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The big deal is not that Clint Eastwood, 80, still produces and directs films. After all, at the Toronto International Film Festival, there was The Strange Case of Angelica made by 101-year old Portuguese film director. The film got mild reviews but the prospect of theatrical sales seems limited.
When the film premiered at Cannes, The Hollywood Reporter wrote: 'The Strange Case of Angelica is any indication, critics are according the 101-year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira the benefit of the doubt, as they have for decades. There seems to be general agreement that longevity equals virtue, but this is true, in and of itself, neither in life nor in filmmaking. Angelica is vintage De Oliveira, and some will love it on those grounds alone, but it's a vintage that may have passed its prime.'
At TIFF, Eastwood's supernatural saga Hereafter, a meditation on death, was warmly received as well. But there will be no need to give the benefit of doubt to Eastwood.
It is important to recognise that Eastwood makes films that win praise from prominent critics and earn a decent profit. By Hollywood standards, his films that cost $50-$60 million are middle budget movies, and they are watched, with an exception or two, by millions worldwide.
His previous film, the apartheid drama Invictus, which made about $38 million in North America and was called a disappointment at the box office had a stronger run worldwide, grossing $90 million. The film got its actor Matt Damon an Oscar nomination.
Trade analysts expect Hereafter, which also features Matt Damon, to have a solid box office run. This is the eighth film the Oscar-winning director (Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby) has made in the last seven years. For more than 15 years, Eastwood has also been writing the score for his films, and he comes up with yet another evocative track with his newest.
'The way to be 80 years old and still be cranking the way he does is all about managing his energy,' Damon said in an interview at TIFF. 'The wisdom that guy has about how to make movies, it makes it really fun to work with him.'
The film is written by one of the most acclaimed of screenwriters, Peter Morgan, the Oscar nominee for The Queen, Frost/Nixon.
Eastwood often said during interviews that though his film has stories of three people -- a blue-collar American, a French journalist and a London school boy -- with traumatic experiences in their lives, the stories do converge finally. He said his newest is like a French film in structure 'where the stories kind of converge together, and destiny drives each person towards the other.'
Some critics did not think much of the film, with one complaining that Eastwood and writer Morgan were in trance during the shooting. But those were in a minority.
David Ansen of Newsweek declared: 'At 80, he continues to throw us curves, abandoning the safety of genre for an unconventionally structured story about mortality, loneliness, and the relationship between the living and the dead.'
George (Damon) has psychic powers but he is reluctant to use them. On the other side of the world, Marie (Cecile de France), a French journalist, has a near-death experience in Tsuanmi that forces her to think about life and death in a very different way. She gets interested in the psychic phenomenon. And then there Marcus and his twin brother Jason (Frankie/George McLaren). When Marcus, a London schoolboy, loses his twin brother who was also the person closest to him, he desperately needs answers.
One of the film's intriguing situations comes from Marcus looking for a psychic who can connect him to his dead brother.
While George (Damon) is genuinely gifted, the field of psychics and mediums is rife with phonies and the pseudo-scientific, Eastwood has said. 'We try to show the legitimacy of what George does,' he says in the production notes, 'as opposed to the charlatans... Where there are some who are legitimate and others who are not is in the eye of the beholder, so to speak but the story touch on the existence of people that take advantage of those who want to make contact with what might be out there.'
Though the film is described as a thriller, don't expect The Sixth Sense kind of twists. And don't expect any pronouncements about life after death.
'We don't know what's on the other side,' Eastwood asserts. 'People have their beliefs what's there or what's not there, but those are all hypotheticals. Nobody knows until you get.'