Eternity

 Everyman

In or about the year 30 of the common era, a debate is said to have taken place between two rabbis. The first one, a Sadducee, did not believe in life after death: the second, a Pharisee, did. So, says the sceptic: it is permissible — indeed, under some circumstances, obligatory — for a widowed lady to take a second husband; and if the second dies as well, then a third and a fourth. So, if there is an after life, who is she married to? The second, more famous rabbi replied that this was a silly question: you shouldn’t think of the afterlife in material terms. In heaven, there won’t be any such thing as marriage. 

It is this same dilemma that Eternity, a rom-com set in the after-life, entirely fails to address.

Larry (Miles Teller) and Joan (Elizabeth Olsen)  are an old couple, as happy as any perpetually bickering grandpa and grandma can be. Larry dies and them Joan dies, which is the exact definition of a plot. They are translated into a very materialistic after-life -- with escalators, bars and hotel rooms -- in middle-aged bodies; with their physical ailments cured. We are asked to imagine there’s no heaven: everyone, good or bad, gets to choose what kind of Eternity they want to experience: — an eternity on a sunny beach, or an eternity walking in the mountains, or on a space ship or in a Nazi-free Weimar Republic… They have to make the choice in one week, and once made it is irrevocable.

The twist is that before she was married to Larry, Joan was married to Luke (Callum Turner), an all-to-perfect hunk who died in the Korean War. He has waited in the anteroom of eternity for her arrival: and she has to choose between spending her afterlife with her one true first love (who she only knew for a few weeks) or with the husband and father of her children (who she has shared decades of life with). The after-life set-up is a plot machine to ask this question: and the eventual solution is precisely the one you would expect from a movie of this kind. It briefly looks as if the two boys are going to go off together, but in the end they don't.

The Good Place has set the bar pretty high for after-life comedies. Eternity shares with it a liking for corner-of-the-eye visual gags: the "eternities" for which we glimpse advertising promos are a good deal funnier than the ones Larry, Joan and Luke actually visit. But unlike the TV show, the film seems to be entirely uninterested in ethics or philosophy. It doesn't remotely engage with the actual idea of life-after-death.We never find out why this arbitrary system has been put in place, or who by. There is no big reveal or wry twist. It does not turn out that they are really in a Sartrean hell. No-one makes a choice which causes the entire system to break down. There is no philosophy professor on hand to point out that an infinite amount of time in any environment, however pleasant, would become unbearable pretty quickly. And in any case, that’s not necessarily what “eternity” means. 

The only scenario I can envisage which would not rapidly turn into hell would be if infinitely-prolonged beings got to inhabit an infinitely large environment in which there were always new experiences to be had and new individuals to encounter: although the availability of an infinite number of experiences would tend to make any particular one meaningless. I believe that the highest levels or Mormon and Armstrongite heaven involve becoming an actual God, creating your own universe and breeding additional deities. This is also what happens in Dungeons & Dragons. 

We are clearly supposed to feel that we are being hauled though a sentimental roller coaster of emotions; in fact the experience is more like watching some experimental specimens being forced through some moderately challenging hoops. 

A clever and funny film, which really could have done with being a little bit funnier and an awful lot cleverer.

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