Clint Eastwood defends a wronged man

Richard Jewell brings the story of a 1996 Olympic bombing to life.

Clint Eastwood tells the story of an innocent man who was convicted by public opinion in Richard Jewell, a movie that exposes the media frenzy that turned Jewell’s life into a nightmare. Jewell, you’ll recall, worked as a security guard at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, site of a bombing that killed one person and injured 111.

It didn’t take long for Jewell to make the transition from hero to goat when word leaked that he had become a prime suspect in the bombing. Evidently, investigators — in this case, the FBI — routinely consider anyone near the site of a bombing to be a potential suspect. After discovering the bomb in an abandoned backpack, Jewell guided people to safety. None of that got him off the hook.

Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser) makes for an unlikely main character. He aspires to be a policeman, but can’t find his way into that world, even losing a job as a college security guard. He’s overweight and lives at home with his mother (Kathy Bates). Jewell’s "suspicious" profile — a loner who lives with his mom — makes matters worse for him.

Watching Hauser, you may wonder whether Eastwood has cast a real person in the role. I don't say that as criticism but as praise. An experienced actor, Hauser proves entirely convincing as a man who can’t find his niche. Eager to be part of law enforcement, Jewell constantly overplays his hand. He expects the police to treat him as a willing colleague.

Jewell finds an ally in Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell), an attorney who believes in his client's innocence and works to clear his name. No stranger to colorful characters, Rockwell makes for an intriguing figure, an idiosyncratic lawyer who sometimes finds his client exasperating.

The two characters who represent the government and the media don’t fare nearly so well.

Jon Hamm portrays Tom Shaw, the FBI agent who leaks Jewell’s name to an aggressively seductive reporter (Olivia Wilde).

Wilde’s portrayal of reporter Kathy Scruggs has been criticized by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the paper at which Scruggs plied her trade. Scruggs is no longer alive, so it’s impossible to hear what she has to say but a scene in which Scruggs comes on to Shaw in a bar made me skeptical. It goes way beyond calculated flirtation, making it seem as if Scruggs is propositioning the agent.

As someone who worked in journalism for almost 40 years, I never knew or heard of any female reporter behaving in such an unprofessional fashion. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen but I didn't buy it.*p>
The FBI takes it on the chin, as well. Despite evidence that suggested that Jewell couldn’t have planted the bomb, the FBI persisted in keeping him a suspect. To the end, Hamm’s character insists on Jewell's guilt.

Reservations aside, Richard Jewell clearly shows how eager reporting can ignite a storm capable of ruining a person’s life. But any journalist who investigates the Jewell case beyond what's seen on screen must ask him or herself what they would have done if they had credible information about a suspect in a crime that had captured international attention.

Watching the FBI invade Jewell’s home and remove evidence provides an abject lesson in what it means to be demeaned by an investigative process. It looks bad now that we know Jewell was innocent: Had it turned out that Jewell was guilty, however, would anyone have complained?

Jewell died a few years after the movie ends. He was 44. Eastwood’s movie leaves you wondering whether he ever recovered from his ordeal, and we feel for him. It’s possible to take issue with some of the ways Eastwood treats the story and still believe that Jewell was badly wronged, thanks in no small part to Hauser's performance as a guy who flounders as he loses control of his life.

Flaws and all, Richard Jewell serves as a reminder that when outrage reaches fever proportions, no one benefits.

*If you're interested in reading more about the Scruggs controversy try this Washington Post article.
No one disputes the fact that a ruinous media frenzy surrounded Jewell once a story naming him as a suspect had been published. That would have been no less true had the movie shown Scruggs writing a story for which she had received a credible tip and left it at that.

Eastwood and Hanks team for 'Sully'

A real-life drama with stunning highlights.

In a society riven with division, Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger qualifies as a hero nearly everyone can get behind. You remember Sully, I'm sure. In January of 2009, he made an emergency landing of US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River. The feat was hailed as a heroic act of competence and daring in the face of potential disaster.

It all happened in a matter of minutes. Shortly after leaving Laguardia Airport, Sullenberger's jet was struck by a flock of geese. The plane's engines were disabled.

Sullenberger quickly calculated his chances of returning to Laguardia or making an unscheduled landing at New Jersey's Teterboro Airport. After determining that he couldn't reach either airport, Sullenberger and first officer Jeff Skiles landed their plane in the Hudson.

