50/50 (Jonathan Levine, 2011)

As I walked out of 50/50, I was struck by the realization that it didn't get funny until the protagonist got cancer. If nothing else, that speaks to the unorthodox nature of the film. No matter, young Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) gets cancer after only a few minutes of awkward establishment. 50/50 is your usual Apatow-style funny/sentimental movie but with cancer, to which some might reply, "Remember Funny People?" This is different. Where Funny People used the threat of an illness to prompt a reevaluation of life and career. But Adam Lerner is not George Simmons. He's too young to have a life to reevaluate. He's still building the career he can look back on later. As Adam says during a breakdown late in the film, he's never even told a girl he loved her.

That flecks 50/50 with an affecting quality I'm not sure is fair but cannot deny hit me hard, especially in its last 40 minutes. Based on screenwriter Will Reiser's own bout with cancer at 24, the film clearly displays the guidance of someone who actually lived this life rather than looking for some easy quirks. That is not to say that the film doesn't suffer from some questionable touches, but at least it takes its subject seriously, even when it's milking cancer for laughs.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Adam, an inspired casting choice that makes instant and thorough use of the actor's gangly physique and boyish but sharp face. He's so thin and spry as to be the last person you'd expect to get sick, but when he gets the diagnosis of a rare, genetic form of cancer from a persistent backache, Gordon-Levitt's frame suddenly looks horribly suited to the harsh regimen of chemotherapy. Jonathan Levine's camera often remains tight on the actor's face throughout the film, everything around him woozy from his delirious despair, and the young man's face grows sallow and sunken over the course of 99 minutes while remaining uncomfortably young, like Sleeping Beauty preserved in youth but hanging near death.


Helping Adam cope with the news is his best friend Kyle (Seth Rogen), who sees cancer as the ultimate weapon in scoring chicks and pushes Adam to get laid to the point of myopia. Rogen plays his usual, ingratiating but well-meaning quip-machine to the hilt here. He can barely contain his glee when he catches Adam's stuck-up girlfriend cheating, and he openly uses his friend's serious ailment to get dates. But if Gordon-Levitt uses his youthful looks to grimly ironic effect, so too does Rogen undermine his own image. Beneath his almost stupefying disregard for his friend's health lies the suggestion that his self-centered attempts to show his friend a good time is nothing but a front for how desperately he wants to avoid thinking about losing who may be the only person who talks to him.

Kyle is just one of a cast of characters Adam must look to for guidance and grounding, and 50/50 plays much of its emotional weight on its supporting cast. Anna Kendrick plays an implausible psychologist-in-training whose blatant lack of professionalism in handling Adam hits the brick wall of that huge, blinding smile, making up for a complete lack of believability with something better: presence. Even less convincing, and without the offsetting humanity, is Bryce Dallas Howard, as ever playing one awful note. As Adam's girlfriend Rachael, she is self-absorbed and selfish to the point of cartoonish bitchiness, so utterly unlikable that we hope she leaves when Adam gives her the chance to walk away when he learns the diagnosis. The film denies Rachael the possibility of being an actual human being, thus avoiding the pathos and depth of a decent human being forced with the difficult choice of having to care for someone you might not know that well. Rachael wants to stay even after being thrown out, but she's given no reason for this and thus only seems more of a stereotype, clinging to Adam just to feel like a good person.

But no one compares to Anjelica Huston, who plays Adam's mother. Huston has to defend her sanity on two fronts, on one side caring for her Alzheimer's-stricken husband as he loses total grip on reality and trying to connect with a reserved Adam on the other. Huston gets the most organically funny lines of the film, and her constant fidgeting and fussing carries a deep pain that tinges even the silliest moments of her overbearing nature. Huston excels at playing matrons who place their reputations and power dynamics over warm connections with their children, but the flashes of pure panic and anguish playing out over her hollowly made-up face tear that Stoic matriarch image to shreds. Diane has nowhere to turn, and Huston perfectly captures the feeling of a woman terrified of losing everything but forced to keep it together for the sake of others. It's a career highlight for Huston, and a performance equaled by few this year.

