What Shakespeare described as the undiscovered country from whose borne no traveler returns is also something less poetic: the subject of a turf war among theologians, charlatans, New Age fabulists and other opportunistic metaphysicians. Like the true believer, Clint Eastwood's latest – with the unsubtle title “Hereafter” – aims to prove itself of a modern, post-Enlightenment mindset by exposing various con-artists out to exploit the grieving through the pretense of communicating with the dead. In an amusing bit of mockery, various kinds of mediums — channellers, spiritualists and Electronic Voice Phenomena technicians — are paraded and punctured. To these scammers, we could give the advice: Don’t sell manure by calling it chocolate pudding. Alas, most people don’t have the nose to tell the difference, which is not only the open secret of their success, but the trap the film itself falls into. All the finger-pointing comes with the firm belief that while those other guys are fakes, the film’s chosen guy – Matt Damon, whose charm is blunted by the requirement he mope through the story – is the Real Deal. Courtesy of a dramatic sound effect whenever Mr. Damon takes hold of someone’s hands, we are cued that genuine contact has been made. Then Mr. Eastwood takes over with visuals of light and vaguely defined people. Matt Damon sees blurry people, in other words, while the film’s other characters either saw blurry people but didn’t understand, or want to talk to blurry people so they can fulfill the emotional needs of their grief. The result is rather deflationary: Where’s the drama in pitting characters against the great unknown when the film establishes clearly, within its own internal logic, the truth it wants? It’s writing from Ayn Rand’s School of Fictional Reasoning, also known as rigging the game.

The only ghost that haunts the film, then, is the agenda of Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Peter Morgan, who wrote the excellent scripts for Frost/Nixon and The Queen but here delivers a script better off exorcised. And that agenda involves shameless pandering to pseudo-scientific pop-philosophy, the kind of feel-good nihilism Nietszche decried as negating life in favour of an afterlife. When science is dragged in to provide credibility to recycled ideas, Morgan doesn’t miss out on an opportunity to deliver a jab. The film’s only scientist is made to proclaim herself a former atheist who no longer denies the truth of near-death experiences. In fact, she actively researches them despite the allegedly heavy stigma attached to that line of inquiry. How convenient for Cecile de France’s crack reporter trying to put herself back together by understanding her near-death experience; she gets to run around citing “irrefutable” scientific evidence that her experience wasn’t merely the theatrics of an oxygen-deprived brain.

Had there been a shred of honesty in Morgan’s treatment of near-death experiences, he might have considered, for example, that there is no universal agreement on what constitutes a near-death experience. Crucially, he might have given some thought to research showing that near-death experiences can be induced in people by electrically stimulating the brain. At the very least, he could have avoided flimsy inductive reasoning. In answer to the question of why many near-death experiences are described so similarly, one could point to the dominant cultural image of the “white light” seen by the revived. Or one could point out that humans share the same anatomy, a biological fact that makes the coincidental seem less like coincidence.

Going Soft When It Should Not

But what are we do with a film that undercuts its ambitions with timidly conceived ideas? Morgan and Eastwood can’t deliver a concrete vision of the hereafter beyond inoffensive pop-culture clichés. The aforementioned white light and blurry people are all we get, and even then Eastwood pulls back on the sights and sounds to avoid seeming too committed. When the opportunity comes to speculate further the script wimps out, though some might confuse it with thoughtful ambiguity. Give me a film like What Dreams May Come any day. Richard Matheson’s book may have been goofy in pretending to know what the afterlife is like (based on “research”), but the film, stripped of the pretense, was content with offering a visually inventive, endlessly delightful, and above all committed fantasia on life after death.

What Dreams May Come offers another lesson for films dealing with love, death and grief: emoting is key. Though it veers close to melodramatic hokum, passion and energy ultimately make What Dreams May Come an irresistibly romantic narrative force. So, too, with Hugh Jackman’s turn in Darren Arafnofsky’s cryptic but supremely lyrical arthouse masterpiece, The Fountain, which comes with an added benefit: A story about trying to stave off death, not merely deal with the gaping aftermath.

The emotional tone in Hereafter is dull, however, despite occasional flashes of the strengths that make Eastwood a director’s director. Matt Damon’s sensitive character broods about not being able to touch anyone for fear of knowing everything about them. (The pesky dead don’t know the concept of too much information, apparently.) Cecile de France, as the reporter risking her credibility to expose a “conspiracy of silence,” spends most of the movie in a daze without even an ounce of mania or obsession. And the third character, a young boy who loses his twin brother in a car accident, is only capable of single-minded despondency. With all the gloom, one would expect the film to ultimately sink into the kind of heart-wrenching sorrow that defined Eastwood’s incalculably superior Million Dollar Baby. Instead, Morgan wraps things up using a groaning technique borrowed from romantic comedies: coincidence as the great provider of unbelievable happy endings. Please, don’t sell us rubbish and tell us it’s precious, even if one person’s junk can be someone else’s treasure.

Entertainment: zero stars
Craft: * (out of two)

Hereafter. Directed by Clint Eastwood. Screenplay by Peter Morgan. Starring Matt Damon, Cecile de France, Jay Mohr, Bryce Dallas Howard, George McLaren, Frankie McLaren and Thierry Neuvic. 129 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Mr. Sisa, Assistant Editor, may be contacted at fsisa@thefrontpageonline.com