Drama. Starring Matt Damon and Cecile De France. Directed by Clint Eastwood. (PG-13. 129 minutes. In English and in French with English subtitles. At Bay Area theaters.) 
 
 That Clint Eastwood has become a great filmmaker is something few would contest, yet the nature of his greatness is as surprising as it's little understood. You can talk about the pristine technique - the new film, "Hereafter," provides lots of examples. But what's much more fascinating and enriching is Eastwood's Olympian vision, the sympathetic and all-encompassing understanding of the pain and grandeur of life on earth. 
 
 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. Make no mistake, Eastwood's directorial output, from "Mystic River" on, constitutes the 21st century's first cinematic marvel, and "Hereafter" is among the best things he has ever done. 
 
 Like Alejandro Inarritu's "Babel" and Wayne Kramer's "Crossing Over," "Hereafter" is an attempt to convey the bigness of life though a story involving disparate characters in different parts of the world. 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. 
 
 Importance is earned, shot by shot, scene by scene. Self-importance is assumed, and is largely a matter of adopting an attitude and keeping a straight face. 
 
 Eastwood takes us into the story from the opening shots. From a hotel, we see a beach resort, filmed with the kind of color saturation we might see in an old postcard. The effect is reassuring, but misleading. A vacationing French journalist (Cecile De France) goes into the village to buy presents. And suddenly, there's a rumbling, the sight of a rising wave, and within seconds, buildings are washed away, and cars, trucks and people are all caught in a rushing flood. 
 
 There have been tidal waves in movies before, but what makes this one so effective (aside from being perfectly realized on the technical end) is that Eastwood stays with De France. He doesn't show us an overview, so that we might get our bearings. Rather, we experience the catastrophe from one person's terrified and completely subjective vantage point. It's as close as you'll ever be to a tidal wave without getting wet. 
 
 "Hereafter" features three central characters that have been touched by death. The newswoman drowns and is revived. A construction worker (Matt Damon) in San Francisco is cursed with an ability to talk to the dead. (If he touches someone, he finds himself in communication with that person's dead relatives - so much for his love life.) And a little boy in London develops an all-consuming desire to talk to a recently deceased loved one. These stories play out separately, then gradually move toward one another. 
 
 Notice how every shot communicates something precise, whether it's plot detail or a thought or emotion. As an actor, Eastwood is used to breaking up a script into a succession of specific actions, and he does the same as a director. Such meticulousness serves his actors well and allows Eastwood to take his time within scenes and let them expand and feel lived in. He never wastes his audience's time, because he is always feeding it new information. 
 
 Eastwood's practical unwillingness to neglect any actor ends up giving "Hereafter" a humane essence: Everybody is important, not just Damon as the tortured psychic or De France as a breezy extrovert deepened by trauma. 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. 
 
 The ironic result of all this meticulous care is that we don't see Eastwood's hand but rather have the illusion that this gallery of humanity is telling the story for him. It's the most self-effacing way to do great work, and it's an approach that couldn't be more suited to this material. The film's notion that people share a common destiny, that they're participating in some overarching order, that they're being watched over by a benevolent all-seeing understanding, doesn't need to be spelled out. It has its analogue and expression in Eastwood's technique. 
 
 He just tells the story, and we get it. 
 
 -- Advisory: This film contains sexual situations. 
 
 This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle ||||| Hereafter 
 
 October 19, 2010 
 
 Clint Eastwood's "Hereafter" considers the idea of an afterlife with tenderness, beauty and a gentle tact. I was surprised to find it enthralling. I don't believe in woo-woo, but then neither, I suspect, does Eastwood. This is a film about the afterlife that carefully avoids committing itself on such a possibility. The closest it comes is the idea of consciousness after apparent death. This is plausible. Many near-death survivors report the same memories, of the white light, the waiting figures and a feeling of peace. 
 
 One of the characters seems to have a genuine psychic gift. But is he in fact communicating with people beyond the grave? Some form of telepathy might be possible, and he may simply be receiving what his subjects desire or need to be told by their dead loved ones. He brings nothing from beyond the grave that his clients could not have formed in their living minds. 
 
 
 
 This is a subject that lends itself to sensation and psychic baloney. It's astonishing how many people believe New Age notions, which have the attraction of allowing believers to confer supernormal abilities on themselves and others without the bother of plausibility. Eastwood's film will leave such people vaguely uneasy. It believes most psychics are frauds. It supposes one who seems to be the real thing, but what, exactly, is he real about? 
 
 
 
 This is a film for intelligent people who are naturally curious about what happens when the shutters close. Eastwood tells three primary stories. The stories meet at the end, in one of those coincidences so beloved by multiple-strand movies. Is this possible? Yes. Is it likely? No. A coincidence never is. That's why we notice them. Throughout the film, the characters behave in ways that seem reasonable enough, and possibilities are left open, which is as it should be. We must live the lives we know and not count on anything beyond the horizon. 
 
 
 
 "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. 
 
 
 
 I won't describe here the traumatic surprises some of them experience. In the surprises as in everything else, "Hereafter" is believable. There are terrifying events, but Eastwood handles them not for sensation but to show how close we all are, at any moment, to oblivion. In the case of Marie, she undergoes the near death experience we often hear reported, with the white light and the figures. Are people in such a state already dead, or are they experiencing visions generated by the human mind in its final shutdown mode? 
 
