In 1998, the Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda made a highly atypical work for him called After Life. Depicting life after death as a Buddhist temple and movie studio, it remains one of his best movies. I have to think David Freyne used it as an inspiration for Eternity, a funny romantic film that doesn’t quite reach the heights of Kore-eda’s masterpiece but is diverting nonetheless.
Octogenarian Larry Cutler (Barry Primus) is attending a gender-reveal party for his great-grandchild when he chokes to death on a pretzel. When he comes to, he’s his 35-year-old self (Miles Teller) being transported to a mid-grade hotel and convention center. His afterlife coordinator Anna (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) explains that he is no longer old because everyone is reincarnated at the age when they were happiest. “We get a lot of 10-year-old boys here,” she says. “Very few teenagers, though.”
She also explains that the hotel is not the afterlife per se, but rather a way station where the dead have one week to choose the place where they will spend the rest of time. The movie’s funniest running gag is the various afterlives’ advertisements on the convention center floor and on the hotel rooms’ TVs: “Weimar World: With 100% Fewer Nazis.” “Smoking World: Because Cancer Can’t Kill You Twice.” “Capitalism World: What’s the Point of Being Rich If Someone Else Isn’t Poor?”
Larry’s week is not yet up when Joan (Betty Buckley), his terminally ill wife of 65 years, also passes on and comes to the hotel as her younger self (Elizabeth Olsen). He’s overjoyed, until he learns that her first husband Luke (Callum Turner), who was killed in the Korean War, has spent the last 67 years waiting for her and working as a bartender at the hotel. She now must decide which man she wants to be with for all eternity, and a mysterious authority figure far above Anna — she’s coy about whether that’s the Christian God or somebody else — grants Joan the rare opportunity to preview her husbands’ choice of afterlives, with Luke wanting a ski lodge in the mountains while Larry opts for a beach.
Freyne is the Irish filmmaker who previously made the innovative zombie movie The Cured. He almost pulls this off, not least because Teller and especially Olsen give everything they have to playing the reality of this conceit. The hotel feels realistically drab, with bits of life peeking through with details like Anna’s petty rivalry with Joan’s afterlife coordinator (John Early), which gives the Oscar-winning Randolph a chance to flash her comic skills. Larry tries to impress Joan by having her favorite singer, Dean Martin (David Z. Cohen), perform for her. Too late he realizes that it’s not the real Dino but a professional Dean Martin impersonator who grossly hits on her.
Sadly, the movie’s comic energy winds down as it approaches the end and Joan has to make her choice. The bit when Joan has to flee from afterlife security guards doesn’t work, because she’s running through scenes from her life. (She should have run through different afterlives. It might not have worked conceptually, but it would have been funnier.) Eternity is clearly the work of a talented and funny filmmaker who will probably make something better in the future, even if this particular entry falls apart.
Eternity
Starring Elizabeth Olsen, Miles Teller, and Callum Turner. Directed by David Freyne. Written by Patrick Cunnane and David Freyne. Rated PG-13.