Admittedly, 50/50 is spotty. Too much of its humor between Adam and Kyle feels standard, and both of Adam's romantic interests don't have enough three-dimensional strength to be much more than contrasts for each other at polar ends of stereotypical females in film. I was also unsure about the use of Alzheimer's as a further emotional punch, though I understood the point of including that sideplot long before Kendrick literally spoke it aloud.* But I loved the gallows humor of Adam's chemo sessions with two older patients played by Philip Baker Hall and Matt Frewer, who playfully tease the kid with grim predictions to mess with him. And while the tonal shift of the final act gives way to almost total despair, Gordon-Levitt's harrowing descent into pure terror and his breakthroughs with friends and family make for some honest tear-jerking. Gordon-Levitt is so affecting, so raw, that he retroactively makes up for many of my earlier quibbles, and I couldn't get 50/50 out of my head for hours after I saw it.

*Having said that, Serge Houde's performance is one of the few horribly believable portrayals of Alzheimer's I've seen lately. The look of spaced-out absence and perennial curiosity he knows not to try to satiate because he'll just forget it is all too real for me and my experiences with my grandfather. When Adam tells his father he loves him late in the film, Houde's uncomprehending face and gentle but neutral one-word response was so familiar I burst into tears.

The Help (Tate Taylor, 2011)

The Help takes the obliviousness of Kathryn Stockett's 2009 hit novel and magnifies it to the level of the dangerously ignorant. The novel at least had the decency to include a modicum of ambiguity and the suggestion that Stockett could vaguely remember some of her 3rd-grade social studies lessons on the Civil Rights Era. The film, on the other hand, is erected out of pure fantasy, set in a plastic, pastel Jackson, Miss. that has all the authenticity of Lars von Trier's Dogville set. Stockett's novel dropped whiffs of the true reality of 1960s Jackson among her dialect-ridden, charmed view of social prejudice like talismans to ward off criticism, but childhood friend Tate Taylor has to condense 500 pages into two-and-a-half hours. Given the paper-thin characterization of the novel's figures, this means that the obliterated subplots and truncated, blunt dialogue serve to make the material even more farcical.

In fairness, Taylor does try to refashion Stockett's book around the African-American characters instead of a white guilt cipher. But this idea goes no farther than letting Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis), a maid who becomes the first to tell her stories of life serving whites, narrate the movie. Soon enough, focus is back on Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan (Emma Stone), a recent college grad and sort-of feminist who, despite no clear identity before leaving for school and a blindness to current events (at least in the book), decides to get the black perspective of Jackson life. In the novel, Skeeter is almost jaw-droppingly entitled and never criticized for it. Here, Taylor dispenses with nearly all of her story, which would be a significant improvement if he also cut down her screen time to match. But no, regardless of who had to go in to record ADR, this is still Skeeter's story.

Completely unaware of the risks of such an enterprise despite living in one of the hotbeds of the Civil Rights Movement, Skeeter puts the lives of maids in jeopardy just to please a scabrous New York Jewish elite editor—no commas because Taylor/Stockett seem to use each of these terms as if they all mean the same thing—named Elaine Stein (Mary Steenburgen, who somehow gives the most one-note performance in a film of unambiguous heroes and villains). For some reason, Stein is never shown sitting at her desk like a professional, instead lounging on the thing dangling her legs like a naughty secretary or brashly calling from a restaurant whilst devouring adoring younger men. Mocking the ivory tower insularity of the New England elites, both Stockett and Taylor have her flippantly telling Skeeter to hurry up and get the interviews she needs for a book "before this whole civil rights thing blows over."

The rest of the archetypes are spread out among dignified, frumpy sexless (yet child-inundated) maids and shrieking housewives who put a glossed look on racism so audiences don't have to be reminded that some of their parents (or even friends) used to beat and hang people for the color of their skin. This brigade of over-hairsprayed, overacting harridans is led by Hilly Holbrook, played by a Bryce Dallas Howard with such narrowed eyes there simply must be a gag reel of her walking into furniture by mistake. One never gets any clue as to why Skeeter was ever such close friends with her or Elizabeth (Ahna O'Reilly), a lab-grown Betty Draper cloned with amphibian DNA to fill the sequence gaps. But then, Skeeter herself is such a blank slate for the author's guilt and wish fulfillment that presumably anyone could find something to project in her.

As for the maids, Aibileen is the chief representative, but she is also joined by Minny, de-sassed from her ludicrous novel form into someone who might conceivably have lived past the age of 13 in a town where lip from a black woman could equal jail time at best. Stockett wrote the character with her actor friend Octavia Spencer in mind, and Spencer plays the role here. Her bug eyes are their own punchline, always bulging in anticipation of reprisal when she can't keep her mouth shut and regarding any and all white people with disbelief, as if unable to comprehend just how ridiculous they are. Minny is the most anachronistic element in this story, modeled after a modern, no-nonsense black woman, but now that Spencer can say the lines instead of Stockett writing in loose dialect, she nearly makes the thin comic relief of the character work. She shares some organic laughs with Aibileen that work far better than the more staged comic pieces, precisely because these smaller, more intimate moments feel like conceivable gallows humor between two people suffering through the same endless torment.

