Eternity: Till Death Do Us Part? Not So Fast!
By Chris Knight
Rating: C-
I am fascinated by stories set in the afterlife. After all, I’ll either be spending a great deal of existence there eventually, or I just — won’t. Either way, it’s a great way to pass the time.
But some levels are better than others; just ask Dante. Among the best: 1998’s After Life from Hirokazu Kore-era, in which the newly deceased are allowed to pick one memory to take with them into the hereafter; and David Lowery’s A Ghost Story (2017), remarkably moving even though Casey Affleck’s wraith is of the hackneyed sheet-with-two-eyeholes variety.
Oh, and a shout-out to TV’s The Good Place (2016-2020), which among many other things gave us a dramatization of philosophy’s “trolley problem” with actual trolleys. Splat!
Eternity, directed and co-written by David Freyne, has much in common with another great afterlife story, Albert Brooks’ 1991 romantic comedy Defending Your Life. Alas, it pales (like a ghost!) in comparison, containing nowhere near that earlier movie’s intelligence, whimsy or charm.
The premise: Larry and Joan, an elderly couple, die within days of one another, and find themselves in a kind of post-life way station called The Junction. It’s part luxury resort, part trade show, part mall, where the newly deceased can shop for an eternity in which to spend, well, eternity.
Freyne and co-writer Patrick Cunnane have a lot of fun with the idea of narrowly designed heavens, and I enjoyed watching them trot out billboards and video ads for a variety of hereafters.
There are a number of slightly tweaked nostalgic pasts, like Ireland in the 1840s minus the potato famine, Paris in the 1960s but everyone speaks English with a French accent, and “Weimar World,” which is basically pre-war Germany where the Nazis never take over.
Larry and Joan (played by Miles Teller and Elizabeth Olsen, because you also get to be young in the afterlife) have a bigger problem on their hands, however. They’re all set to go to the same afterlife together — until Luke shows up.
Played by Callum Turner, Luke is Joan’s first husband. They married in the early 1950s, and then he went off to fight — and die — in the Korean War. Luke has been waiting in The Junction ever since. Joan can’t decide with which man she wants to spend the rest of her (after)life.
But why? The script hits a bit of a hitch here, because it demands us to believe both that Larry and Joan had such a wonderful 60-plus years they want to spend the rest of time in the same state, AND that Joan and Luke were so perfect she’d be willing to throw away more than a half-century of her second marriage just to reignite the first.
Just one romantic filmgoer’s opinion here, but if my long-ago love showed up waiting for me in the next world, I’d still stick with my longtime spouse. (Someone please send this review to my longtime spouse, preferably anonymously.)
Oh, and the film aims to juice the drama by telling us Luke is insanely more good-looking than Larry, a concept that works on the page but fails spectacularly on the screen when you cast two tall, Hollywood-handsome hunks to play the male leads. Might as well try telling me that Olsen is not ridiculously hot. (Someone please remove that line before sending this review to my longtime spouse.)
And so we’re left with an unbelievable conundrum involving three pretty, petty people who would be better off dead — except they already are. If I had one film memory to take with me into the afterworld, Kore-eda style, this would not be it.
There’s still quite a bit of joy in the movie, mind you, but it all sneaks in at the edges, thanks to a strong supporting cast and so many blink-and-miss-it moments of set dressing.
In the first category, comedian John Early and actress Da’vine Joy Randolph (fun fact: her breakout performance was in the Broadway production of Ghost) play Ryan and Anna, the bumbling afterlife coordinators for Joan and Larry, each trying to steer one half of the couple in a different direction.
And I want to watch Eternity again on the small screen with the pause button handy, just to check out all the “worlds” on tap. For instance, there’s Man Free World #443, which is already fully occupied but there’s a new one opening soon. You can also choose Finance World (greed really is good!), Cowboy World (a.k.a. WestWorld), Food World, ’80s World (yes!) and even Atheist World, which seems like a head-scratcher.
Meanwhile, MAGA World suggests that Hell really is other people (other very specific people), while Infantilizing World seemed a bit risqué, and had me wondering if there was perhaps a Rule 34 World. If you’ve got one devoted to sitcoms and another to bromance, why not?
But you know why I had time to take in all these minutiae? Because the main story is so drab, so poorly constructed and lacking in any real drama, comedy or chemistry. It’s a clever conceit but bungled in the delivery.
It’s also one hour and 52 minutes long, far short of eternity, no matter how it may feel while watching it. Thank heavens for small mercies.
Eternity. Directed by David Freyne. Starring Elizabeth Olsen, Miles Teller, and Callum Turner. In Theatres November 28.