Eternity Should Be Sadder

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Eternity is an old-school crowd-pleaser. Directed by David Freyne, it’s big and brightly lit, the type of movie you watch during the holidays despite it having nothing to do with Christmas. It’s full of beautiful people and whimsical flourishes and features a premise so instantly appealing it begs the question, How hasn’t this been done before? A woman named Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) arrives in the afterlife and has to choose which of her two deceased husbands to spend her afterlife with: her first husband, Luke (Callum Turner), who died in military service shortly after the pair married, or her second husband, Larry (Miles Teller), whom she was married to for 65 years and raised her family with. It’s an impossible and irreversible choice between pursuing the life she never got to have and continuing to build on the life and memories she did. But for a movie with such high and clear emotional stakes, it sure has a lot of jokes.

A lot of these jokes add to the movie’s texture, particularly those embedded in the movie’s intricate (after)world-building. For example, each newly dead person has to choose a specific “eternity” to spend forever in, and among the infinite choices they’re presented with are eternities like “smokers’ world: because cancer can’t kill you twice” and “capitalist world: What’s the point of being rich if someone else isn’t poor?” At one point, an announcement plays over a loudspeaker, issuing a reminder to the deceased: “Geopolitical differences don’t matter; you’re dead.” Jokes also land with regularity thanks to the actors who deliver them, in particular John Early and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who play “afterlife coordinators” tasked with helping Joan and Larry plan their afterlife. They function as de facto rom-com sidekicks offering comic relief.

But the movie never slows the pace of jokes enough for such relief to feel necessary. Even the central characters, for whom you’d think this would all be heartbreaking, constantly deliver quips. Comic beats interrupt otherwise affecting scenes, like when Joan and Luke relive their life together in a video archive of their memories on Earth, and an embarrassed Joan skips past a memory of them having sex: “No, no, no!” Larry and Luke develop a rivalry in which any genuine hurt they are causing one another gets sidelined in favor of petty squabbling; in one scene, Larry tries to discount the valor of Luke’s war death: “It was Korea, buddy. Relax!” The result is that the premise plays like a 1950s-sitcom predicament. Joan, discombobulated by the choice she’s presented with, is appropriately tortured at times by the gravity of it all but seems just as likely to put her hands on her hips, pout, and exclaim, “What a pickle!”

None of this is to say Eternity needed to be another Past Lives, telling the story of a woman forced to confront the divergent paths of life with two possible romantic partners in as aching a tone as possible. Pure comedies have their place. But in the movie’s final act, Freyne clearly wants to evoke tears. There are big romantic sacrifices, sad good-byes, and wrenching looks of longing and regret that don’t hit as hard as they could, because the audience hasn’t been given space to feel these characters’ emotions build over the course of the film. Eternity didn’t need to be a melodrama, but sometimes a little schmaltz goes a long way.

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Hershal Pandya

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