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Matt Damon’s performance dead on arrival in ‘Hereafter’

Matt Damon talks to the dead in "Hereafter," though after awhile, it's hard to tell who's who.

Matt Damon talks to the dead in "Hereafter," though after awhile, it's hard to tell who's who.

This isn't Damon's liveliest performance, and after more than two hours of it, you'll think you've died and gone to "Changeling," another endless Clint Eastwood movie that looked like it was shot through a fish tank plagued by a bloom of green algae.

Certainly "Hereafter" starts with a jolt - a tidal wave swamps a tropical resort, drowning (among others) a French tourist (Cecile de France, her actual name) who dies, then comes back to life after CPR.

Being dead changes her life, and when she returns to her job as a big-time Parisian journalist, she finds she can't reinvest in such banalities as politics, and drops everything (career, beau) to obsessively pursue a book about her insight into the Great Beyond.

De France is a wonderful actress to spend time with, and I'd follow her just about anywhere, but there's a curious lack of urgency and emotional heft to her character's obsession. She talks of it distractedly over cocktails, or matter-of-factly with phlegmatic alpine hospice physicians. This is a case where Eastwood's famed no-rehearsal, one-take approach hurts the movie.

On to Damon, playing a retired San Francisco medium named George who can no longer manage the psychological toll of talking to dead people. It's a conceit that doesn't really make sense on screen, because when he's coerced into a reading, the events are benign, healing "Touched by an Angel" affairs. There are no angry, scary voices on the other side (it's post-partisan), and what we get are exchanges of pleasantries, pleas for forgiveness, etc.

"Hereafter" has better luck in England, where a boy (George McLaren) loses a mother to drugs, then his twin brother to a traffic accident. In his abject loneliness, he launches a touching, determined search for a legitimate medium.

As the movie creeps slowly forward, we see that the three stories will converge, and they do, at a book convention in London where Dickens lover George goes to hear a reading (and where the French journalist is unveiling her new book).

Here, we suspect, George's obstinate refusal to help the bereft will waver. What Dickens lover, after all, would refuse the weepy entreaties of an adorable orphaned boy?

What does not come together is the movie's attitude and tone. While I'm happily vulnerable to the sentimental prospect of a boy's reunion with his beloved brother, I had a hard time reconciling it with the preceding events - a terrorist bombing in a subway, the catastrophic tidal wave.

There's a reason that Charles Dickens has never been adapted by Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich.