Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant in ""Did You Hear About the Morgans?"View more photos HERE. 
 
 Pure, communal silence can be a wonderful thing, and if you haven't experienced any lately, I commend you to see the first available screening of the new romantic comedy "Did You Hear About the Morgans?" Each of its theoretical punch lines is preceded by an eerie second or two of dead air, followed by the jokelike "payoff," guiltily delivered by one of its game cast members, followed by a longer awkward pause. It's not just the sound of crickets you hear watching this movie. It's the sound of dead crickets. 
 
 Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker play the Morgans, a Manhattan power couple on the outs and the brink of divorce. He cheated on her, citing reasons of infertility-related stress; she is not in the forgiving vein and has already begun thinking about adoption on her own. He wants her back, and proposes a trial reconciliation dinner — after which they witness a murder, which makes them targets themselves.So, it's off to FishOutOfWaterville. Plonk, they're plonked into the federal witness protection program and these liberal blue-state weenies are mixing it up with the red-state, red-meat, red-blooded folk of Ray, Wyo. Grant's character is confronted by a grizzly and by a rodeo; Parker's character learns she's a dead-eye with a rifle. (Sam Elliott and Mary Steenburgen, dignity intact, portray their temporary hosts.) At one point the Morgans share a bull costume, otherwise known as writer-director Marc Lawrence's script.Rooting interest? Couldn't be lower. I like Parker and, even though Grant looks genuinely pained in "Morgans," I like him. For the premise to work, though, the Morgans' pathetic dependency on their BlackBerrys and general sense of privilege would have to be funny, so that we enjoy seeing them knocked down a few pegs. Lawrence made a respectably entertaining rom-com for Grant opposite Drew Barrymore, "Music and Lyrics." But when so many films in this battered genre make money, from "Bride Wars" to "The Proposal" to "The Ugly Truth," Hollywood really has no meaningful incentive to do better. 
 
 mjphillips@tribune.com 
 
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 PG-13 (for some sexual references and momentary violence)Hugh Grant (Paul); Sarah Jessica Parker (Meryl); Sam Elliott (Clay); Mary Steenburgen (Emma); Elisabeth Moss (Jackie); Jesse Liebman (Adam); Michael Kelly (Vincent); Wilford Brimley (Earl)Written and directed by Marc Lawrence; produced by Martin Shafer and Liz Glotzer. A Columbia Pictures release. Running time: 1 43 ||||| Across the Styx, but never out on a limb 
 
 By Michael O'Sullivan 
 
 Friday, October 22, 2010 
 
 For much of its two-hour-plus length, "Hereafter" plays like a smart and stylish thriller. Smart because of the way it pulls back, but only a little bit, from a full-on embrace of its central premise: the existence of an afterlife for the human soul. Stylish because of its cool and bloodless demeanor. The world it depicts - our world, the world of the here and now - is bathed in a deathlike pallor of icy blues and grays, whether set in San Francisco, London or Paris. 
 
 It's a thriller because of the pervasive tone of dread and sadness. For its three main characters, the world is a deeply haunted place indeed. 
 
 At the center of the mostly mesmerizing but finally flawed film is George Lonegan (Matt Damon). In the script by two-time Oscar nominee Peter Morgan ("The Queen" and "Frost/Nixon"), which has been directed with admirable restraint by Clint Eastwood, George is a former professional psychic who has shut down his lucrative Bay Area practice to work as a menial laborer. It seems that his ability to talk to the dead through readings is less the gift one might think than a curse. 
 
 All George has to do is to touch someone's hand and he's plugged into a parallel universe - a universe of actual ghosts and the ghosts of repressed trauma. These days, despite his best efforts, he's forever running away from skeletons: both the kind in the ground and the kind in someone else's closet. 
 
 Needless to say, this makes it kind of hard for George to maintain relationships. The first time he takes a woman's hand, as he does on an abortive first date with a flirtatious cutie from cooking class (Bryce Dallas Howard), he immediately knows everything about her. And I mean everything. So much for leaving something to the imagination. 
 
 But Eastwood's film isn't just about George's romantic problems. Woven into that narrative are two even more compelling story lines. 
 
 While on a vacation, French TV anchor Marie LeLay (Cecile de France) almost drowns, during what we're led to believe is the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. This is the scene that opens the film, and it's a doozy of harrowingly real special-effects. Brought back from the brink of death, Marie soon quits her job to research and write a book on near-death experiences. (The name of the manuscript, "Hereafter," lends the film its title.) 
 
 Meanwhile, in London, a taciturn schoolboy named Marcus (Frankie McLaren) is traumatized when his identical twin, Jason, (George McLaren) is accidentally killed. Marcus spends the rest of the movie trying to contact his dead brother, or to track down somebody who can. At one point, Jason seems to reach from beyond the grave to save Marcus from one of the London subway bombings of 2005, by knocking Marcus's hat off his head. 
 
 It's these dramatic close calls - first the tsunami, then the bombing - that lend the film an air of mounting suspense. Eastwood and Morgan handle them with as little cheesiness as possible, under the circumstances. The tone is not one of skepticism, so much as deadpan acceptance of things we may not understand. 
 
 As the film proceeds, however, something terrible (or perhaps something wonderful) seems to be brewing, something even more dramatic than what's come before. Something that somehow involves not only George, and his ability to connect with the other side, but also Marie and Marcus. It takes the film nearly two hours to get there, but finally, near the end of the movie, all three characters wind up in London, for what we've been led to believe will be a collision - or at least a fusion - of artfully woven plotlines. 
 
 That fusion never takes place. 
 
 Not, at least, in the way that Eastwood and Morgan have been hinting at in "Hereafter's" deliciously creepy, otherworldly build-up. George and Marcus do meet. So do George and Marie. The film is filled with such great little one-on-one scenes. And the best of them are between the living, not between the living and the dead. 
 
 But the big payoff fizzles. By pulling its punches, by refusing to make outlandish claims about a world beyond this one, "Hereafter" avoids the pitfalls of other supernatural thrillers. But it's unable to avoid the even soggier conventions of the movie romance. 
 
 It starts out with a tsunami - and ends up standing in a puddle. 
 
 Contains disturbing disaster and accident scenes, brief crude language and drug and alcohol abuse. In English and some French with English subtitles.
– The highlight of Did You Hear About the Morgans? for most critics is their own joke that Sam Elliott's mustache deserves separate billing. Some reactions: The film is so "lumpish and crude" that Colin Covert saves most of his ire for a geographical offense. "The landscape around Yellowstone, where the film is supposedly set, is one of America's great scenic wonders," he writes in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "The movie was actually filmed in tax-break haven New Mexico, and it looks blah. Inexcusable." If you enjoy silence, Michael Phillips writes in the Chicago Tribune, then this is for you. "Each of its theoretical punch lines is preceded by an eerie second or two of dead air, followed by the jokelike 'payoff,' guiltily delivered by one of its game cast members, followed by a longer awkward pause." Oh, come on, Robert Wilonsky writes in LA Weekly. This "multiplex meringue" is a "thoroughly delightful throwaway," and Hugh Grant is "the most reliable deadpan smart-ass this or that side of the Atlantic." No, really, this is unbearable. Sarah Jessica Parker wears a look of "Dostoevskian unhappiness," while Grant acts as though "he just pulled an all-nighter in an emergency room," Michael O'Sullivan writes in the Washington Post. "If they're not having fun, how the heck are we supposed to?"