Entertainment

Not so happily ever after

Can a void be overstuffed? Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter” brings to gether recent historical events, in cluding a European terrorist attack, plus Charles Dickens and the after life without having anything to say about any of these topics. 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.

Matt Damon plays a reluctant San Francisco psychic who would rather work as a forklift operator than peer into the secrets of people whose departed loved ones inhabit their souls. In Asia and in France, a famed TV newswoman and catastrophe survivor (Cécile De France) gradually accepts that she has died and come back, while in London, a boy (who is played by twins, George and Frankie McLaren) becomes obsessed with what happens after death.

Gradually bridging all of these gaps a la “Babel,” Eastwood creates a compelling and suspenseful atmosphere of latent sorrows — at least on a first viewing, when you can’t figure out what’s going on.

But few will want to see the film twice.

Eastwood’s style is all meatloaf and mashed potatoes — in a piece that begs for eye candy confected by a David Fincher or a Zack Snyder. Eastwood is the kind of guy who tells us we’re in San Francisco with a shot of the Golden Gate Bridge, Paris with the Arc de Triomphe and London with Big Ben. He plays up a line — “It’s not a gift, it’s a curse” — that no director could bring back from the dead.

“Hereafter” contains perhaps the most spectacular scene Eastwood has ever shot — and yet it’s still a little inert. The passage between this world and the next is portrayed with no more imagination than you’d expect on an episode of “Fringe.”

Damon, calm of mien and measured of movements, spends the movie looking as if he’s just emerged from a therapeutic chanting session. Though he has grown as an actor, anguish is not in his reach. You might as well ask Woody Allen to play the president.

Screenwriter Peter Morgan, the cinema’s court reporter of the political class (“Frost/Nixon,” “The Queen”) is, like Eastwood, exploring uncharted territory. Why be so timid about it? It seems likely, from this film and “Gran Torino,” that Eastwood is a secularist, quite possibly an atheist, and he and Morgan tantalize us with the notion that they’re leading up to a God-free take on an afterlife. There is no follow-up, though, except for a clinical scene explaining that there is a lot of consistency in the experiences reported by survivors of near-death experiences.

The script wastes a couple of scenes demonstrating that Damon’s character is vaguely working-class (for no apparent reason except maybe to provide contrast with the glamorous broadcaster) but doesn’t explain why he can afford to live in Nob Hill. Class never gets to play a part in the story anyway. Nor does his fondness (which is brought up about five times) for Charles Dickens, except as a rickety mechanism to get him to London to visit the author’s house and cross paths with the other principal characters. The answer to the plot’s main question — what will finally unite the afterlife trio? — turns out to be “coincidence.”

When an 80-year-old director turns his attention to death, you hope for some insight, or gravitas, or even whimsy or anger. “Hereafter” has none of that. Instead it offers sensitivity and a demure shrug. What would “Gran Torino” ‘s Walt Kowalski say to such a limp and passive film? “Get off my screen.”