Nevertheless, Minny's neutering makes her extraneous, and the already unnecessary side-plot with her airheaded but sweet new boss, Celia Foote (Jessica Chastain), only more distracting. I would venture to guess that Stockett intended Celia's character to comment on how much poor whites shared with blacks in their ostracizing from the realm of "classy" whites, but her depiction as a kindhearted, racially blind piece of "white trash" is antithetical to the true, vile nature of racism among poor, which is almost always more vicious for the jealousy and resentment of being in the same financial bracket as minorities. Having said that, Chastain gives as good a performance as the two black leads with her equally limited role: virtually unrecognizable from her turn earlier this year as the embodiment of human spirit in The Tree of Life, Chastain speaks with a squeaky hiss that sounds as if the air for her words came not from her lungs but wind blowing through the empty space between her ears and out her mouth and nostrils. She couldn't be any further from her other breakout role this year, and the sheer range she's shown within releases spaced apart by mere months is, one hopes, a sign of stardom to come.

Much talk has already circulated regarding the awards potential of Davis' performance, and it's true that she makes a startling presence. Confined by Stockett's conception of Aibileen as a loving maid who seemingly exists to raise and cheer up white babies, Davis nevertheless injects steel into the character. She's no more complex a character, but Davis' fearsome visage etches pain on this glorified Mammy figure. If anything, she conveys too much strength to be taken seriously as a humble, submissive domestic: there's more fire in her face than Spencer's. When one looks into those hardened eyes, however, one can also find humor and love, and if she has to play a maid who, in one way or another, always gives of herself to a white person, at least Davis makes that role almost believable on a human level.

I mention all these actresses because there are some genuinely solid performances here. While the Stepford women of Jackson shriek and scream and hiss, depicting racism as a matter of peer pressure instead of an endemic social ill, Spencer, Davis and Chastain elevate a film that doesn't deserve them. But not even they can distract from the shortcuts and stereotypes thrown at the screen for easy identification. Skeeter's mother, an imperious yet unchallenged force in the book, is here softened by Allison Janney. Taylor condenses the gradual progression of Charlotte's illness into a single line, and I must say that "My daughter's upset my cancerous ulcers!" is my favorite non-sequitur, crass exploitation of a terminal disease since "I got the results of the test back, I definitely have breast cancer." Skeeter too finds the shortest distance to her moral awakening, openly sniping Hilly from the start and eroding any plausibility of her supposedly close friendship with Jackson's resident witch. Skeeter's arc revolves around the mystery of what happened to her loving maid Constantine, who disappeared just before the young woman returned from college, and we're meant to track her moral development through this uncooked subplot that serves only to not-really drive a wedge between mother and daughter.

Constantine is the downfall of both the novel and the film. A repository for Stockett's idealized memories of her own maid, Demetrie, Constantine appears in flashbacks that reduce the woman to an utter fabrication, Aibileen without the tangibility. My mouth actually fell open in horror at seeing Cicely Tyson, an icon, simply appear to a teenage Skeeter, so rail-thin, shriveled and toothless that she resembled less a human being with her own life and story than a savior version of Baron Samedi. Constantine exists solely for beatification, despite how little say she gets in literary or cinematic form. All she does is buck up Skeeter, which Stockett interprets as true motherly love. Hilariously, she gave an interview in which she admitted that, when she spoke to white families that used to have a maid, they remembered the workers with fondness and love. But when it came to the maids, well, let's take a look: "When I spoke to black people it was surprising to see how removed they were emotionally from those they worked for. That was not always the case, but it was one of the dynamics that struck me. Sometimes it was a total disregard. It was just a job."

The interviewer, of course, didn't press this, but the question arises: did Demetrie truly love young Kathryn, who incidentally grew up in the '70s and '80s despite people passing this book off as autobiography? I would love to know if, at any moment, Stockett remotely entertained the possibility that the maid she has placed on a pedestal for raising her, for empathizing with her, really just viewed her as a job to make oppressive wages to feed her own children. I think that she did, in some dark recess of her mind, and the result is Constantine, a icon carved out of blessed wood that Stockett uses to chase such life-altering thoughts away like a broom to a raccoon. The resolution of Constantine's fate in the novel is overwrought, but it at least cast Skeeter's mother as a more accurate face of racism than the sparkle-bright young ladies of the Junior League, revealing how nearly three decades of service and invaluable contributions could not stop a white person from acting with cold impersonality. The film, however, recasts the revelation with regret on behalf of Charlotte, and she and Skeeter suffer no fallout or profound change for it. It's just there for another tearjerker in another film that makes so many intervallic leaps between cutesy comedy and shameless manipulation it feels like a bebopification of sentimentality.

