'Hereafter': Unusual, but beautiful, Eastwood

When Clint Eastwood's Hereafter ended the other night at its prerelease screening, with the camera pulling up and away from a beamy Matt Damon and Cécile de France, there were bursts of applause. But there were also gripes among the crowd that the film was "draggy," slow. And who knows what the more-than-a-few folks exiting intermittently throughout had thought? Well, not hard to guess.

Which is to say that Hereafter, an uncharacteristically sweet, loping, and meditative film from the 80-year-old, busier-than-ever director, isn't going to please everyone. With its wispy strands of guitar music, its Shyamalanesque visions of the afterlife (blurry figures bathed in white light), and a performance from Damon that's muted, to say the least, the film is startling - mostly for the fact that this quiet cogitation on death comes from Eastwood.

It's as if the cussin' blue-collar retiree of Gran Torino accidentally found himself at a Kieslowski retrospective, and was moved to the core by the late Polish auteur's reflections on fate and finality, interconnecting lives, the mystery of it all. Heck, de France's character, a French TV journalist named Marie, even has posters of herself plastered around Paris - just like Irène Jacob's fashion model did (in Geneva) in Kieslowski's Red.

Of course, Hereafter wasn't written by Eastwood. The screenplay is the work of Peter Morgan, diverging from his typical fare - politically and biographically based projects like The Queen and Frost/Nixon. Maybe he's the one boning up on Kieslowski.

But no matter.

Opening on some unnamed Indonesian beach resort, where Marie and her TV producer lover (Thierry Neuvic) have been resort-ing, Hereafter begins with a Spielberg-scale disaster: a tsunami, freakishly rising from the tranquil waves and flooding the streets, taking out cars and shops and hundreds of thousands of people. Marie is one of them, trying valiantly to save a young girl, and drowning in the effort, in the watery tumult.

She dies. We see that. And then, thanks to two bystanders, she's revived. She returns to Paris, and to work on the news show, but nothing is the same. Her experience has changed her. De France, recently seen in the French gangster bio Mesrine, plays this profoundly shaken soul with a beautiful reticence.