Miraculously -- there's really no other word for it -- all 155 passengers survived. No one was even seriously injured.

We all saw pictures of the shaken passengers standing on the plane's wings in the middle of the Hudson on a day when temperatures dipped into the 20s. We saw rescue boats scurrying to bring the passengers to safety. It was a national "Holy shit" moment, and -- for once -- it ended in a good way.

Director Clint Eastwood's Sully, which stars Tom Hanks as Sullenberger, offers stunning recreations of those events on the Hudson, but rather than move steadily toward the fateful moment, screenwriter Todd Komarnicki places them toward the middle of a film that focuses on the National Transportation Safety Board investigation that followed the landing.

According to the movie, an NTSB committee left an already shaken Sullenberger wondering whether he'd made the right decision.

Hanks' low-key performance underscores Eastwood's celebration of Sullenberger's competence and modesty, even as Hanks conveys Sullenberger's continuing bouts with doubt. Sully dreams of what might have happened had he miscalculated. He experiences post-traumatic stress, and his life is made more difficult by a relentless flood of media attention.

As co-pilot Skiles, Aaron Eckhart shows a bit more flare. He's a staunch defender of Sullenberger, and believes that the highly experienced captain had no choice but to gamble on a river landing.

Although the tension of the landing can be felt throughout Sully's entire 95-minute running time, Eastwood makes a public NTSB hearing the movie's climax, hinging its outcome on questions about the validity of NTSB computer simulations used to evaluate Sullenberger's decisions.

In a battle between human judgment and computers, there's little doubt which side Eastwood will take. I suppose the NTSB is vilified a bit -- albeit not in excoriating fashion. The NTSB investigators -- Anna Gunn plays one -- are portrayed as a panel of not-always-friendly inquisitors.

A compelling story helps Sully survive some of the problems that keep the film from total takeoff. Flashbacks to Sully's past (his start as a crop-dusting youngster and an episode from his stint in the Air Force) are inserted without great finesse, and there's little attempt to flesh-out the drama.

Despite Sully's statement that the landing and rescue reflected a team effort of which he was only a part, the movie remains a solo flight built around Sully's experiences, which include brief, troubled phone conversations with his wife (Laura Linney).

Eastwood, who has been praised by those who work with him as a no-nonsense director who knows what he wants, must have warmed to Sully, who never regards himself as a hero and who talks about what he accomplished in mundane terms: He was just doing his job.

The film compacts (justifiably, I think) the NTSB investigation, which took place over the course of 18 months -- not in the few days following the emergency landing. Besides, can you imagine the outcry that might be heard if the NTSB didn't investigate emergency water landings?

A few nuances might have given us a better feeling for such complexities, but Sully seems interested mostly in keeping faith with the unquestionable trustworthiness of its main character.

The movie also leaves you with an indelible sense of the terror and panic that would rattle you to the core if you were on a plane that was heading for water, and you were hearing fight attendants straining to overcome the sounds of a falling aircraft. "Brace. Brace. Brace," they shout in drum-beat fashion.

It's a moment you won't soon forget.

Eastwood's poweful 'American Sniper'

Chris Kyle's story speaks of battle and the toll it takes.

Navy SEAL Chris Kyle was credited with 160 confirmed kills in Iraq. If "probable" kills -- those without a witness -- are added, Kyle's number rises to 255. He has been called the most deadly sniper in U.S. military history.

In director Clint Eastwood's America Sniper, a sobering big-screen version of Kyle's autobiography, Kyle says he felt no remorse about those unlucky enough to find their way into his rifle sights.

He tells us his regrets involve an inability to protect even more American combatants. Other SEALs and marines called him "Legend." They felt safer when Kyle was on the job.

I don't know how you'll feel about Kyle's warrior ethos, but I do know that Eastwood -- with Bradley Cooper hitting a bullseye in the starring role -- tells Kyle's story without doing much by way of moral posturing. By giving us Kyle's story straight, Eastwood puts the burden on us.

We must decide what we think about SEAL culture, the combat mission in Iraq, and the toll that combat takes on the those who fight and the loved ones who support them.

American Sniper is that rare action movie that rivets our attention while leaving us with plenty to think about.

It's also staggering to realize that Eastwood -- now 84 -- took on the arduous task of making an intensely realistic combat movie. As he often has done in recent work, Eastwood skillfully explores the impact of violence on the spirits of those who inflict it.