And so, the film resolves itself for maximum audience pleasure: Hilly turns into a dozen crows that scatter into the winds, Muggles and wizards learn to live in harmony, and a baby named Barack raises his tiny, large-eared head in Hawaii and coos the word "Change." Stein, who exists to be a hard-ass to Skeeter (and an inconsistent one, first aware of the risks facing maids and then expecting more than a dozen interviews later), somehow lets Skeeter's book be released with the most hysterically dumb cover I've ever seen. The baby blue cover sports only a dove as its centerpiece, halfheartedly justified as being linked to the budding hippie movement. I just found it amusing that even the goddamned object on the book cover is white.

The Help, even in its semi-ambiguous novel form, cocoons open racism as a thing of the past. It doesn't say that racism is over, per se, but it clearly wants us to admire how far we've come. But when Jackson only recently found itself the subject of another high-profile case of race violence—in this case the murder of a black man by racist teens who shouted "White power!" as they beat him and ran over him in a truck—maybe we shouldn't be so aghast at how things "used" to be. But no, we are instead treated to the running joke of Minny's revenge against Hilly, a dastardly deed involving a pie and a mounting sense of dread, not in the reveal but in the dawning realization that this work really will sink so low for a laugh. Naturally, it works as a crowd-pleaser, but it is so insipidly dumb, Stockett writing herself out of the true conclusion to it (and the release of Skeeter's book itself) with the threat of mutually assured social destruction. But do you know how that story really ends? It doesn't end with Minny in prison where she can tell the world of Hilly: it ends with her being killed and her house firebombed. Those might not even be two separate actions. It ends with Aibileen not simply fired but completely stripped of what little she has and possibly the target of violence. It ends with Skeeter mostly likely being raped for being a race traitor and definitely with her family crippled economically. These are not pleasant endings, and I do not "want" to see them, at least in the sense that I would ever like to spend an evening seeing such sights. But if you're going to make a film about '60s Jackson, you should show the truth, not what will only unsettle audiences in the safest way possible.

So what, in the end, are we left with? A movie that hinges its biggest payoff on a flight of pure revisionist fantasy designed to make modern audiences feel good about themselves, complete with emotional moments that are, in almost every occurrence, tied to a black person helping a white. Whether it is Aibileen's insulting "You is kind, you is smart" speech to little Mae Mobley, the maids agreeing to speak after Hilly crosses the line (their assent delivered with a collective "mmm-hmm" that throbs through Aibileen's house like an A/C unit switching on), and finally the dénouement of the two supposedly lead black maids stopping everything to cheerlead Skeeter getting a job. This trivialization of the '60s has been defended for its nonsensical feel-good whimsy by those who feel validated for having a cry over these prop cutouts of suffering. But those looking for a genuinely inspiring story of overcoming hardships associated with the racial serfdom that persists today—a recent Pew Research Center release showed the median net worth of a white household at 20 times that of a black family—should read this account of a conversation the daughter of a maid had with the grown-up child of the family that employed her. It's heartbreaking, enraging, unexpectedly uplifting, defiantly confrontational, and it ends with a punchline that is not only earned but truly hilarious and vindicating. In other words, it's everything The Help isn't.

Hereafter

If the word "ponderous" did not exist, one would invent it to describe Hereafter. "Ponderous" is such a great word: one cannot say it would communicating its meaning merely through diction. It forces one's register lower, forcing the short "o" sound out in booming baritone like the blast of a great war horn echoing around a mountain. It's such a noble word, in fact, that while anyone should be able to write it down, only the most refined and eloquent of British-accented speakers should be allowed to say it aloud.

If it seems I have lost track of the review before it has even started, that is because merely thinking about the word "ponderous" has given me more joy and provoked more thought than anything in the total of Hereafter's two and a half hours. If there is anything positive to be found in the movie's plodding, half-baked, hollow treatises on the possibility of life after death, it is that Clint Eastwood's lifeless direction may finally swing people around to my side. Perhaps America's most coddled filmmaker has at last pushed his luck too far.

