This vision is consistent in Eastwood's late work, no matter who is doing the screenwriting, and it boggles the mind to realize that this is coming from a guy who, until he was about 60, was best known as an action hero. This is a subject that lends itself to sensation and psychic baloney. But Eastwood's film isn't just about George's romantic problems. This is the scene that opens the film, and it's a doozy of harrowingly real special-effects. Eastwood takes us into the story from the opening shots. The stories meet at the end, in one of those coincidences so beloved by multiple-strand movies. Eastwood and Morgan handle them with as little cheesiness as possible, under the circumstances. Notice how every shot communicates something precise, whether it's plot detail or a thought or emotion. "Hereafter" stars Matt Damon as George, a man who sincerely believes he's able to have communication with the dead, but has fled that ability and taken a low-profile job; Cecile de France as Marie, a newsreader on French television; Bryce Dallas Howard as Melanie, a young cooking student with a fearful dark place inside; Richard Kind as a man mourning his wife; and Frankie and George McLaren as twin brothers, one of whom is struck by a truck and killed. The powers of the Damon character seem to be authentic, although what they prove is hard to say. These stories play out separately, then gradually move toward one another. Thus, the little boy's mother (Lyndsey Marshal), is more than a desperate alcoholic, and Bryce Dallas Howard gets to create a rich character as Melanie, the psychic's partner in a San Francisco cooking class - a young woman masking pain under a superficial facade that has become her personality. It seems that his ability to talk to the dead through readings is less the gift one might think than a curse. Frankie McLaren, as the solemn and earnest little boy seeking his dead twin, takes a character that could have been bathetic and makes him simple and transparent. All three movies are responses to the interconnectedness of the world, but "Hereafter" is by far the most successful, partly because it has the best screenplay - by Peter Morgan ("The Queen") - and partly because it has a director who understands the difference between important and self-important. Not, at least, in the way that Eastwood and Morgan have been hinting at in "Hereafter's" deliciously creepy, otherworldly build-up. 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 the best of them are between the living, not between the living and the dead.
– Clint Eastwood, Matt Damon … what’s not to like about Hereafter? But not all the critics are overly impressed with this spiritual film that touches on the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the 2005 London subway bombings: “The mostly mesmerizing but finally flawed film” mostly “plays like a smart and stylish thriller,” writes Michael O'Sullivan in the Washington Post. But the promise of three separate and “artfully-woven” plotlines coming together for “a collision—or at least a fusion,” is never realized. “The big payoff fizzles.” Mick LaSalle begs to differ: This is one of Eastwood’s best, he writes in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Every shot communicates something precise, whether it's plot detail or a thought or emotion.” The result is a “sympathetic and all-encompassing understanding of the pain and grandeur of life on earth.” In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert concurs: The “enthralling” film “considers the idea of an afterlife with tenderness, beauty and a gentle tact.” Though the subject matter “lends itself to sensation and psychic baloney … this is a film for intelligent people who are naturally curious about what happens when the shutters close.” Another in the thumb's down camp: It tackles big topics "without having anything to say,” writes Kyle Smith in the New York Post. “The movie drags, yet it feels like it's missing an hour. It features three characters on three continents who barely interact with one another. And after 130 minutes, it stops without concluding.” Eastwood recently promoted the film, but ended up talking about his disagreements with President Obama. Watch that interview here.