Hereafter

British screenwriter Peter Morgan has two Oscar nominations, for an adaptation (of his own play Frost/Nixon) and an original movie script (The Queen, for which he won a Golden Globe). He has won BAFTAs and other awards for The Last King of Scotland, The Deal and Longford, and gained plaudits for The Damned United, The Special Relationship and The Other Boleyn Girl.

They were all based on historical personalities, whereas his latest, and least successful, screenplay was a fictional fantasy about three characters experiencing the Hereafter. Despite starring Matt Damon, being produced by Spielberg's Amblin and other Warner Brothers partners, and directed by Clint Eastwood, its chances of delivering a decent return on its US$50 million budget are slim. For his next venture (360), Morgan returns to the safer world of a BBC/European co-production with a line-up of Brit stars (Hopkins, Law, Reitz) for its multi-faceted tale of odd couples.

The three plots in Hereafter provide potentially interesting studies of the afterlife. Damon is a former successful psychic whom the dead can talk to, Cecile de France plays a Parisian TV journalist who saw the dead during her near-death experience in the Asian tsunami, and young British newcomers Frankie and George McLaren take the roles of communicating twin brothers, one alive and one dead. Their paths and fates will cross, of course, and Morgan's hard task was to make their meeting in London dramatically credible. Eastwood had to make it visually interesting, while Damon was required to drive it with star power. All of them failed.

Eastwood is a laid-back director, but this time he could have been asleep on the job, lulled by his own tinkly siesta-like musical soundtrack. Just in case the audience may not realise that scenes are set in San Francisco, Paris and London, it is given long establishing shots of a Port sign and the Towers of Eiffel and London. Commendably, for an art-house audience, the French segment is performed in French with English subtitles, which are an American mainstream market disaster: the production should have found a way to translate the French TV roles.

Three stories necessitate three sets of subsidiary characters, and Morgan fails to breathe life, let alone an afterlife, into any of the sketchy characterisations of Damon's wannabe clients, the journalist's working world and the twins' addicted single mother and drearily nice foster parents. The three focal figures do not connect dramatically or logically, and Derek Jacobi is stuck onto the shaky framework as a book fair's reciter of Charles Dickens (a favourite bedtime solace for Damon's character). There's also an Italian cookery teacher, amplifying the feeling that Morgan gathered a lot of scraps from his waste bin, threw them into a pot and then forgot to add spices and turn on the gas.