Although, American Sniper doesn't exactly break new ground, it's a powerful, unflinching look at the life of a committed warrior operating under especially difficult circumstances. Kyle completed four tours in Iraq. He shuttled back and forth from the U.S. In the process, he lost his taste for ordinary life.

Kyle became increasingly isolated from his wife (Sienna Miller) and kids. When he was home, he felt guilty for not being with his comrades in arms. The problems of civilian life seemed embarrassingly trivial to him. He missed the high-stakes atmosphere of combat.

As a patriotic man, he felt that as long as shots were being fired at Americans, he should be there.

Eastwood portrays the fight in Iraq with a ground-level realism that only a gifted director could achieve. Disciplined and tense, American Sniper is another summary work for a star whose movie career seldom has strayed far from violence.

Make no mistake, American Sniper is not Unforgiven, Eastwood's 1992 anti-revenge saga. American Sniper fully immerses in Kyle's point-of-view, which reduces the world to those who prey on others and those who need protection.

Kyle believes that being a protector qualifies as a high calling, perhaps the highest calling, something he learned from his dad during his Odessa, Texas childhood.

Whether you agree with Kyle doesn't matter. Had Eastwood made a different movie (one that spent more time wringing its hands about the futility of the war), he could not have taken us so deeply into Kyle's world. It's a place we need to visit, and we have a responsibility, I think, to sort through our feelings about it.

Eastwood puts us on rooftops with Kyle as he waits for targets to emerge. He's poised for kills that he believes are absolutely essential. In the context of vicious combat, he's most probably right.

The first of Kyle's kills involves targets that immediately put him on a strange moral edge: He shoots a kid who's carrying a bomb and a woman who picks up the same bomb after the kid is killed.

Not surprisingly, Kyle wonders whether this is what his harsh SEAL training was all about. He's quickly assured by a fellow SEAL that the bomb he kept from exploding surely would have killed at least 10 marines.

The calculus of war can be that simple. But warriors are also human, and even when they're not aware that it's happening to them, the toll of combat settles on their shoulders.

Toward the latter part of his career, Kyle began to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. An incident at a backyard barbecue in Texas proves harrowing, and it takes Kyle a while to decide that he wants to rejoin society, something that he accomplishes by using his marksman's skills to help others scarred by war.

If I had read Kyle's autobiography prior to knowing he was to be the subject of a film, Cooper might have been last person I'd have thought of for the lead role.

Cooper, after all, is the guy from the Hangover movies, an actor who only began to emerge as a major talent in Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. Here, Cooper bulks up to play a good-ole Texas boy whose emotions can't always support his view of the world as a place where bad people prey on the weak.

Cooper keeps Kyle likable throughout, and does an exceptionally fine job of showing that Kyle's patriotism was real and sincere. Kyle believed he was acting for his country. He couldn't imagine doing otherwise. You probably wouldn't want to argue with him about that.

Still, a bit of shading creeps into Jason Hall's screenplay. One of Kyle's colleagues in combat eventually begins to question the war. When he's killed, Kyle tells his wife that the man's doubts about the Iraqi enterprise caused his death. He lost focus. He entertained doubt.

To me it sounds as if that man was coming to his senses, but not everyone will see it that way. Kyle certainly didn't.

Kyle's story clearly establishes the gulf between those who've been fighting the U.S's wars and those who've been pursuing normal life at home. These days, war is a specialized warrior's enterprise. Much of the home front remains oblivious to it.

For those who don't know how Kyle's story ends, I won't say more. But the conclusion of Eastwood's movie vividly demonstrates that for many soldiers, war doesn't stop when they leave the battlefield.

Eastwood knows that when doors of violence swing open, they never entirely can be shut. In American Sniper, he again brings us face-to-face with that disturbingly important truth.

Eastwood slows down 'Jersey Boys'

The popular musical about Fankie Valli and The Four Seasons reaches the screen

You can look at director Clint Eastwood's version of Jersey Boys in a couple of ways. You can lament the fact that Eastwood's movie misses some of the irrepressible energy that marked the musical's many stage productions.

Looked at another way, it's possible to argue that Eastwood -- not the most likely choice to bring a popular musical to the screen -- does a workman-like job of balancing drama, comedy and musical numbers in telling the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, the '60s group responsible for such hits as Sherry, Big Girls Don't Cry, Dawn, Walk Like a Man and many more.