It takes balls to open a film that has nothing to do with any real life tragedy with the real life tragedy of the Indian Ocean tsunami, and the shamelessness of the opening segment sets a low bar the film never manages to clear. Focusing on Marie (Cécile de France), a French television journalist on holiday, the sequence plays out in clumsily animated CGI that leads to a choreographed setpiece that appears to want to excite more than terrify. As the water carries Marie and everything else in its unstoppable crush, we get cheap glimpses of cars crashing into people and power lines falling into the water and zapping nearby souls. Worse still, the POV shots of the camera moving through the water feel like a flume ride at Disneyland, and they're about as spiritually rewarding. Worse still, Marie drowns and spends a few moments legally dead, during which time she crosses over to the other side and sees the stereotypical bright light. The digital effects here are distracting, if more cleverly done than the cheap wash of water previously seen, and the tease of the afterlife does nothing to spark curiosity, much less wonder. Eastwood is clearly out of his element here, but no other film has more sorely tested the idea whether he has any directorial element at all.

Jim Emerson recently posted some serious thoughts on Eastwood's supposed legacy as a director that track closely enough to my own that I need not enumerate my issues with him here (or at least, not again). Where I disagree with Emerson is in his claim that, apart from the classicist gloss Eastwood paints over his films, there's nothing in them to make any one seem, on its face, a Clint Eastwood film. That's largely true, but there are a few recurring themes. Chief among them in his modern work is the idea of lost innocence, a realm Steven Spielberg has been plumbing his entire creative life. Eastwood, however, tends to enjoy more critical adulation for his supposed maturity on the subject where Spielberg is too much of a man-child. As it so happens, I recently returned to Sir Steve's Empire of the Sun, a film that depicts the decay of a boy's innocence through separation and atrocity, told almost exclusively though visual means that blur the line between subjective romanticism and objective horror in a way that would not be equaled until Guillermo Del Toro took it to the next step with Pan's Labyrinth. When Eastwood wants to communicate lost innocence, he lets it be known that a child was raped, or killed (or both). I posit the question: which of these approaches sounds less nuanced?

Hereafter, a movie about the possibility of a life after death, must naturally also concern death, and one of the several diverging and converging storylines -- yes, Peter Morgan saw Crash and Babel and apparently thought the network narrative had not sufficiently been snuffed -- involves two adorable, precocious twin brothers. Is one of them abused or killed? Check. Oh, and they also care for a mother who's an alcoholic (and a junkie, because when it rains it destroys beaches in Thailand, killing hundreds of thousands pours). The surviving lad, Marcus, cannot cope with losing his brother, and his numb reaction to being placed in foster care matches up with Marie's distraction back home in Paris.

Then, Eastwood introduces the main arc, that of George Lonegan (Matt Damon), a construction worker who, we learn, has the ability to communicate with the dead. No, really. You'd be forgiven for thinking he was a fraud, for the yes/no questions he asks his clients are of the same sort that charlatans use to lead gullible and vulnerable payers. In fact, when Morgan's script addresses the frauds, it must paint them in the most absurd light possible just to make George's style plausible, calling into question how anyone could be fooled.

George, of course, just wants to leave that side of his life behind him, saying on two occasions that his ability "isn't a gift. It's a curse." He takes night classes on cooking, where he meets nepotism personified, Bryce Dallas Howard, who shows up late to the first lesson because she was playing the Anne Hathaway role in M. Night Shyamalan's remake of The Devil Wears Prada -- the twist is that it's actually the Devil! Howard brings all her halting, overacted anti-charm to the part of Melanie, whose presence is cut mercifully short when she gets close to George and insists he read her when she learns of his powers. I don't want to give away what the reading reveals, but if you've been paying attention so far you can guess when I say "double check."

The problem with network narratives is that it's difficult to transition between storylines without editing arbitrarily, and rarely has this flaw been so evident. Before we spend enough time with anyone to care about their issues and their pain, Eastwood leaps countries and continents to deal with the most tenuously related bullshit. I've often been nonreactive to something meant to be sad in a film, but never have I been so utterly unmoved by the death of a child on-screen. All I could think about was the absurd editing of a van with a large grill braking before striking the poor British lad, who then somehow flipped up and over the grill to smash into the windshield. I couldn't be expected to believe in this film's vision of an afterlife because it doesn't have any care for physics in its life-life.

