In one of the sharpest openings in movie memory, Director Eastwood starts with a prolonged view of a devastating tsunami.
What can I say? On Friday nights a while back our family watched Clint Eastwood
play Rowdy Yates on Rawhide while two small boys wearing chaps rode their
red rocking horse across the kitchen floor. Tell me it wasn't fifty years ago.
One thing is sure: our hero has never disappointed us. As innovator and explorer
he has directed and acted in many enduring movies that have often challenged
both the audience and the prevailing culture. And now, here we all are watching
his new movie and wondering at this tricky point in life whether there is or
isn't a Hereafter. Though Clint Eastwood is far too smart even to suggest
an answer, he has assembled a cast of terrific professionals to explore the
question.
In one of the
sharpest openings in movie memory Director Eastwood starts with a prolonged view
of a devastating tsunami. The fact that the very sight of it makes us go rigid
is surely due to the actual recent fact of it. Several hundred thousand deaths
by one wave erased forever our comfortable assumption that tsunamis are figments
of science fiction. Now frozen in our chairs, we watch an exploration of
mortality that is by turns intriguing and disappointing, ending finally in
something of a fizzle. But that's the same fizzle we live with as we confront
our own mortality. We can comfort ourselves with the certainty that if Eastwood
had satisfied us with a movie solution, we would have called him a fraud.
While the
cast is not uniformly strong, the three leads are memorable for their skill and
for understatement of a dramatic subject. Each has been touched by death. Marie
LeLay (Cecile de France) is a Parisian television journalist who survives the
tsunami and is haunted both by what she has seen and by what she has imagined.
In London, Marcus (twins, Frankie and George McClaren) has lost his brother
Jason to an accident. The two had been a survival team in the face of their
mother's crippling addiction. In San Francisco, George for a time made a living
from his psychic ability to get in touch with those in the Hereafter. Blindsided
by the emotional complications that accompanied his gift, he becomes a heavy
equipment operator; but those who need him find him.
Frankie and
George McLaren's joint creation of the small, bewildered, sad, and ultimately
strong little boy is the standout performance in the film. Cecile de France's
Marie is especially refreshing because she is no Hollywood cardboard cutout.
Instead, she is unpredictable and charming in her confusion.
All this
leads us to the final fizzle. The three stories are pulled together in a silly
set of contrived coincidences where we are simply abandoned without resolution.
But, true to his western code, Clint Eastwood knows that as much as we'd all
like to believe in some form of the Hereafter, neither he nor the rest of us
will ever know until it happens.
Copyright (c) Illusion