious reflection on what really happens when we die.
Now that he is now in his 80s, one would have imagined that Clint Eastwood would have had more than just an academic interest in the afterlife, but he says that he was drawn to the screenplay by what it said about life rather than death.
The screenplay was by Peter Morgan who says he is not a religious man but wanted to write a simple, non sentimental, unintellectual story about how three people from different backgrounds come together and make connections that change their lives forever.
In the movie, Matt Damon is George, a reluctant psychic from San Francisco who, just by touching someone’s hand , can see and chat with that person’s recently bereaved friends or relatives. This power he regards as a curse rather than a gift because it makes it nigh on impossible for him to form any meaningful relationships with others. Damon plays this role like a heavily sedated Jason Bourne, about as far removed from an action-hero as it is possible to imagine.
The French strand of the tale comes from Parisian, Marie (Cecile de France) who has had a glimpse of heaven after she all but drowned in a tsunami while on holiday in Thailand. This has a catastrophic effect on her high-flying career as a TV presenter and leads her to seek out other people who had similar near death experiences. She ends up writing a book called, you guessed it, Hereafter.
The third plot revolves around Marcus, a 12-year-old from London whose twin brother, Jason was killed in a car accident. Marcus seeks out fake psychics and charlatans in a desperate attempt to reconnect with Jason. This leads to a chance encounter with George and George in turn has a chance encounter with Marie and the movie ends with love very much in the air.
It is a mildly entertaining but fairly superficial movie in which the afterlife is little more than a useful plot device. It does not try to answer any philosophical questions about death or grieving and deliberately avoids taking any religious standpoint.
To hammer home this point, the extras on the DVD are not concerned with pontificating about life beyond the grave but instead includes featurettes on what an all round great guy Clint Eastwood is and how the special effects team created the realistic tsunami scenes.
If Hereafter is to be believed, when we die we are transported to a pure white, weightless land full of muffled dialogue and hazy figures – hardly my idea of paradise!
Derek K. Miller (born June 30, 1969 - died May 3, 2011)
In my opinion, when we die our beings turn into nothingness but, of course, this is not a viewpoint I would ever expect a popular movie to address.
However, Canadian writer and editor, Derek K. Miller, was someone who didn’t shy away from this reality.
An honest and incredibly moving perspective on the real hereafter can be found in his Penmachine blog. In this, he faces death from cancer at the age of 41 with stoicism without seeking crumbs of comfort from religion or having false notions of an afterlife.
Derek’s last blog post was published by his family and friends and from a prepared message he wrote : “I haven’t gone to a better place, or a worse one. I haven’t gone anyplace, because Derek doesn’t exist anymore. As soon as my body stopped functioning, and the neurons in my brain ceased firing, I made a remarkable transformation: from a living organism to a corpse, like a flower or a mouse that didn’t make it through a particularly frosty night. The evidence is clear that once I died, it was over”.
