“Hell is other people.” No one knows that for sure, Jean-Paul, but if I were stuck in the not-so-sweet hereafter with Miles Teller, Callum Turner, Elizabeth Olsen, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, maybe my heels would be hotter. I like some of those actors, especially Randolph, and they’re not to blame for their new movie Eternity; in fact, this is the first time I’ve ever liked, even tolerated, Teller. Ever since Damien Chazelle’s awful and inexplicably popular (especially with women) Whiplash in 2014, Teller has threatened to invade multiplexes, but due to some dumb fights, conservative politics, and an alleged lack of manners, he never took off. People forget that Teller co-starred with Tom Cruise in 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, probably because he was alongside Glen Powell, the young man Cruise chose to guide in the end. Powell may not be doing too well this year—The Running Man, Chad Powers—but he got those gigs because he played the game, whatever that means. Teller obviously didn’t know, either.
The two things I kept thinking over and over again during Eternity’s interminable (too easy, but they’re asking for it) two hours and two minutes: Miles Teller has really warmed on me, he’s reminding me of Classic Hollywood stars like Van Heflin, James Cagney, Robert Walker, and Don Taylor; and Callum Turner will make a great James Bond. That’s the rumor, he’s the favorite, and if Jeff Bezos picks him to lead the next… movie? TV series?… I’ll check it out. Eternity’s premise and setting are blatantly ripped off from Albert Brooks’ 1991 film Defending Your Life: Teller and Olsen are an old married couple who die within days of each other. He goes first, arriving in an orange and beige afterlife terminal full of freshly dead souls embodied at whatever age they were happiest. “That’s why you don’t see a lot of teenagers,” Randolph says, one of the “Afterlife Coordinators.” That’s the caliber of “joke” you can expect in this movie.
Pat Cunnane’s script ended up on the 2022 “Blacklist,” an annual collection of highly coveted un-produced original screenplays and not a list of actors who are persona non grata. You won’t see Kevin Spacey or Dasha Nekrasova on “The Blacklist,” unless they write a killer spec script. After the Hunt is another one of those Blacklist movies that got made, and guess what, it bombed spectacularly just like everything else this fall not called Wicked or Zootopia. Even if most of the people who see Eternity will see it on Apple TV, where it will be playing in the background, or on long after the TV’s owner has fallen asleep, auto-played after an umpteenth viewing of As Good as it Gets, I was able to experience this made for streaming movie the proper way: in a movie theater, at 9:45 on a Tuesday night, alone in a movie theater, empty save for three college girls talking about boyfriends. They got quiet as soon as Eternity began, occasionally checking phones, nothing egregious, and then, with about 45 minutes left to go, the sniffles begin. Eternity got them.
I saw Hamnet at the same theater the next night, and one of the people working the popcorn told a customer they “LOVED” Eternity, so I can’t criticize the movie for appealing to few and satisfying no one like most material made for streaming. It’s just another lousy movie that many people like. What makes Eternity galling rather than merely grueling is how openly it rips off the Albert Brooks film. This could be forgiven if the film was of any value, but Defending Your Life didn’t need to be updated and certainly didn’t need to be anonymized as it is here. It’s not one of Brooks’ masterpieces, but it’s his most “accessible” film (and, for what it’s worth, the most commercially successful); it should be better known, more widely discussed and watched.
Brooks is by no means obscure, but if a movie like Eternity can lift its entire premise and setting whole cloth—DMV/Holiday Inn style purgatory, corporate “Afterlife Coordinators,” memories of lives lived and not lived, and questions of one’s “true self” manifesting—then Defending Your Life is obscure, dangerously obscure, and people need to be educated so that there isn’t a suffocatingly unfunny road-trip comedy called Lost in the United States made for Netflix in a couple years.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith