Review: Hereafter (2010) TH

Death doesn't always come a knockin'

On the surface, "Hereafter" is a film that takes on aspects related to the moment before death (including "close calls"), the shock of death itself, as well as the after effects of this oft-times tragic, misunderstood and hard-to-cope facet of life. We all wish things would last forever but that isn't always the case.

The film begins with separate stories involving seemingly different characters with varied age, gender and background, and, as fate would have it, makes the world a little smaller when you have a similar set of circumstances underneath all those social constructs. This is a slower moving drama that's made to relax and ponder upon. Part of the reason is due to dealing with George's (Matt Damon) ability to peak into the after life. Unlike other films that take on a person with special abilities, this builds itself up with enough time for the skeptics, myself included, to catch up. His powers aren't glorified by selling the audience a this-could-be-you storyline, but rather focuses on the search for his real self, including others who are looking at him for resolve, potential love or just plain greed. He's confident when tapping into his ability, though one can see that there are more truths in his readings of others than honesty in his own deeper feelings for himself.

"Hereafter" works as a film for the believer as well as the unbeliever, as it uses this supernatural premise to ask a pivotal question: Are some things better left alone or unsaid? Its gradual pacing can be its best friend and enemy, though it's still a movie that plays on what you wouldn't expect, often times panning a certain scene and not being so obvious on what it focuses on. This doesn't have action-packed car chases and there isn't a heart-pounding revelation at every single turn but the film manages to effectively capture some hope, acceptance, as well as realism even if the mode it's dealing with in the movie is a subject on the fence in real life.

Director: Clint Eastwood (Unforgiven, Mystic River, Gran Torino)
Starring: Matt Damon, Cecile De France, Bryce Dallas Howard
Website: IMDB

True Grit (2010)

Starring: Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin

Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen

IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1403865/

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Grit_(2010_film)

They got it right this time. Remakes are usually frowned upon by critics and the general public, and for good reason: they have a tendency to either fall short of the standards set by the original films or are just seen as a waste of a film altogether. However, there are occasions when they turn out well, especially when the said original film needed to improvements in the first place (http://docuniverse.blogspot.com/2010/12/true-grit-1969.html). So how did the Coen Brothers manage to take on a western made famous by John Wayne himself? Like this:

Once again based upon the book of the same name by Charles Portis, the story starts out with a young girl named Mattie, who's father is murdered and she goes on a quest to find his killer. The character of Mattie as played by Kim Darby was the part of the original movie that I really hated above anything else, but the Coen brothers thankfully helped change that around. First of all, she actually looks like a real girl from the 1870s, as opposed to a weird Justin Bieber clone. Secondly, the actress who plays her, Hailee Steinfeld, can actually, well, act. She comes across as a girl who is tough and certainly able to hold her own. While she has a bit of a self-righteous streak and a prim-and-proper manner that can turn people off, Steinfield is still able to reveal Mattie's warmth and personal conviction, making her very likable character. This is in stark contrast to Darby, who acted more like a monotone robot trying to give the illusion that she was tough but ends up looking like a deer in headlights.

Anyway, Mattie eventually comes across a one-eyed U.S. Marshall named Rooster Cogburn, played by Jeff Bridges, whom she asks to help her capture her father's killer. Bridges does a great job as Cogburn; he is gruff and is not afraid to take on the bad guys when necessary, even if some complain that he over does it. At the same time, he is shown to have some flaws due to his age and alcoholism. Fans of "The Big Lebowski" may notice some hints of The Dude when Cogburn is a little...disoriented, but as much as I love that character, I think Bridges and the Coens were smart not to try and force their creation into this particular film; it would not have be right. My complaint is that his accent is so thick that I could not understand about half of the stuff he said, but I am willing to give that a pass because I get the idea of what he is saying and I guess that it makes Cogburn more memorable.

The rest of the story is pretty straight forward: the two of them, along with a Texas Ranger named La Boeuf (Matt Damon), begin their journey as they come across a pair of outlaws, a hanged body, and a man dressed as a bear. Okay, it is not entirely straight forward, but come on, its the Coen brothers, you got to expect a little weirdness! Anyway, generally speaking, the film moves at a productive paste and keeps you intrigued to until the end, using both action, humor, and good dialogue.

I did not have to much to complain about, but if I have to nit-pick...There is a part at the beginning when Mattie is arguing with the man her father had sold horses to before his murder. I disliked this part in the original movie because I thought that it was a pointless scene that did not need to be done on-camera, and while the Coen brothers make it a tad better, it still seems like a time waster. The film also has a tendency to marginalize its supporting characters. Damon does well with his role, but he is mostly absent from the picture; he just has his little bouts with Bridges (which are pretty amusing), but then gets annoyed and leaves not once but twice. James Brolin is good as the murderer Tom Chaney, someone who is somewhat stupid but can be intimidating when he needs to be. However, he is on screen for barely five minutes and his impact is lacking. A nearly unrecognizable Barry Pepper also does a decent job as the outlaw Ned Pepper, but is also underused. To be fair, these characters were not on-screen that much more in the 1969 version, but I guess they were so unimpressive in that version that it kind of did not matter. By making them interesting, the Coen's have been hurt by their own success. Another part of this may have to do with the 110 running time, about 18 minutes shorter than the original. Overall, I am glad this was shorter because it made the movie more concise, but it was not without its draw backs.

Despite that admittedly bloated paragraph I just wrote, it is still a very enjoyable film that shows that not all remakes turn out bad, and I recommend it.

Review: Hereafter (2010)

I’d just like to say that there will be SPOILERS in this review, so if you don’t like those, then don’t read this one yet! Until after you see the movie. Then I encourage you to read it and tell me how right I am about it.

