Perhaps we’ve been sold an overly literal version of heaven when we jump at the chance to live forever. While theologians balk at how transactional the idea is (80-odd years of good behavior for everlasting happiness), preachers and any self-help guru worth their salt capitulate nonetheless to our primal fear of mortality, with entertainers and vaudevillians following close behind. Thus speaks Eternity, David Freyne’s sweet and stupidly sincere third feature, directly to the sensitive soul, being as it were both counterfactual and unfalsifiable. It posits an afterlife, à la The Good Place, where the recently deceased are faced with the prospect of choosing one of its many worlds — or “eternities” — to live in perpetually. But you can’t leave your world once you’ve chosen it, lest you nullify your right to existence and relinquish yourself to the void. Who in their right mind would?
Eternity’s cozy simulation of the great beyond sprinkles its comforts all around, with an overall sheen of retro-nostalgia and an aesthetic palette just short of Wes Anderson’s obsessive symmetry. Into this fantastical scene intrudes the ghost of a Charlie Kaufman trip, its hints of neurosis and gnawing insecurity threatening to derail the picture-perfect backdrop of Freyne’s painstakingly agnostic paradise where eternities are peddled much like indefinite time shares in a buffet of advertising glamor. Fortunately, for the casual viewer, there’s little in general to be insecure about when you’re dead — a wondrous premise forsaken by the film for easy, tear-jerking romance. When Larry (Miles Teller), one half of an old, happily married couple, chokes on a pretzel and shuffles off his mortal coil, he wakes up on a train bound for the aforementioned purgatory where his “afterlife coordinator,” Anne (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), prepares to process him for his good place. His wife Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) soon joins him, finally rid of cancer and appearing 40 years younger (the afterlife’s denizens take the form of their happiest age). But so, too, does her first husband, Luke (Callum Turner), who passed over six decades earlier and has been waiting for her all this time.
The annoying though not entirely unforeseen pickle which Joan finds herself in does not disabuse Eternity of its merits. Where the film misfires most, however, is in its emotional thrust. Ostensibly packaged as a classic dilemma between Platonic ideal (Luke died young in the Korean War, two years into their marriage) and lived reality (Joan and Larry were together for practically their whole adult lives), Freyne and Pat Cunnane’s screenplay opts for the most traveled route, circumscribing its narrative beats thoroughly within the strictures of the romantic comedy without once expounding said romance beyond every other love triangle out there. The quirks and inconsistencies of this variegated pastel world could warrant seasons’ worth of lore, yet Eternity treats them mostly as background fodder, consigning the stakes of immortality to game-show theatrics. A potential ménage à trois is dashed as fast as it’s floated; the throuple could inhabit the same forever home after all. And sticking around is so precious that, confronted with the void’s non-existence, they’d probably rather choose Hell.
In a way, this speaks less to a case of bad theology and more the flaws of the laity, for Eternity’s primary aim — which it achieves with remarkable success — is really to enact the common fantasy of “great ordinary love,” as Anne describes Larry’s plight, serving as wishful balm for the anxieties attached to meaning and impermanence in the grand scheme of things. Yet even so, Eternity is strangely lacking in profundity. It’s cutesy, make no mistake, and also sometimes flat and cringeworthy (as Joan flails about haplessly while her newfound suitors parry in manufactured jest). It’s also wantonly manipulative, especially when none of the characters are properly allotted room for free will. Ditching the mythology of Plato’s Symposium — which ponders the certainty and exclusivity of soulmates — for a sandbox universe less self-aware than the Ryan Reynolds-led Free Guy, the film banks on a suspension both of disbelief and of depth. Did no one stop to consider the implications of inhabiting the same environs for thousands of years, never mind a billion, never mind with the same few faces? To paraphrase the inimitable Dean Martin, sorely missed: everybody loves somebody sometime, but nobody loves that somebody all the time.
DIRECTOR: David Freyne; CAST: Miles Teller, Elizabeth Olsen, Callum Turner, John Early; DISTRIBUTOR: A24; IN THEATERS: November 26; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 52 min.
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