Producers: Tim White and Trevor White Director: David Freyne Screenplay: Pat Cunnane and David Freyne Cast: Elizabeth Olsen, Miles Teller, Callum Turner, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, John Early and Olga Merediz Distributor: A24
Grade: C
The afterlife comes across as a rather dismal place in David Freyne’s dramedy, which he co-wrote with Pat Cunnane. It consists of a huge train terminal (pun intended) where the recently departed arrive at the age in their lives when, supposedly, they were most happy, however old they might have been at their demise. Each is assigned a coordinator for a week, during which the arrival must choose an ultimate destination where he or she will spend eternity. The various possibilities are advertised around them, and range widely. Want to spend every day on a sunny beach? In a mountain cabin? At a place that welcomes smokers, or gamblers? The opportunities are many, and often absurdly niche. The catch is that once you make your choice, it’s irrevocable: you’re sent on and can’t come back.
This seems to ensure an eternity of endless sameness and boredom, a circumstance that the script never addresses at all. And, of course, there’s nothing of transcendence about it: it’s just a prolongation of a life one chooses without the admittedly annoying elements of aging and death. An interesting script might have been written about it.
But instead, the movie turns into a sappy romantic triangle centering on the Cutlers, Larry and Joan. We meet them as an elderly couple bickering as they travel to a family “gender reveal” party. Joan (Betty Buckley) is suffering from terminal cancer, and Larry (Barry Primus) worries about the trip overtaxing her. But it’s he who dies during the event, choking on a pretzel soon after seeing a photo of his wife with her handsome first husband, who died in the Korean War.
Larry arrives at the busily bureaucratic afterlife station as a young man (Miles Teller), apparently when he was a newlywed. He decides that he must wait for Joan to join him before proceeding, as he can’t imagine spending eternity without her. His coordinator Anna (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) allows this, and Larry prepares to stay for a while, comforting himself with an occasional visit to a bar where a guy named Luke (Callum Turner) mixes the drinks.
It’s not long before Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) shows up, having died quietly in bed. Larry welcomes her enthusiastically, expecting they can quickly move on together to an eternity of their choosing. But there’s a complication. Luke turns out to be her first husband, who has waited for decades for her to join him in going to the rustic mountain cabin they’d imagined spending their life in. And as she explains to her coordinator Ryan (John Early) and to livewire Karen (Olga Merediz), a deceased friend who’s enjoying her freedom, choosing between the two men is tearing her apart. Meanwhile she’s given the chance to spend time with both, while they in turn squabble about which of them she should choose.
This situation is not unlike that found in earlier movies without the “supernatural” trappings—think, for example, of “My Favorite Wife” (1940) and its remake, “Move Over, Darling” (1963), in which a supposedly dead wife returns to find her husband remarried, and he must make the choice between her and his second wife. What “Eternity” does is to mash together the hoary scenario with Albert Brooks’s “Defending Your Life,” and unhappily it does neither justice, missing both genuine romance and the deadpan wit Brooks brought to the table.
It’s also a terrible cheat. It spends inordinate time in world-building, explaining the rules that govern terminal procedure and the choice of a final destination. Yet it treats Joan’s dilemma as unique, even though given the billions of folks who have passed through over the centuries others must have faced similar situations; for Anna and Ryan, however, this is a crisis that requires referring it to some unspecified upstairs for approval of special dispensations. But even that is secondary to the fact that after telling us the rules governing the choices arrivals make are ironclad, the script tosses all that out the window in the end to allow our protagonists to change things by running around through hallways, climbing ladders and easily evading pursuers. It turns out that the world the script has so assiduously constructed is a crock.
Which isn’t to say that there aren’t some amusing grace notes to it. The exposition hall where proponents of the various final destinations hawk their ludicrous wares is a testament to the foolishness of people’s preferences, and the archive where Joan goes to view memories that might help her make her choice is a nifty idea, especially when it’s presided over by an increasingly grumpy ticket-seller. Generally, though, it’s a curiously bland place in Zazu Myers’ production design, and Ruairí O’Brien’s flat cinematography doesn’t endow it with any magic. Even David Fleming’s score is ordinary.
Things might be different if the leads had much chemistry, but they don’t. The best is Teller, who at least brings frazzled energy to Larry; but Olsen’s Joan is, despite her centrality in the triangle, curiously dull in her indecision. (Truth be told, Primus and Beckley are the more interesting couple.) And Turner comes across as a good-looking blank.
As for Early and Randolph, they’re stuck in stereotyped parts—he the effete white dweeb, she the rotund, good-natured black woman—that feel prefabricated. Merediz brings some spunk to her scenes and a few of the lesser characters register briefly, but overall it’s hard to root for anyone here, or to feel their pain and joy. That’s a factor of pedestrian direction from Freyne and dilatory editing by Joe Sawyer, which dilute any fizz the story might have generated.
The result is a fairly anemic otherworldly rom-com about an afterlife that’s barely worth visiting, let alone spending an eternity in.