For a reviewer, it's frustrating to acknowledge that there's legitimacy in both points of view, but I've seen the stage version and appreciated the fact that Eastwood isn't interested in building his movie around in-your-face energy.

Eastwood begins with the backstory of how the group formed and how Valli -- actually Francesco Castelluccio -- came to provide its signature voice, a famous falsetto that helped create the Four Seasons' trademark sound.

Jersey Boys works as a typical rise-and-fall story: The group struggles, becomes phenomenally successful and eventually falls apart amid arguments over money and control.

John Lloyd Young, the actor who originated the role on Broadway, plays Valli, a kid from Belleville, N.J. who is portrayed as never having mastered the ruthless side of the music business. Throughout, Frankie remains faithful to a romanticized Jersey ethos of loyalty, friendship and neighborhood ties, even when his values cost him dearly.

The movie also introduces us to Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen), a young man who already had written a hit song (Short Shorts) when he joined the Four Seasons and who wrote most of the songs that put the group on the map.

Vincent Piazza portrays Tommy DeVito, the guy who formed the group and who also squandered a lot of its money. Michael Lomenda plays bassist Nick Massi, who mostly seems content to hover in the background.

The story makes room for other characters, as well. Christopher Walken appears as Angelo "Gyp" DeCarlo, a mobster who takes a liking to Frankie. Mike Doyle plays Bob Crewe, a gay record producer who helped put the Seasons on the map and who, in many scenes, provides comic relief. He's from Jersey, but functions as the movie's anti-Jersey Boy. And Joseph Russo plays Joe Pesci, the edgy actor who, in his early years, introduced Gaudio to the group.

An almost charming Walken provides the glue that holds a pivotal scene together. Somehow, the group must deal with the fact that Tommy owes $162,000 to a loan shark. Gyp negotiates the deal that saves Tommy's life.

Eastwood takes an unhurried approach to the screenplay by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, who also wrote the book for the musical. He follows the basic format of the play, which finds each character narrating segments of the movie in what appears to be an effort to add Rashamon-like complexity to a story that really doesn't really need it.

The portrayal of the movie's Italian-American milieu dips into caricature that doesn't really let up until the latter going, when Valli begins to face a host of personal and career problems.

Perhaps because he was looking for a way to make the material his own, Eastwood brings an element of wistful reflection to a story that's usually presented in more upbeat fashion.

Eastwood may have made a mistake in not doing more to showcase the musical numbers, the main reason anyone would want to sit through a story about these four New Jersey guys.

There are other miscalculations, as well. When Valli sings My Eyes Adored You as a lullaby to his young daughter, the moment feels weird: The lovelorn lyrics ("Though I never laid a hand on you") don't match the tender fatherly sentiment for which Eastwood must have been aiming.

The main tension involves Tommy's reluctance to admit that he's not in control of the group. He can't acknowledge that without Valli and Gaudio, there really is no group. A volatile Piazza plays Tommy as if he's in a perpetual audition for a small part in Goodfellas.

I wouldn't say that Young has the makings of a terrific screen actor. He doesn't have the kind of face that turns close-ups into intriguing explorations of character. But Eastwood needed someone who could replicate Valli's voice and Young obviously knows how to do that. The songs weren't lip-synched, but were recorded live.

By the end, it finally becomes clear what Eastwood found admirable about the Four Seasons, the clarity of their tone when they were just four guys harmonizing under a lamp post in a Newark suburb. It's a long time coming, but Eastwood gets there.

Eastwood scouts for another hit

Trouble With the Curve is low on surprises, but still offers some satisfaction.

Predictable, a little corny and featuring a familiar performance from Clint Eastwood as a crotchety old baseball scout whose bosses think he may have lost something off his fast ball, Trouble With the Curve can be pleasing in the way of formula movies that pretty much work.

Eastwood portrays Gus, a legendary scout for the Atlanta Braves. Gus has two problems: a statistic-addicted younger man in the organization (Matthew Lillard) doesn't trust his judgment and he's losing his eyesight. Disabilities or no, Gus is stubborn, and he does have one loyal supporter in the Braves organization (John Goodman).

Gus's baseball future seems to hinge on his evaluation of Bo Gentry (Joe Massingill), a high school slugging prospect the Braves are eager to sign.

