Awards season is drawing close. Trailers are beginning to emerge for some of the biggest name contenders for the coming competitions. Last week we had the Coen Brothers with True Grit. It looks like once again they’ll be squaring off against the legendary Clint Eastwood (Invictus, Gran Torino), as he brings us his latest in a string of always solid and often masterful pieces of cinema he has helmed as director. The films Eastwood has directed in recent years have often been nominated for both Best Picture and Best Director at the Academy Awards (and the Golden Globes if they count too), and he has won Oscars for both in 2005 for Million Dollar Baby. To put it bluntly, if Eastwood has a film out, there are good-to-decent odds that they’re going to be up for a few nominations and might be strong contenders for winning in a whole range of categories.
Watch the trailer below the jump.
In his second Eastwood film (after Invictus), Hereafter sees Matt Damon play George Lonegan, a working class American who has a psychic ‘gift’ that allows him to connect to those who have died. George was in fact a very successful and somewhat famous professional psychic, who has since abandoned the job, believing his psychic powers to be a curse. Intersecting with his story are those of Marie LeLay played by French actress Cecile De France, a journalist who has a brush of death when she encounters the 2005 tsunami, and Marcus (Frankie/George McLaren), a British boy who lost his brother. Bryce Dallas Howard (Twilight: Eclipse, Terminator: Salvation) also stars as George’s girlfriend Melanie.
With Peter Morgan (The Special Relationship, Frost/Nixon) writing and Eastwood behind the camera, there’s a good chance Hereafter will be a strong film. The trailer has a quiet, austere quality to it, and the focus is less on the notion of psychic powers and contacting the dead than it is about the living characters and the mysteries surrounding their personal stories. Eastwood has made a powerful directorial career out of his vivid character portrayals, and Hereafter looks like he may once again be right on the mark.
