Friday, April 22, 2011

Supernatural Connections

Earlier today I saw Clint Eastwood's film "Hereafter". It was an unusual movie, and one might be tempted to speculate that its genesis arises out of the director's growing awareness of his mortality. Perhaps it would be too trite and simplistic to do so, because the movie is defined by many of the same themes that have characterized his films. Hereafter isn't about conclusions but about denoument. There isn't the sense of finality and of summing up but instead one of preparing to proceed to the next stage after a fateful turn of events.

When one reflects about it, Eastwood's films have to do with the way in which outsiders form bonds with their communities. They may appear to be singular, arriving with no name and no history as was the case with the seminal westerns of the 50s and 60s, and morphing into characters who seek to preserve a sense of integrity in the face of immense pressures and incompetence. They are, indeed, iconoclasts, but they may be termed as such only with regards to their methods, and not necessarily out of a deep philosophical stance. The vigilante gave way to more nuanced characters as Eastwood aged, and while he will always be identified with the iconic action figure, he has directed thoughtful and meditative films that reflect on the ways in which we all delude ourselves with our obsessions and ambitions. They search for integrity, as was the case with the Marines in the movie "Flag of our Fathers", and are haunted by the ways in which their institutions, with their accompanying cultural component, seem to impose impossible roles that diminish them. Their ideological landscape is not absence nor isolation, but one of protagonists trying to protect against the pressures that seek to explode the social network.

In this case, we have several outcasts. One if the psychic played by Matt Damon, another is a boy by the name of Marcos who has lost his twin brother in an accident, and the third is a damaged French woman who has has a near-death experience. Their lives will intersect and they will come to a new accommodation, one that is pregnant with possibilities.

The music is, as with most of his latter films, graceful and understated. It is the music of meditation, and the pacing settles into a languid pace after the beginning sequence of a tsunami causing havoc. This sequence is particularly disturbing in light of the recent events in Japan a few weeks ago.

Overall, the movie was evocative but it somehow did not affect me as deeply as other recent Eastwood films such as "Letters from Iwo Jima", "Mystic River" and "Gran Torino".  Perhaps it is as the actor Damon exclaimed, Eastwood's "French" film, by which he meant an intellectual and, in its pejorative sense, pretentious exercise. I suppose that in the end it seemed too contrived. It didn't convince me in the same way that the other films did with their inexorable logic. It was resolved in too neat a fashion, and this didn't satisfy me. The other films have elements of conflict but also of loss, and this one somehow seemed to supercede the pathos that might have accompanied this subject matter.

I'm still an admirer of Eastwood's films.

Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2011
Copyrights ORomero 2011

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