Finding smiles in the afterlife

 The afterlife isn't a new subject for movies. Albert Brooks tried his hand at it in 1991 with Defending Your Life, and we've seen other big-screen journeys into the beyond. Consider Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), It's a Wonderful Life (1946)  Heaven Can Wait (1978) or the 1943 version, The Sixth Sense (1999), make your own list.

  Now, David Freyne (Dating Amber) plunges into the life to come with Eternity, a clever movie that's good in the setup, amusing in its midsection, and overextended in its final act. Generosity lands me on the positive side of the ledger.

  When Larry (Miles Teller) dies, he awakens in a crowded junction surrounded by faceless apartment buildings. He's  told that his understandable confusion will be addressed by his personal AC (Afterlife Coordinator). 

   If the late Larry immediately saw his reflection, he might not recognize himself. The recently departed arrive in the afterlife at the age at which they were the happiest during their lives. 

    They then must pick the place where they will spend eternity, choosing from an array of choices that are presented as if they were theme park attractions: Famine Free Ireland or Weimar World, a happy German romp that's free of Nazis. Those addicted to nicotine can choose cancer-free Smokers' World. Others prefer beaches or mountains.

    The catch: The choice, once made, is irrevocable. 

     No wonder, then, that Larry tells his AC (DaVine Joy Randolph) that he wants to defer his decision on where to spend eternity until the terminally ill wife he left behind (Elizabeth Olsen) arrives. He can't imagine eternity without her.

    The now youthful Larry -- he was in his 70s when he died -- tries to learn the ropes of afterlife living, if that's not too weird a contradiction in terms, but it doesn't take long for Olsen's Joan to turn up. 

    Larry's exhilarated until he learns that Joan's first husband, Luke (Callum Turner), a young man who was killed during the Korean War, has been waiting for her as well. Luke has spent 65 years pining for the woman he never had a chance to mature with.

   What's Joan to do?

   That's pretty much the movie.

   Freyne offers comedy and sentiment along the way while differentiating between two kinds of love. Luke represents heart-throb, head-over-heels ardor. Larry's more of an endurance guy; he understands what it takes to build a long marriage and raise two children.

    Temperamentally different, the two men find themselves at odds. Luke has charm; Larry indulges in cranky complaining.

    The supporting cast includes Olga Merediz in a nice turn as one of Joan's former friends. Her ideal happy age turns out to be 72, the time when she finally came out as gay. 

   A screenplay credited to Freyne and Pat Cunnae includes additional invention, notably a hall of mirrors in which each of the major characters watches key scenes from the past.

  Too bad, Freyne has trouble sticking the landing, which means that the film's charm runs out before the final credits roll.  Maybe it was inevitable that a film titled Eternity would have trouble ending.

    Films such as Eternity demand healthy suspensions of disbelief. Throughout, the dead are told that ironclad rules govern their choices. Trying to switch eternities, for example, will throw one into a never-ending void. But what's the good of rules if they can't occasionally be broken?

    Oh well, if Eternity has trouble letting go of these characters, so be it. There are enough smiles along the way to snuff out reservations. 

'In the Heights' hits lots of high notes

 

     With In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda established himself as a major figure in American musical theater. Miranda followed In the Heights with Hamilton, the production that took Broadway and then the nation by storm. 

    Now In the Heights has reached the big screen where it serves as a vibrant celebration of the Washington Heights neighborhood that has become a center of New York Dominican culture, broadened here to encompass a variety of Latino ethnicities living in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge.

    The message behind the energy that director Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians) and a fine cast bring to the movie involves identity and assertiveness, insistence of characters on building lives in New York while keeping their culture close at hand.

   A large-scale ensemble piece, the movie nonetheless centers around Usnavi de la Vega played by Anthony Ramos in a commanding performance. Ramos narrates the story and also participates in the tale as a bodega owner who, in the movie's framing device, tells a group of youngsters how he wrestled with the idea of giving up his New York business and emigrating to the Dominican Republic to open a nightclub.

    Scenes in the bodega make good use of Gregory Diaz IV, who plays Sonny, Usnavi's teen assistant, a kid who wants to legalize his presence in the US, attend college, and make a life for himself.

    Chu introduces the movie in a way that makes it clear that he's telling the story of a neighborhood, showing us a block springing to life on a hot summer day. To underscore the challenges of big-city living, a crippling power outage looms.

    A large case keeps things lively, but a few of the performances must be highlighted.  Leslie Grace plays Nina, a young woman who has returned to the neighborhood after dropping out of Stanford, where she didn't feel accepted and where she felt she was betraying her roots. 

    Nina's father (Jimmy Smits) owns the cab company where Nina's boyfriend (Corey Hawkins) works as a dispatcher.

    Most of the movie's themes revolve around the issue of flight, how to balance aspiration with faithfulness to heritage.

    -- Smits's character is ready to sell his business to finance Nina's tuition.

    -- Daniela (Daphne Rubin-Vega) runs the local hair salon and is thinking about moving her business to the Grand Concourse, abandoning Manhattan for the Bronx.

    -- Melissa Barrera portrays Vanessa, a young woman who wants to abandon the Heights to establish herself in the downtown fashion world.  

     The beating heart of the neighborhood belongs to Abuela Claudia (Olga Merediz), a Cuban-American woman who has no children but who has become a grandmother figure for the entire neighborhood.   

     Merediz sings one of the movie’s key songs, Paciencia y Fe  (Hope and Patience), which Chu stages in a New York subway station.

    Chu adds some nice graphics and effects flourishes, one involving a spinning manhole cover, another enabling Grace and Hawkins to scale the side of an apartment building as they sing a love duet. 

     Other highlights include a number at the local pool, where the characters wondering what they'd do if they had a winning lottery ticket that would pay $96,000.

    Miranda appears in the role of Piraguero, the guy who sells flavored ice from a pushcart.

    When I lived in New York, Washington Heights was known as an Irish neighborhood, a fact to which the screenplay makes glancing reference. Smits’s character bought his business from an Irish-American who was moving elsewhere.

    The movie's themes aren't exactly groundbreaking, but new voices give the entire enterprise an invigorating feeling of freshness.

     Chu and Quiara Alegria Hudes, who wrote the movie's screenplay, might have done a bit more to condense a two-hour and 23-minute run time, but In the Heights stands as a rich and spirited entertainment that brims with love for a neighborhood and the people who populate it. 

    Oh, and did I mention that it’s also a lot of fun?