‘Eternity’ evaluation: Da’Vine Pleasure Randolph sparks up an underwritten rom-com

There’s no scarcity of fantasy gems about afterlife forms conflicting with real love, together with “Right here Comes Mr. Jordan” (remade into one other traditional, “Heaven Can Wait”), the wartime Powell-Pressburger masterpiece “A Matter of Life and Dying” and Albert Brooks’ “Defending Your Life.” “Eternity,” set in a manner station resembling a blocky airport Radisson at capability, could by no means grow to be pantheon materials. However in screenwriter Pat Cunnane’s intelligent riff on love triangles and limbos, directed by David Freyne with nods to what was celestially cheeky about these earlier motion pictures, there are indicators that the rom-com itself needn’t be left for lifeless.

Within the 65-year marriage of Larry and Joan (performed in opening scenes by veterans Barry Primus and Betty Buckley), it’s Larry who goes first — unexpectedly, since Joan’s the one with a terminal sickness. When he awakens on the Junction, nonetheless, he’s his youthful self (enter Miles Teller) and thrown into an environment akin to a travel-agent conference, offered with myriad choices for the subsequent stage and a seasoned Afterlife Coordinator named Anna (Da’Vine Pleasure Randolph of “The Holdovers”) to facilitate his choice.

The hitch (which isn’t completely rationalized however no matter) is that after your themed eternity is picked — possibly it’s location-driven (seashore? mountains?) or a response to what chafed you on Earth (Man-Free World is widespread) — that’s it. No do-overs. However when Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) arrives quickly after Larry, she discovers not solely a husband hoping to share without end together with her but in addition her long-dead past love Luke (Callum Turner), preserved in youthful brawn, having waited many years to rekindle their all-too-brief ardour.

Contained in the jokiness of a kitschy mall, “Eternity” spring a tantalizingly emotional situation: Ought to the unknown or the acquainted prevail? Even the coordinators decide sides. (Joan’s planner favors dreamy-looking Luke.) However as a lot because the script tries to complicate issues by emphasizing every perpetuity suitor’s fundamental goodness — Larry being steadfast and true, Luke radiating affected person sacrifice — “Eternity” has a persona downside in that solely Teller has been given one thing to play. Irritable, neurotic, first rate, confused and sardonic, Larry is a refreshing nod to the sort of spiky haplessness Jack Lemmon mastered. Teller’s old-school charisma in conveying that nervous power is his personal bid for a profession eternity.

If solely Olsen‘s and Turner’s characters had been as generously written; Joan and Luke merely aren’t as fascinating. Turner has been saddled with the Ralph Bellamy function, nevertheless it’s much less forgiving that Joan, even with Olsen well-equipped for Lombardesque screwball vibes, is so thinly conceived exterior of the “selection.”

That makes the richest takeaway from this largely breezy if tonally jumbled movie the totally successful pairing of Teller and Randolph. Their prickly, candy and touching scenes, which traverse a comically wealthy terrain from buyer and consumer to misplaced soul and pal, are the film’s greatest, suggestive of the extra philosophically commiserative potentialities (“Groundhog Day” meets “Oh, God!”) you would like had been explored.

Not that “Eternity,” after a plot swerve that had this viewer fooled, doesn’t discover a nifty method to stick its heartfelt touchdown. Nearly as good as Teller is as a husband in disaster, the Oscar-winning Randolph is her personal commanding supply of sunshine, sufficient to promote this film’s feel-good abstracts and wry commentaries on her personal. She’s support-staffed sufficient of different folks’s tales these previous few years; someone please give this world-class actor her personal heavenly main function.