‘Eternity’ Digs Up A Rom-Com That’s Got A Problem With The Afterlife
(REVIEW) The afterlife has always fascinated people. While organized religion is on the decline, more Americans believe in an afterlife today than they have since the 1970s. So it’s inevitable that we would start to see more creative interpretations of the death — and what happens after — in the stories we tell, unmoored by the need to be faithful to religious tradition.
Enter “Eternity,” a romantic comedy by independent film studio A24 that centers on a love triangle between a woman and her two dead husbands in the afterlife. While the movie itself is uneven, the world it creates is a perfect encapsulation of a postmodern idea of happiness — and shows why this view of our ultimate destination is causing us such misery.
The film follows Joan Cutler (Elizabeth Olsen), a widow who dies and finds herself in an afterlife where souls have one week to decide where to spend eternity. There, Joan is faced with the impossible choice between the man she spent her life with (Miles Teller) and her first love (Callum Turner), who died young and has waited decades for her to arrive.
READ: How The Movie ‘Nuremberg’ Fumbles Its Own Case
The first and second acts of “Eternity” are very satisfying. It hits all the notes one is looking for from something in the rom-com genre. The characters are all likable, and you root for them to get together — both pairings — at different times, in fact. The film finds that important balance of being funny, while also feeling like it has real stakes and is grounded in real human emotions.
Olsen’s Joan conveys the stress of the impossible choice she faces very well. Teller’s Larry is a flawed but empathetic underdog. Turner’s Luke manages to balance being idealized, but still believable.
But what truly elevates the majority of the film is its A24 arthouse style of commitment to filmmaking craft. Whether it’s the camera, lighting, editing, production design or anything else, the filmmakers know how to use all the tools at their disposal to enhance the experience.
The repeated use of two and three shots to give us a chance to feel the actors’ chemistry is spot on. Another are the quick cuts to heighten a joke. There’s also the highly curated framing of actors on carefully selected sets to increase symbolism. Between this and “Materialists,” A24 is really leaning into bringing this “arthouse” sensibility to rom-coms. I would love it if this successfully revived this genre the way it did for horror.
But “Eternity” stumbles in its third act. More accurately, it stumbles, picks itself up, then stumbles again, and gets its shoelaces tangled up together and tumbles down a staircase. When Joan finally makes her decision, it’s so ill-developed that it’s hard to relate to her decision emotionally. Then, because she is convinced so quickly to change her mind — by something that you’d think she’d have thought of herself — it starts to feel like she’s a rather flighty person. This impression only becomes stronger when she changes her mind once more.
By the time the film ends, it’s difficult to avoid the feeling that it’s only a matter of time before she does so once more. This is all the more unsatisfying because the entertaining banter is all but gone in this section, replaced by a lot of on-the-nose speeches about the meaning of love.
I am tempted to say the reason the third act struggles is that the film collapses under the weight of its own spiritual contradictions. One can’t talk about marriage and the afterlife without mentioning that this question of “who is the woman married to when the dead rise if she married more than one husband but they both died” was posed to Jesus in the New Testament (Matthew 22:23-34, Mark 12:18-27, Luke 20:27-40) to trap him. His response was to dismiss it by saying people wouldn’t be married after death.
Some, like Biblical Scholar Dr. Dru Johson, have argued that Jesus was not literally teaching eternal celibacy, but making a broader point about spiritual complacency. Even so, this illustrates the difficulties of reconciling marriage and the afterlife go back a long time.
But the afterlife in “Eternity” has bigger tensions than just that. It’s a full-on postmodern view of heaven that doesn’t even try to hide how postmodern it is. It’s absolute candy for a culture critic like myself. It’s an afterlife where each individual gets to pick what they want the most. There’s beach heaven, gym heaven, mountain heaven, capitalist heaven and “no man heaven” That delivers one of the funniest gags in the film since that heaven has an insanely long waitlist.
As French Philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky explains in “Hypermodern Times,” postmodernism is functionally the idea that we can choose to make the meaning of our own lives out of what we think will make us happy, and that became popular because we were so successful at reforming our institutions to expand human freedom that humans had near-unlimited freedom to determine their own path in life.
Monarchies became democracies, economies became capitalist and religion was separated from the state. And people migrated to cities, customized their friendships, their jobs, their sexuality, to their preferences. Along with the rise of the internet, they did so even further, egged on by the algorithm.
But Lipovetski points out that the enthusiasm for this ability to choose your happiness quickly turns to anxiety because the freedom to create your happiness came with the responsibility to create your happiness.
Likewise, this freedom to customize our lives has led us increasingly to move further and further away from each other into smaller, more fragile and more virtual communities. This is making us more miserable — not happier — as Jonathan Haidt details in his book, “The Anxious Generation,” and Jean Twenge in her book, “Generations.”
This brings us to the irony of “Eternity”: It is a picture of heaven that in many ways very mirrors the Christian view of hell. The Christian picture of heaven is an eternal wedding feast (Mathew 22), a city (Revelation 21) and other such metaphors. It’s one where people are gathered together in something beautiful. Hell is often thought of as a fire, but is also often described as a “separation” from God and others. C.S. Lewis pictured hell in “The Great Divorce” as a place where people were constantly moving further and further away from each other, because they had the freedom to do exactly what they wanted. And that’s what they chose to do. The parallels to today are eerie.
There’s a moment treated as a joke where Larry asks if he can see his parents. He’s told he can, but if he does, he has to stay with them forever. His comically horrified look on his face puts that option to rest.
And yet, there is a cruelty to this. Is the end point of all human relationships between parents and children to all leave each other behind? For most of human history, it was the norm for people to live in tight-knit, interconnected groups of families. In fact, some like New York Times columnist David Brooks have suggested that collapsing that social network was one of the reasons for the collapse of the family. Without that support system, too many couples couldn’t support the weight of the troubles in marriage. Doesn’t that sound like a better version of the afterlife?
The problem is that living in community requires sacrifices of some of your personal happiness. Larry and Joan can’t be together if he’s in “beach” world and she’s in “mountain” world. And those are just two people.
Building a life with a community means negotiating this happiness with a lot more people. In our modern world, we have decided that personal happiness is absolute and shouldn’t be negotiated. But that ends up meaning being alone, which is no happiness at all. In fact, it’s likely not an exaggeration to call it hell.
“Eternity” is playing now in theaters.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at josephholmesstudios.com.