Hereafter – Clint Eastwood is a humanist cockstar

(Skip through the different sections if you want)

Why Eastwood is the best living director:

It took me around five years to get my brother Devon to come around on Clint Eastwood. After twisting his arm to watch Million Dollar Baby, I think Eastwood’s finally captivated him.

Long ago I made a greatest living directors top ten list, which I might re-post, but if anything, Clint is now number one. He is the top dog amongst directors still making movies. I had number one as Martin Scorsese, but that just doesn’t feel right anymore. Eastwood is the best of them all, the big dick swinging, and it is hard to say why.

I think, most of all, it is because the deep sense of humanism that embodies all his films. I don’t know exactly what that means, because you can play hard and fast with the word humanism, but basically you can tell that Eastwood cares deeply for characters, and vicariously, all human beings.

What other director would make the film Flags of our Fathers, then immediately release an equally sensitive movie from the Japanese perceptive? Would Spielberg make a German movie in response to Saving Private Ryan? Of course not.

Eastwood couldn’t go without making an humanist story about two groups of human beings driven by duty and sense of sacrifice. Yes, the Germans and Japanese were despicable, but they were, after all, just people.

Hereafter:

Hereafter is my favorite movie of the year. I don’t think it is better than The Social Network, which I think is the best film of the year and a 100% perfect movie, but Hereafter will rock your soul. It is flawed, but sweet and powerful. It is a movie for smart people who care deeply for their fellow man

It follows the lives of George (Matt Damon), Marie (Cecile De France), and Marcus (Frankie or George Mclaren) as their stories, and tragedies, seemingly unrelated, begin to converge. It reminded me a great deal of Babel in terms of its structure. I always say the more specific you focus on a life or theme, the more universal it becomes. This is true, but what could have been a cheese-ball movie about spirituality is devastatingly existential.

George is a psychic tortured by the fact he can learn about people’s innermost secrets by speaking to the dead. He resigned to a peaceful life outside of the psychic professional, while Marie and Marcus experience tragedies I won’t ruin. But I will mention to pay attention to the way Eastwood shoots the disaster that happens with Marie and consider the difference between that and, say, an Emmerich disaster movie.

I don’t think it is 100% fact that George can indeed speak to spirits. There are only flashes of the afterlife, which are not proof positive that they are real. However, there is a moment where George speaks to one of the characters about his hat (you’ll know the one) that George could not have known without supernatural gifts. But I argue that I’ve seen mentalists and illusionists do much more incredible things. Have you seen Derren Brown?

Why Hereafter is great:

Hereafter is NOT about whether or not there is an afterlife. Eastwood knows that would just be breaking the age old question: How can we really know? But instead, the movie is about why human beings need the belief of the afterlife. This is why it is a great movie.

We are the only known creatures in the universe with the capacity to understand our mortality. What a fantastic gift. But with this capacity comes all the other exclusively human feelings. The film questions: If not for the afterlife, how else could we love each other so deeply, but know the switch could get flipped off at anytime?

Doesn’t sound that original? It isn’t, but Eastwood deals with the characters with tenderness and empathy that few directors can get near.

People showing up will fill in the blanks where they need to about what the movie feels toward heaven, spirituality, and will even pontificate on Eastwood’s own beliefs. I’ve read that the film’s writer Peter Morgan doesn’t believe in an afterlife and Eastwood says this about the afterlife:

I don’t know what I think about it. I probably tend to think, you’re here for the time you’re here, and you should do the best you can for the time you’re here, and appreciate it and move on. That’s rather simplistic, but that’s where I come out.

I’m not going to read into that too much, but I only mention this because I hope that people find pleasure from this movie in its exploration of human truths, not spiritual ones.

Lastly, people doing bad things, death, and many other things in movies don’t make me too upset. What gets me blubbery is when good people are trying to be good, trying to help others, or sacrificing their own pleasure for the greater good of someone else.

One scene in Hereafter got me, and pretty much the whole audience, teary eyed. There is a scene I’ll just have to ruin for the sake of discussion, where George gives a reading to Marcus about his brother that died. George seemingly lies about a section of the reading, and in doing so, reaffirms Marcus that he isn’t alone. This act of kindness touched me deeply, but it is up to the audience to choose whether such a lie is evil or kind…I’m not sure.

The film suffers only from a bit of a bizarre ending, but how else could you end a movie like this?

-Collin

I say: A

You’ll say: B-