"Hereafter," Clint Eastwood's first stab at romance since 1995's "Bridges of Madison County," does a few things right.
Unfortunately, it does more wrong.
A supernatural romance, of sorts, it feels like it wants to be two or three different films, doing each of them moderately well, but collectively making one messy meandering film.
There are three main protagonists: George (Matt Damon), a real psychic; Marcus (Frankie McLaren), a twin whose brother is killed when he's hit by a car; and Marie (Cecile De France), a French television journalist who gets swept away by a tsunami while on vacation, and dies, but is brought back just before she reaches the light.
Eastwood rotates between the three, and we see their individual stories completely detached from each other, until their paths finally intersect in Act III. This is all well and good, but we meander through one arc after another, a veritable revolving door of unnecessary backstory, unneeded characters, and unresolved arcs.
For my money, the most interesting relationship in the film was between George and a divorcee (Bryce Dallas Howard) he meets in the Italian cooking class he's taking. They hit it off, but again George's "gift" causes him problems. The arc quickly drops and Howard disappears from the film with one scant reference.
Marcus's arc is perhaps the most wrenching, as he loses his brother and his best friend, and is completely lost. His mother is a drug addict, so he is shuttled to a foster home.
Marie takes some time off to write a book on the life of Francois Mitterand, but instead finds herself drawn to the notion of an afterlife and begins investigating.
Frankly, the three stories don't mesh, and the film meanders and bounces around, short-shrifting all of its characters, and plugging in what feels like a tacked-on resolution that, no matter how you spin it, is a little too convenient.
Psychic ability as a legitimate phenomena is not broached; instead it's presented as factual, and the authenticity of George's abilities are never really in question, so don't go in expecting a hard-hitting exploration of the veracity of speaking with the dead.
Eastwood's signature use of lighting is again on display throughout the film, and there are moments where he captures the magic, both with Damon's scenes with Howard, and the film's incredible opening tsunami sequence. It's spectacularly filmed, but feels detached from the deliberate pacing of the rest of the film.
The film's finale is really interesting, as the three main characters finally meet, and another quickie romance pops up. It feels forced and rushed, as if they they needed something to tie everything together. It's jarring and feels inauthentic.
If nothing else, "Hereafter" shows that Clint Eastwood is interested in creating a variety of film types beyond your typical Oscar-bait crime drama-type films. But this effort just didn't bring me back from the dead.