Randy Brown's screenplay contrives to have Bo's daughter (Amy Adams) join him in North Carolina to help scout Bo. She'll be Gus's eyes. Of course, Gus doesn't want help, and Adams's Mickey (she was named after Mickey Mantle) has problems of her own. On the verge of earning a hard-won partnership, she has to leave her Atlanta-based law firm for a few days to assist Gus.

Eastwood can play a character like Gus in his sleep, but his performance is by no means lazy. He gives the role its due, creating a hard-boiled type who has trouble coming to terms with any sign of vulnerability.

My respect for Adams continues to grow. Watch her in The Master and look at her here. You'll be hard-pressed to tell it's the same actress. I'm not talking about the way she looks, but the way she acts. Her character in The Master has a spine of steel; here she's playing a strong woman, but one who has to hold up her end of a romantic tale.

While helping her father, Mickey meets a young scout (Justin Timberlake) who takes an immediate interest in her.

The story pits Gus's instincts and experience against the statisticians, and you don't need a score card to know who's going to win that battle. This is, after all, a Clint Eastwood movie, and it's unlikely that he's going to suffer an irreparable defeat.

This time out, Eastwood cedes directing chores to Robert Lorenz, who has worked as a second-unit director and producer on a variety of Eastwood productions. Aside from creating a blurry spot in the middle of images that are supposed to represent Gus's fading eyesight, Lorenz does a straightforward job with material that's fairly straightforward.

To the extent that there's subtext, it goes like this: Mickey's an adult, but she and the long-widowed Gus still have issues, which the screenplay doesn't deal with until the end and which hardly qualify as dramatic dynamite.

Trouble with the Curve wraps things up so neatly, it's a bit like watching a player who never gets his uniform dirty. This one's for moviegoers who long for happy endings and who are inclined toward what's commonly known as old-fashioned entertainment.

I'm not always one of those people, but saw no reason to fault a movie that wants to tell its story, maybe moisten a few eyes and move on.

'J. Edgar' lacks a compelling point of view

There's much to admire about Clint Eastwood's look at J. Edgar Hoover, but the movie eventually becomes far too laborious.

He loathed Communism, saw himself as a staunch patriot and kept secret files on anyone he thought might threaten his ascendance. J. Edgar Hoover was a world-class intimidator, who used his manipulative skills and power to build the FBI into a national crime-fighting force.

It has been widely speculated that Hoover had yet another side to him, that he was a closeted homosexual who shared a marriage-like intimacy - if not carnal pleasures - with Clyde Tolson, his second in command.

This man of stunning contradiction is the subject of J. Edgar, a new and carefully assembled biopic from director Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black. Eastwood needs no introduction: Black, you may recall, won an Oscar for his screenplay for Milk, the story of slain San Francisco board supervisor* Harvey Milk.

Eastwood and Black seem to have genuine sympathy for the torment of those who are unable to acknowledge important parts of themselves - in this case, gayness. Eastwood treats Hoover's death in 1972 with a tenderness that's almost mournful.

And then there's the performance of Leonardo DiCaprio, who creates a stark and convincing portrait of Hoover as a troubled man who seldom lost his composure. Heralded in a recent New York Times piece as an actor who welcomes risk, DiCaprio hardly seems a natural fit for the role Hoover, but he meets the challenge.

DiCaprio provides the movie with a solid center, and he receives able support from Armie Hammer, who plays Tolson. Depicted as cultured and witty, Tolson became the second most powerful figure in Hoover's FBI. He also inherited Hoover's estate after the FBI director passed away.

Overall, Eastwood and Black seem to be trying for a tempered approach to Hoover's story, telling us that if he had them, Hoover never acted on any homosexual urges, that he was an early champion of forensic evidence, that he sometimes abused his power and that, on at least one occasion, he put on his mother's clothes.

But what do we take from a movie that's beautifully crafted and earnest to a fault? Not enough, I think. I kept waiting for J. Edgar to catch fire, but it moves somewhat laboriously over its two-hour and 16-minute length, never really finding a compelling point of view.

Moreover, J. Edgar suffers from a depressingly conventional structure: An aged and embattled Hoover tells what he bills as his side of his story to various young FBI agents, dictating chapter after chapter of a self-serving autobiography. Eastwood uses flash backs to develop the story from Hoover's perspective.

