After.Life

Sometimes, a movie sticks with you after you watch it, haunting you, eating at you. You mull over its themes, the acting leaves an impression, the movie makes you see a concept in a different light. After.Life did so, but not for any of those reasons. I was absolutely confused about whether or not I liked this movie. And I'm still unsure, hence the dead center rating. For every one thing After.Life (what a dumb name) does right, it does another wrong. It is in perfect balance that way, but that's not a laudable goal. The acting, for instance, is great. When you have Christina Ricci and Liam Neeson heading the cast, you're not getting the B-team on performances. Ricci plays a woman who dies and wakes up in a funeral home, where the operator can speak to the dead. He helps them prepare for their final days above ground. Ricci is confused, disbelieving, panicked, while Neeson is caring and fatherly. They work well together, he as a sort of Charon and her as a lost soul who won't get on the boat, despite never having been happy with her life. But the movie also wants there to be a sinister undercurrent to their relationship. My wife felt like the movie wanted us to believe he was holding her hostage. I thought the movie was trying to convince us there was this greater mystery afoot. But, for the most part, it never justifies this feeling. It just exists, without reason, and more importantly, without stakes. I mean, she's dead. There can't be a life-or-death situation when one of the two options -- the good one -- is removed. But I'll come back to that, because there's another aspect to it. The movie is dripping with atmosphere, as long as its in the morgue. It's not that the room is somber or gothic, but something about it is presented in such a way to give the movie a great sense of ambiance. Part of it is the color palate; red, bright fire engine red, is very prominent in the movie, and it makes sense; red is tied to life, love, and death, all three being intertwining themes of the movie. What is life without love? What is a relationship without love? If life is spent without the beauty of love, is it worth living? Does the value of life come from its fleeting nature? After.Life toys with these ideas ... unfortunately, it also only toys with these ideas. It tries them on like trying on clothes in a mirror, and then puts them back on the hanger. Because it also has to follow Justin Long -- Ricci's boyfriend -- as he grieves, struggles to accept it, and then starts to think maybe she's not dead. And that's because, late in the movie, it starts dropping hints that maybe she's not, and it is an unwelcome addition to the proceedings. It muddies the waters of everything you've seen, making you not only doubt what you've seen, but start to question the logic of the movie itself (and considering that it plays fast and loose with its own rules before this twist, that's two levels of immersion-breaking doubt). Even without the never-resolved maybe-it-was-something-else clues, following Long still breaks the ambiance of the movie. His time in the living world doesn't detract from the movie, but it doesn't add, either. The movie couldn't just be about Ricci and Neeson, but every time it cuts to Long's character, it feels like an intrusion somehow. The movie needs him just to break things up, but he's not wanted, if that makes sense. Also contributing to the dissonance between the moral ponderings, delicate atmosphere, and sinister undertones is a score that JUST WON'T STOP being weird and ominous at all the wrong times. It isn't a bad score, but it is applied with no delicacy whatsoever. Speaking of something that is handled awkwardly, a topic I hate bringing up in reviews because it can come off pervy, we have to discuss Ricci's nudity. The act of preparing a corpse for its funeral is, in a way, an intimate sequence of events, and to an extent, After.Life does handle it well. Neeson's funeral home director treats her like any other corpse as he disrobes her. She spends a good portion of the movie in only a bright red slip, and then another significant portion totally naked, and not once is Neeson's character made to feel inappropriate in any way, when it would've been so easy for them to do so. I appreciate that. But this movie is also very obviously directed by a man, and a man who thought his female star was gorgeous, because this movie bends over backwards to find new ways of getting Ricci's breasts in frame. And while the movie tries to ameliorate the sexiness of an absolutely stunning woman like Ricci being naked by having her skin be a deathly gray, or having a gross wound in her torso, they also make sure to have her lay on the table in all sorts of positions that accentuate and highlight her physical attributes. She often looks like she's posing for Playboy's Girls Of The County Coroner's Office. In 100 minutes, I've seen more of Ricci nude than my own wife in a week. Why, if it's an overhead shot of Ricci laying on the table and lamenting about her former life, do I need to see her boobs in frame? Why, as Neeson is preparing another corpse, do we need a behind shot of Ricci sashaying across the room, swaying her hips, and leaning against a wall with her back arched so her breasts are at full perkiness? Why is this movie going to such great lengths to make us horny for a dead woman? For a movie that seems to want to treat death and the preparation of the dead as a sacred event, it also seems to want to luxuriate in some softcore leering just because this one dead body happens to belong to a volcano-level hottie like Ricci. You can see why I'm torn on this. The movie can't decide whether it wants to be a philosophical pondering on the value of life and death, or a thriller mystery that only occurs at the last minute. It can't decide if the atmosphere should be gothic and somber, or tense and emotional. It can't decide if it should treat its lead actress as a capable performer or a centerfold. It is a jumbled mess of a movie that is never boring, but also never coalesces into anything, because it is unsure of what that thing should be.