 
 
 The powers of the Damon character seem to be authentic, although what they prove is hard to say. There is a moment handled with love and delicacy in which he says something that is either true or isn't, but is a kindness either way. When he holds a stranger's hands he experiences a flash of telepathic insight, but the movie never declares that his insights literally come from dead spirits. 
 
 
 
 Eastwood and his actors achieve a tone that doesn't force the material but embraces it: Not dreamlike, but evoking a reverie state. These characters are not hurtling toward the resolution of a plot. There is no "solution" to their stories. There are various degrees of solace, or not. They don't punch the dialogue. They lack the certainty to impose themselves. George in particular is reserved and sad, because his power has become a burden to him. 
 
 
 
 There's a sweet subplot involving Melanie (Howard), who he meets as a partner in a cooking class. She has experienced loss. George doesn't want to enter her mind. He yearns for a normal life. The ability to read minds would be an unbearable curse. The way his gift affects their relationship is stark and poignant. Marie, the newsreader, is played by Cecile de France in such a fresh and likable way that our sympathy is engaged and we understand that whatever happened to her in the first terrifying scene has fundamentally changed her. 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. And notice Richard Kind, so affecting as a man who has lost his wife. 
 
 
 
 The movie is an original screenplay by Peter Morgan ("The Queen"). Eastwood told me Morgan doesn't believe in an afterlife. I don't know if Eastwood does, either. His film embodies how love makes us need for there to be an afterlife. It is the film of a man at peace. He has nothing to prove except his care for the living. 
 
 
 
 Incorporates a little wording from my blog entry from the Toronto film festival premiere. ||||| Across the Styx, but never out on a limb 
 
 By Michael O'Sullivan 
 
 Friday, October 22, 2010 
 
 For much of its two-hour-plus length, "Hereafter" plays like a smart and stylish thriller. Smart because of the way it pulls back, but only a little bit, from a full-on embrace of its central premise: the existence of an afterlife for the human soul. Stylish because of its cool and bloodless demeanor. The world it depicts - our world, the world of the here and now - is bathed in a deathlike pallor of icy blues and grays, whether set in San Francisco, London or Paris. 
 
 It's a thriller because of the pervasive tone of dread and sadness. For its three main characters, the world is a deeply haunted place indeed. 
 
 At the center of the mostly mesmerizing but finally flawed film is George Lonegan (Matt Damon). In the script by two-time Oscar nominee Peter Morgan ("The Queen" and "Frost/Nixon"), which has been directed with admirable restraint by Clint Eastwood, George is a former professional psychic who has shut down his lucrative Bay Area practice to work as a menial laborer. It seems that his ability to talk to the dead through readings is less the gift one might think than a curse. 
 
 All George has to do is to touch someone's hand and he's plugged into a parallel universe - a universe of actual ghosts and the ghosts of repressed trauma. These days, despite his best efforts, he's forever running away from skeletons: both the kind in the ground and the kind in someone else's closet. 
 
 Needless to say, this makes it kind of hard for George to maintain relationships. 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 I mean everything. So much for leaving something to the imagination. 
 
 But Eastwood's film isn't just about George's romantic problems. Woven into that narrative are two even more compelling story lines. 
 
 While on a vacation, French TV anchor Marie LeLay (Cecile de France) almost drowns, during what we're led to believe is the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. This is the scene that opens the film, and it's a doozy of harrowingly real special-effects. Brought back from the brink of death, Marie soon quits her job to research and write a book on near-death experiences. (The name of the manuscript, "Hereafter," lends the film its title.) 
 
 Meanwhile, in London, a taciturn schoolboy named Marcus (Frankie McLaren) is traumatized when his identical twin, Jason, (George McLaren) is accidentally killed. Marcus spends the rest of the movie trying to contact his dead brother, or to track down somebody who can. At one point, Jason seems to reach from beyond the grave to save Marcus from one of the London subway bombings of 2005, by knocking Marcus's hat off his head. 
 
 It's these dramatic close calls - first the tsunami, then the bombing - that lend the film an air of mounting suspense. Eastwood and Morgan handle them with as little cheesiness as possible, under the circumstances. The tone is not one of skepticism, so much as deadpan acceptance of things we may not understand. 
 
 As the film proceeds, however, something terrible (or perhaps something wonderful) seems to be brewing, something even more dramatic than what's come before. Something that somehow involves not only George, and his ability to connect with the other side, but also Marie and Marcus. It takes the film nearly two hours to get there, but finally, near the end of the movie, all three characters wind up in London, for what we've been led to believe will be a collision - or at least a fusion - of artfully woven plotlines. 
 
 That fusion never takes place. 
 
 Not, at least, in the way that Eastwood and Morgan have been hinting at in "Hereafter's" deliciously creepy, otherworldly build-up. George and Marcus do meet. So do George and Marie. The film is filled with such great little one-on-one scenes. And the best of them are between the living, not between the living and the dead. 
 
 But the big payoff fizzles. By pulling its punches, by refusing to make outlandish claims about a world beyond this one, "Hereafter" avoids the pitfalls of other supernatural thrillers. But it's unable to avoid the even soggier conventions of the movie romance. 
 
 It starts out with a tsunami - and ends up standing in a puddle. 
 
 Contains disturbing disaster and accident scenes, brief crude language and drug and alcohol abuse. In English and some French with English subtitles.
– 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.