Review | “Eternity” is far too long

Photo courtesy of A24

“Eternity” is a rom-com that doesn’t make nearly enough of its setup and goes on for longer than it should, but a winning Miles Teller and an appealing conflict kept me invested.

“Eternity” paints a vision of the afterlife where, upon your expiration, you are transported to what is ostensibly a college fair of a vast range of different eternities from “Studio 54 World” to “Capitalist World.” You can choose to spend forever in any of them, but with the caveat that you can never leave to check out a different world. 

We are first introduced to this system that awaits the dead through the experience of Larry (Miles Teller). He’s just suffered a fatal heart attack and waits for his wife of over 50 years, Joan (Elizabeth Olsen), to join him before he chooses where he’ll spend his eternity. 

However, his plans are complicated when Joan finally does cross over, and she’s reunited with her first husband, Luke (Callum Turner), who died in the Korean War decades prior and has been waiting just as long for her to arrive. From there, Joan is forced to choose between whom she wants to spend the endless remainder of her existence with.

When I first heard the setup for this movie, I genuinely — no hyperbole — thought it sounded like one of the best pitches for a movie I’ve ever heard; what it means to be there for someone versus what it means to wait for them. Some romance in the afterlife and an impossible choice as one must comb through the past while on the precipice of forever? Count me in! 

But, above all else, this is a “which guy is she going to pick?” movie. A romantic whodunnit but with fewer suspects. Will she pick one? The other? Neither? I considered all of these outcomes over the course of the film. 

While that is undoubtedly a compelling framework for a movie, it ends up simplifying the possibilities and the ideas you could explore when you take a romantic comedy and set it in the afterlife. This isn’t a movie about life or even the concept of eternity as much as it is about love, specifically the cliché kind that’s oriented in a triangle.

The question of who she’ll pick is presented in a pretty facile manner. I wish the film dared to complicate things further beyond the initial speed bump. For a movie about an impossible choice, I could’ve told you that where it ends up was where it needed to end up within the first half-hour. I never really found my allegiances tested between Joan’s prospects. And without that push and pull, the movie keeps going. Even with this feast of gags and a collection of charming actors, I felt the exact moment it overstayed its welcome and ran out of gas, too close to when it needs you to lean in as Joan makes her ultimate pick.

This movie knows that much of its tension stems from the selection Joan will have to make. There are characters who feel like extensions of the audience in how they back each of Joan’s potential companions with such dogged stubbornness, recalling the kind of discourse I saw around shows like “The Summer I Turned Pretty.” People love to pick “Team (insert character)” and stick to it like nothing else. This is definitely a crucial part of the narrative engine of “Eternity” and what makes it work, but it’s something of a delight to have it be a part of the text of the film as well.

As for the trio of actors at the center of the film, Miles Teller is the standout. He was a master of playing a lovable dope early in his career, which became a rarer and rarer thing to see from him as he traded playing average joes for doing barrel rolls in an F-15 with Tom Cruise. This is a return to form for him in terms of playing normal people, albeit one in an extraordinary situation. 

A character aptly tells Larry at one point, “You grow on people, Larry.” In comparison with Luke’s swagger, Teller seems to know he’s trying to win a game with a losing hand with both Joan and the audience. His charm comes from the moments he gets things wrong, but also the moments he’s there for Joan in ways that no one else could be.

“Eternity” doesn't quite live up to the promise of its intricately imagined setting or premise, but its rom-com rhythms are difficult to resist. By the end, the movie sent my heart aflutter with its many ruminations on the resonant nature of love both in life and beyond it.