So, you probably wouldn’t think of pondering eternity as a casual, much less comedic, exercise. Yet that’s what you get in Eternity, which wants to balance fantasy, romance, pathos and humor.
Elizabeth Olsen (Love & Death, His Three Daughters) stars as Joan, a recently deceased woman–she died at age 92–now “living” as her younger self at a resort doubling as a stopover to the ultimate afterlife. In short order, she encounters the two leading men in her previous life: her husbands Larry (Miles Teller) and Luke (Callum Turner). The former died of natural causes; the latter died in war as a young man. She spent a few precious months of passion with Luke, compared with six decades of domesticity with Larry, with whom she shares a family. Like everyone else here, Joan has to decide where to spend her personal eternity, and with whom. She has one week to select her specially curated option.
Each “resident” of this comfortable purgatory arrives at a rather chaotic train station, and each has an “afterlife coordinator.” In this scenario, Da’Vine Joy Randolph (an Academy Award winner for The Holdovers) as Anna and John Early as Ryan handle those duties.
Special credit goes to Production Designer Zazu Meyers, one of the real stars of this movie, who admirably recreates mid-century architecture and contributes distinctive, evocative sets. They suitably harken back to many of the classic films of Billy Wilder, Powell and Pressburger, Ernst Lubitsch and Preston Sturges.
Eternity borrows many of its themes from a wide array of earlier pictures. That’s not a criticism, since it’s rich subject matter. Albert Brooks wrote, directed and starred in Defending Your Life (1991), in which the dead have their lives reviewed in a court-like setting. In The Notebook (2004), director Nick Cassavetes created an unabashedly romantic blend of dementia, diaries, young love and social classes. More recently, the provocative Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos created The Lobster (2015), set in a dystopian future in which single people have 45 days to identify romantic partners or face transformation into beasts. Clearly, this genre has a big tent.
Irish director David Freyne, who also co-authored the script for Eternity, introduces a lot of promising elements to the movie, but his balancing act goes awry. For example, having assigned Ryan a clever, meaningful remark, “Eternity is a long time to have regrets,” Freyne compresses Joan’s backstories with her husbands to a fault. She needs–and we need–more time with these couples in their past lives to make her final choice more resonant, even as we get glimpses of the elderly Larry and Joan, as portrayed by Barry Primus and Betty Buckley.
At the same time, the picture stumbles as a rom-com, too. All of the principals have occasionally funny throwaway lines, yet often the story substitutes silliness, including physical stunts, for genuine observational wit. The basic material is here (including some very amusing signage), and the actors are talented and seemingly invested in it. The screenplay should have risen to the occasion.
Elizabeth Olsen, whom you may also know as Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, holds this story together reasonably well. She can crisply deliver a humorous line, and she can express poignancy and indecision in reviewing her marital experiences. Having spent so little time with Luke before his departure for military service, you can appreciate her telling him now that “I never dreamt you this clearly.”
The two male leads fare less well. Miles Teller (Whiplash, Top Gun: Maverick) gives an energetic performance as Larry, delivering earnest appeals such as “I don’t care where we end up, just as long as we’re together.” He’s the regular guy, a bit bewildered by his situation, more than a bit frustrated by the fact that he has competition for Joan after sixty years of marriage.
As Luke, Callum Turner (Fantastic Beasts, The Boys in the Boat) is the sexier guy, the first romance, the tragic partner. As he and Joan spend renewed time together, you quickly get the impression that their young love would not have gone the distance.
Given that neither couple has sufficient chemistry–we have to see and feel it on screen, after all–the story flirts with blandness and repetition. This is a commercial entertainment and feel-good wannabe that would have profited from fewer tropes, a sharper focus and more condensed script. Sure, as a change of pace film, you could spend two hours with these characters, but certainly not an Eternity.