Director: Clint Eastwood

Starring: Matt Damon, Cecile De France, Frankie McLaren, George McLaren

Website: hereafter.warnerbros.com

What can you say about Clint Eastwood, anyway? He’s a legend. He’s acted in a million awesome movies and directed a ton of other awesome ones. His last film, Gran Torino, was my favorite of the ones he’s directed that I’ve seen so far, but I think this newest one beats even that. Hereafter is just a stunning piece of film.

It’s just so refreshing to see something like this. I don’t really know why, since it’s not like this movie is really doing anything that groundbreaking – unless telling a good story is groundbreaking. Eastwood’s directing style is really bare bones and simple, and surprisingly, that’s really all he needs to bring out the power in his stories, anyway. He doesn’t need anything else. There isn’t anything about this that needs to be trimmed down – he shows everything in a very stark, direct way that doesn’t try to hide anything and shows you everything that needs to be seen.

So, what is that plot anyway? Well, it’s one of those movies like Magnolia or Crash where you get a bunch of stories of different characters that are connected in some way. Although honestly this movie is better than either of those. It’s just so well done that the stories don’t even feel that separate – they really just feel like one big, entwined web, and that’s how all of these films should feel. One story involves Matt Damon as an introverted psychic who can see dead people in the mind of the living, and another involves a woman who was a victim of a tsunami. A third involves a little boy whose twin brother has been killed in a truck accident.

The cinematography is just excellent here, with great, vivid coloration, snappy, on-point shots and a huge, epic sweep to it all that makes the opening tsunami sequence one of the most memorable you will see this year. Watch as the giant wave sweeps over everything; it’s downright terrifying to imagine yourself on the ground there. It just comes right out of nowhere! There’s really no build up; just like in real life, the tsunami wastes no time laying waste to this unsuspecting Hawaii city. The randomness of it all makes the whole scene even more powerful – life is very fragile, you see.

From there the movie progresses like a trident in three different, parallel streams. Matt Damon’s story about being a psychic and insisting it’s more of a curse than a gift is really captivating. And he makes a damn good case for why it’s more of a curse, too. I mean, the guy is coaxed into ‘reading’ a girl he likes and finds out inadvertently that her dead father molested her as a child. And then she just never comes back to see him. That’s pretty harsh, and probably not even the tip of the iceberg in terms of his life. It’s just maddening how little we’re actually given about this character, and how much what we are given affects us. It’s really stunning. They could have made a whole movie about him, but they still had other stories to tell, too.

The second one is about a woman played by Cecile De France, who is attractive in an offbeat, odd kind of way, and a great actor at that. She plays a French businesswoman on holiday in Hawaii when the tsunami from the opening hit. She and her co-worker, who she is having an affair with, go home and try to continue their regular lives – note here that he later ditches her for another girl; having an affair does one very little good in the end as the cheater will just do the same thing to you. De France, after a strange near death experience, simply can’t focus on mundane worldly business anymore, and she is given some time off to get her act together. She starts writing a book and it ends up coming out very differently from what she expected…

The third story belongs to a little boy played by Frankie and George McLaren – they’re twins, and alternate playing each character, I guess. But the one the story is about is Marcus, who lives with his brother Jason and their deadbeat drunk mother, who, in a refreshing turn of events, actually really loves them and cares about them, and it’s mutual. The boys view their mother’s addiction as something to overcome, and the way they help her evade the investigators who think she’s unfit as a parent is just golden. I wish they had given her more screen time, but then again, like the rest of this movie, it’s not really that necessary. And plus, she serves as a device to let him leave the house and do what he pleases more often. Which makes up the core of his story as he needs to do that quite a bit.

He travels around to different psychics trying to find a way to talk to his brother and get closure. Some of them are pretty funny, but of course it’s building up to the obvious payoff of meeting Matt Damon’s character, who tries to escape his brother’s pushy ways by going to England to visit Charles Dickens’ house…it makes much more sense when you watch the movie, trust me. He can’t escape his demons anywhere he goes, mostly thanks to the internet.

One of the other great scenes comes when Marcus is trying to get on a train and his hat is knocked off his head, causing him to miss it. But then the train blows up anyway so I guess he didn’t miss much…this really becomes resonant once Marcus and Matt Damon meet up.

Really, this is a movie about dealing with death, plain and simple. People do it in different ways. While sadly people in the real world can’t get closure as easy as they could by simply coaxing Matt Damon into reading their palms and getting messages from them, the film still shows very realistic portrayals of people who just don’t know what else to do. And it goes both ways, as Damon’s character is human, too, and being a bridge between the living and the dead is tough, and taxing. He has emotions too, and his curse compromises any deeper relationships inevitably. Nobody gets off scot free.

I think the point is really driven home by De France, who has the smallest of the three main roles but also the most pivotal point of the film – as she is the only one who has seen the Hereafter, nameless in the film itself, and come back alive. It’s depicted in a blinding white cacophony of shaking images, with shadowy figures stumbling drearily around in a brief flash. This glimpse of what lies beyond is chilling and provocative – what else is there that the movie hasn’t shown us? It’s downright brilliant. By showing us very little Eastwood has sparked the imagination and crafted something truly inventive, intriguing.

Hereafter is just an awesome, breathtaking journey, and Eastwood’s finest directorial venture that I’ve seen to date. There’s just something so good about this movie, like a plate of hot chocolate chip cookies in the afternoon after school. Hereafter is enthralling and sophisticated, with a maturity to its cinematography and scriptwriting that is commendable – it is nothing but a pure joy to behold. I don’t know what the movie of 2010 is going to be yet, but I can tell you that Hereafter is a definite contender and a fine, fine piece of filmmaking at any cost. Seminal.