This gives the movie a kind "Hoover's Greatest Hits'' quality; "J. Edgar" lacks the organic punch of a great biopic. Hoover tells the story of the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby and of his stormy relationship with Bobby Kennedy and more. But the movie has a near reportorial tone at times when outrage over Hoover's excesses (his campaign against Martin Luther King, for example) might have been more appropriate. Two women influence the story - albeit in small doses. Judi Dench portrays Hoover's strikingly imperious mother. She bossed him around; he didn't seem to mind. Naomi Watts fares equally well as Helen Gandy, Hoover's long-time secretary.

Any review of J. Edgar must also deal with the make-up issue.

I couldn't entirely shake my awareness of the make-up under which DiCaprio and Hammer (especially Hammer) are buried and which tends to give them eerie wax-works countenances, the look of the embalmed. If a character is aged for a final scene or two of a movie, it's easier to accept, but we see DiCaprio in full make-up throughout the movie.

Look, I respect Eastwood as a filmmaker, and he deserves credit for tackling a difficult subject, but he doesn't seem to have wrested his subject to the ground. J. Edgar moves from one incident to another, sampling an awful lot of history without ever quite knowing what to make of the man who gives the picture its name.

*In an earlier copy of this review, I incorrectly referred to Milk as having held the post of mayor.

More about the "here" than the "after"

A moment from one a most remarkable sequence.

It's nothing if not daring to begin a movie with its most remarkable sequence. In fact, the opening of Hereafter -a vivid depiction of the tsunami that struck Thailand in 2004 - is one of the most amazing sequences of the year, a gripping combination of special effects and speeding camera work that hits the screen with tidal force.

Fair to say that little following in the wake of this re-created natural disaster has similar power, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, the rest of Hereafter - a movie that marks a great leap for director Clint Eastwood --- boasts some of the year's gentlest filmmaking. Still surprising at 80, Eastwood hits some of the loveliest notes in what's become an astonishingly varied directorial career.

Hereafter may posit the existence of some sort of after-death experience, but it's no tricky supernatural thriller. Rather, it's a movie about the ways in which two characters cope with death in their lives and the way in which another tries to come to terms with his troublesome psychic abilities.

Eastwood, wisely I think, understands that the important hereafter is not the one that follows death, but the one these characters will pursue once they've found their share of peace and resolution.

It's not uncommon for movies that attempt to tell three distinct stories - which Hereafter does - to stumble as they switch inelegantly between various plot threads. Eastwood manages the transitions smoothly, uniting the three strands only at the movie's end. He also keeps the movie's rhythms subdued, a directorial choice that stops Hereafter from feeling exploitative or sensationalized.

To the extent that Eastwood shows the afterlife, it looks dull enough to make you wonder whether you'd really like to wind up there. But supernatural kicks aren't what Eastwood's after. I have no idea what Eastwood believes about death and the hereafter, but he's respectful of the journey on which his characters have embarked, which is precisely what the job requires.

As for those three stories...

One involves a San Francisco psychic (Matt Damon) who views his abilities as more curse than gift. Damon's George Lonegan wants to live a normal life, but his brother (Jay Mohr) hopes that he'll use his powers to turn a profit. Grief-torn customers will pay for the comfort of receiving a message from a lost love one. Wanting no part of the commercial psychic's life, George works in a factory and lives in relative isolation.

Scenes between Bryce Dallas Howard and Damon, who meet in an Italian cooking class, are built around a quietly evolving but palpable sexual chemistry. But George knows that his exceptional abilities can sabotage relationships and return him to isolation.

Then there's the eminently successful French TV journalist Marie LeLay (Cecile De France), enmeshed in an affair and caught in the tsunami that opens the picture.
Finally, we meet twins Marcus and Jason (played by real-life twins Frankie and George McLaren). They're conspiring allies in an on-going battle to keep London social workers from taking them from their drug-addicted mother.

The McLaren twins give the movie's best and most moving performances. I wasn't entirely sure how to take Damon's deeply wary portrayal of George, and there's unfortunate redundancy in George's constant insistence that he's done with the psychic life.

Screenwriter Patrick Morgan's script avoids sentimentality, but hardly qualifies as a treasure trove of psychological subtext. It's content to tell a story that's less interested in convincing us that there's an afterlife than in exploring something that turns out be more credible: what might happen to characters who hold such beliefs. It's hardly surprising that Eastwood - as down-to-earth a director as there is -- ultimately casts his lot more with the "here" than with the "after." Hereafter could be the most determinedly grounded "supernatural" movie yet.