That laziness is rampant in this picture. Eastwood needs to stop scoring his films. There, the end. John Carpenter has a way with electronic minimalism. Robert Rodriguez has a raucous Latin-rock-jazz flare. Clint Eastwood perennially sounds like he's tuning the instruments for the actual musicians who never arrive. I always hold out hope for the films he scores that the three-note guitar and repeating piano chord will morph into something atmospheric in the vein of Ry Cooder's Paris, Texas score or Neil Young's haunting work on Dead Man, then I remember that those two are accomplished musicians with a deep knowledge of the craft and not some guy on a power trip trying to prove he can do it all. All exposition is handled through dialogue, including a medical diagnosis for George's ability to speak to the dead, and just when you've gotten over the offensiveness of using the tsunami to suck people in, Eastwood chucks in the London Tube bombings for added offensiveness. When Marcus looks for videos on YouTube that talk about death and the afterlife, he first watches a video by a Muslim who speaks of the Qur'an, then Marcus watches another video, this time by an evangelical. If you pay attention to the text of the video description, however, it does not change when Marcus picks another video, so it still talks about the Five Pillars of Islam leading to salvation as a man talks about Jesus. That little moment summed up the entire film for me: no effort whatsoever.

Worst of all is the depiction of the afterlife. It may sound childish and direct to say this, but there is a great charm in the blunt honesty of childish perception. So here it is: I despise this vision of the afterlife. Christopher Hitchens once hilariously described the Judeo-Christian conception of heaven as a "celestial North Korea," in which the supposedly blessed were charged with singing homilies to the "Great Leader" for all eternity. I am reminded of the old stories of Stalinist Russia, in which audiences clapped for hours because the first one who stopped would be sent to the Gulag.

Peter Morgan's vision of a pan-humanist afterlife is even more dull. Voices do not stay with George long because they want to get back to the wonderful existence of the afterlife, yet whenever we catch a glimpse of the world beyond, we see only silhouettes of people standing idly in pure white as if waiting for George to talk to them. They have no real wisdom to impart, because they're trapped in a film that doesn't have anything to say either. They stand in the Elysian Fields waiting for anything interesting to happen. I wonder, then, if they're a reflection of Hereafter's audience.

This is cardboard depth, typified by the emptiness of the character-building traits used to try to make these characters appealing. Marie's experience makes her the one person most worthy of our attention, yet Morgan defines her character in the simplest means, focusing on her reputation as a hard-hitting journalist until suddenly he doesn't, suggesting a breakdown from survivor's guilt until explaining away all the bad things that happened to her as the result of the actions of others. George's quirk is that he loves Charles Dickens, the relevance of which is never shown. I did, however, perk up when Eastwood included a scene of Derek Jacobi, as himself, reading excerpts from Little Dorrit. With Jacobi's classically trained voice and the enduring majesty of Dickens' prose, I had the same look of wonder on my face as Damon and wished I could have listened to that autographed book-on-tape George picked up instead of watching this tired hokum.

And if network narratives diverge on the shakiest of grounds, they fare even worse when everything comes together. A film about death and the afterlife can have no truly explosive dénouement -- I was deeply amused, as ever, by David Edelstein, who wondered aloud if the film might have tried for a big ending by making a metaphysical version of the climax of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, of the characters stepping into a mother ship of death -- but the uneventful finale only underscores the uselessness of what preceded it. Hereafter doesn't have a damn thing to say about death, or life, or life after death, and the maudlin pablum Morgan uses to justify why people might need to believe in an afterlife serves only to throw his fellow atheists under a bus (at which point they would presumably somehow bounce back up into the bus' windshield). Eastwood gets more solid work from Damon, who can make a splash in seemingly anything, and his work with the young, non-professional actors who play the boys stands in sharp contrast to the atrocious job he did with child actors on Gran Torino. But it's all for naught, a decorative flourish on something terrible, like spraying Febreeze on dog shit. Earlier this year, I let Inception off the hook for some of its issues because the ambition and the effervescent cheek of it carried me past the tin-hollow psychology on its questions of reality and surreality.

The problem with Hereafter is that, for its weighty idea, there's no ambition on any level of the project. Not in the tack script, not in Eastwood's workmanlike direction, not even in the performances. It's as if everyone realized halfway through that this picture had no point and went right into CYA mode. The result is a rumination on mortality that makes The Five People You Meet in Heaven look sophisticated and genuine. If nothing else, its lack of narrative cohesion, two-dimensional characters, shameless attempts to elicit an emotional response and clueless depiction of the afterlife proved one thing: Clint Eastwood totally could have directed the finale of LOST.