Someone ought to speak to the manager
According to Matthew 22:30, Mark 12:25 and Luke 20:35, when the Saducees asked Jesus about the eternal legal status of a widow who remarried, he replied that there was no marriage in the afterlife. That was a wise managerial decision; otherwise I suppose Henry VIII’s afterlife welcoming party would have been very awkward.
The movie Eternity illustrates the exact same problem that the Saducees presented before Jesus: a twice widow goes to heaven and meets her dead husbands, and her eternal fate depends on which one she chooses. Standard jealousy jokes ensue.
If this movie aims to convey any message about the nature of love and the value of the prosaic, quiet life, it’s lost amid the tension of its torturedly contrived premise. The version of the afterlife we see in Eternity is an extremely bureaucratized dystopia with rigid rules and arbitrary prohibitions. Our poor lady simply has to make a choice, and she has one week to do it, and after moving to a specific flavor of heaven, she can’t ever change her mind, and if she tries to undo her choice, she’ll be thrown into an eternal abyss of darkness. Because that’s what upper management has decreed. And no, despite all the trappings of corporate culture, you can’t file a complaint, because what passes for customer service makes one suspect that this place is actually hell.
Let’s go into a bit more detail. In the afterlife presented in Eternity, when you die, you’re assigned a handler who will guide you for a week until you pick a flavor of heaven to permanently move to. Competition is fierce: you’re inundated by every manner of advertisement trying to sell you the gardening heaven, the weightlifting heaven, the nail spa heaven, the mountain cabin heaven, the beach resort heaven, the ’70s cocaine party heaven, the aristocratic mansion heaven, the Parisian literary café heaven, and so on. But our lady’s problem isn’t so much which form of eternity to choose, but whom to spend it with.
Her first husband was, as we’re told endless times, perfect in every way (it doesn’t help that for this role they cast Callum Turner, who I can’t bring myself to believe is handsome at all, but the plot requires us to close our eyes and pretend he’s a 10). Alas, he was sent to war and died too soon, and those blissful young memories have stayed with her all this time. Her second husband was rather normal, and she stayed married to him until old age took them. She had a standard family life with him, having children and grandchildren, without much in the way of complaints. But the ghost of that vigorous first love stayed there, overshadowing the ordinary flow of everyday life. Now that they’re all dead and she has the opportunity to choose again, should she remain with the good but unexceptional guy who gave her 65 adequately unobjectionable years, or should she take her chances with the dreamy guy she never stopped missing?
The amount of tweaks that the plot has to make to its idea of heaven in order for the characters to even have this problem in the first place makes it difficult for the story to say anything meaningful to the viewers. If you squint, maybe you can glimpse a stance against naïve nostalgia, but the movie’s happy ending puts our lady in one of the afterlives that were taken out of circulation: the placid suburbia heaven. So it’s not clear how sincerely Eternity is warning us against taking refuge in rosy memories.
Because the afterlife is presented as a top-down system with unquestionable rules, the plot can’t let the characters consider pushing for the rules to be changed. A short line in the script alludes to a solution where our lady gets to live with her two husbands, but the husbands won’t have that. As a result, the completely unnecessary and unjustified constraints of the story lead to a way too narrow range of possible endings. It’s the least useful type of allegory, the one that only works if you accept a thousand artificial caveats.
What does work in this movie is the acting. Elizabeth Olsen and Miles Teller have to speak and move like old people suddenly put in young bodies, and they succeed, with Olsen taking full advantage of the gorgeous ’50s hairstyles and dresses she’s put in, and Teller milking every drop of his naturally raspy voice. Meanwhile, Turner has a unique assignment: his character is a guy from the ’50s who never grew old, so his mannerisms and general outlook on life have to feel like they’re stuck in time, even though he has existed through the years since. We aren’t told whether dead people can learn and grow in this afterlife, but what Olsen’s character eventually discovers about her true desires reveals a maturity in accordance with her actual age.
Eternity seems to know what it wants to say, but it needs to resort to an absurd scenario for that message to begin to make sense. At least next time you’re forced to choose an irrevocable forever, you’ll know what to do.
Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
