Imagine that you could choose where to spend your afterlife. Then imagine having to choose between the two great loves of your life. That’s the basic premise of the movie Eternity, starring Elizabeth Olsen (Wandavision, Sorry for Your Loss) as Joan, and Miles Teller (The Spectacular Now, Divergent, Top Gun: Maverick) as Larry. Callum Turner, John Early, Olga Merediz, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph round out the cast of what is being billed as a fantasy romantic comedy, directed by David Freyne and written by Freyne and Pat Cunnane.
I had the opportunity to screen the movie through one of my local movie theaters, Landmark Midtown, which offers $5 Mystery Mondays. You buy your ticket for $5, but you have no idea which movie you will see, just that it’s a movie that hasn’t been released yet. This year, they’ve screened Nuremburg, Eleanor the Great and Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, among others.
First of all, I’m excited that a movie has been made using an original screenplay. As you’ve heard me rant often before, Hollywood too often relies on sequels, remakes and adaptations of plays and books. I don’t mind the adaptations as much, but the amount of sequels and remakes, especially over the last decade or two, has been almost comical. Thanks to The Black List, a platform developed by my high school classmate, Franklin Leonard, highly regarded scripts that have not been produced are highlighted. Previously produced films that came out of The Black List include Juno, Silver Linings Playbook, Argo, Spotlight and The King’s Speech. We can now add Eternity to that list as well! The Black List has now expanded to include television series, books and plays.
Back to Eternity. We meet Joan and Larry as an older couple who has been married for 65 years, and are on their way to a gender reveal party for their soon-to-be-born great-grandchild. Right away, you get a sense of the quirky comedy that sets the tone for the entire movie when Larry and Joan argue throughout their drive, and discuss the absurdity of gender reveal parties, which I wholeheartedly agree with. We learn that before Joan has terminal cancer, and that before she married Larry, her first husband died serving in the Korean War. This isn’t really a spoiler since the entire premise of the movie is the afterlife, but right after we learn this juicy tidbit, Larry keels over. I’ll let you watch the movie so you can see how he goes. Like I said, the comedic quirks in this movie are really thought provoking!
After Larry bites it, he is taken to the afterlife. It looks like a John Portman atrium-style hotel, very reminiscent of Atlanta’s Marriott Marquis, but one review I read compared it to the TWA Terminal in New York, which I’ve only seen pictures of. We meet his afterlife coordinator, Anna, played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph (The Holdovers). She explains how the afterlife works: you get seven days to choose where to spend your eternity, and you have a variety of worlds to choose from. It looks like an expo, with each eternity set up as a booth to show where you can go: the beach, mountains, Studio 54 (complete with complimentary cocaine sniffs), the 80s, you get the idea.
There was a scene in the movie that reminded me of The Truman Show, a brilliant comedy with Jim Carrey from the late 1990s. Larry enters his hotel room, and you can clearly see the window in room is a backdrop designed to look like the sky. Depending on the time of day, you get a different backdrop: blue skies and clouds, a sunset, or night sky with a moon. There was a very poignant scene in The Truman Show where Truman ventures to “the end of his world” and he finds that the sky is merely a set, and there is a door to the real world. For Larry in Eternity though, it’s not a set, just the afterlife where he has to choose his eternity.
So Larry had seven days to choose, but he didn’t want to make a choice until he knew when Joan would arrive, which he knew would be soon, given her condition. Of course, she does arrive just in the nick of time, and just as Larry tries to explain the choice they have to make, enter Luke, the first husband. It turns out that Luke has been waiting for 67 years for Joan. Instead of choosing his afterlife after seven days, Luke chose to stay in this limbo world, becoming a bartender doling out advice to those in their seven-day waiting period. So now, Joan has to choose who to spend eternity with: Luke or Larry? And where should she go?
This made me wonder, where would I spend my eternity? A library? A cozy reading nook with unlimited book supply? A mountain cabin with a firepit and lake just beyond? And if I had the opportunity, who would I spend it with? Hey, I would like to have just one great love in my life, and Joan had TWO! Of course, her character also lived into her 80s or 90s by my calculations. I figure Joan had several options: Luke, Larry, her former neighbor Karen, played by Olga Merediz, or by herself. Of course, I would choose the last option, but I’ve also been single for over 20 years now.
The script was brilliant and lighthearted for such a heavy topic, while the acting was okay. I think it is worth an afternoon at the movie, or for a date night with the love of your life. There was a period later in the film where it felt like the movie dragged, but then it wrapped up pretty well at the end.
A24, the production company behind Eternity, also produced Materialists, which I was able to screen earlier this year as well. I like that they are going for some heavy topics for romantic comedies, like the disastrous effects of professional matchmaking and choosing your afterlife.
Watch the trailer for Eternity
Where would you spend your eternity?
Sravanthi Meka 