Elizabeth Olsen’s New Rom-Com Shamelessly Copies One of the Greatest Comedies of All-Time
One of the most buzzed-about comedies at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival is Eternity starring Elizabeth Olsen, Miles Teller and Callum Turner. It turns out that A24’s new rom-com fantasy is funny, charming and a shameless copy of a beloved movie from 34 years ago.
Eternity has a novel premise: Olsen plays a recently-deceased woman who’s reunited with her dead war hero husband in the afterlife. She’s then forced to choose between spending eternity with the handsome veteran (Turner) or her partner of 65 years (Teller, in full-on schlub mode). And for some reason, nobody seriously considers the idea of a never-ending throuple.
It’s evident from the trailer that the filmmakers are big fans of Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life, which similarly features a non-denominational afterlife full of confusing bureaucratic rules and vintage aesthetics. But Eternity arguably crosses the line between “loving homage” and “maybe Albert Brooks should give his attorney a call.”
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It’s not just the basic set-up, Eternity apes a number of very specific story beats from Defending Your Life, including the fact that both movies open with characters dying in dumb ways (Brooks drives his BMW into oncoming traffic and Teller’s character wolfs down a handful of pretzels). They both wind up on mass transit systems (trams and trains, respectively) that usher them into purgatorial way stations between life and the next phase of existence. They’re then put up in Ramada-like hotels, where they flip through an assortment of baffling TV programs.
And each dead person is assigned a representative to look out for their interests; in Defending Your Life, Brooks works with defense lawyer Rip Torn’s Bob Diamond, and in Eternity, Teller is aided by “afterlife coordinator” Anna, played by Oscar winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph.
Despite Eternity’s unique love triangle story, once the plot kicks into gear, it’s still basically just Brooks’ movie. Teller’s Larry is also forced to defend himself, not to the universe, but to his wife. And in both cases, judgements are informed by revisiting their pasts through otherworldly technology that lets them rewatch moments from their lives.
Not to mention how both movies include humorous scenes involving embarrassingly bad nightclub acts — in Eternity it’s a drunken celebrity impersonator, while in Defending Your Life it’s a lame stand-up comedian.
And without spoiling too much, we can say that Eternity also ends with a grand romantic gesture that is arguably just a bloated version of Brooks’ heartwarming climax.
To be fair, Defending Your Life drew heavily on existing movies, most obviously Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, the 1946 David Niven comedy that also combined romance and a heavenly trial. But while Brooks clearly took inspiration from prior films, Defending Your Life wasn't a carbon copy of anything that had come before it.
This is all especially frustrating because Eternity is an otherwise likable movie, and exactly the sort of project that Hollywood should be making more of right now. But instead of offering us a new take on this type of story, Eternity, ironically, is stuck in the past.
