In ‘Eternity’ Film, Hollywood Unexpectedly Celebrates Commitment

Many romantic comedies celebrate divorce (Eat, Pray, Love), glorify sex without commitment (Friends with Benefits), or constitute pure porn like 2025 Academy Award winner Anora. This makes the holiday rom-com Eternity a pleasant surprise.

Eternity isn’t perfect. Partial nudity and F-bombs make it inappropriate for children. The pacing lags at times. Hollywood delivers the usual paean to political correctness by casting characters diversified by skin color and sexual orientation. But the overall message is pro-marriage and pro-commitment, a decided throwback to the 1950s before the start of the sexual revolution.

Warning: Spoilers ahead!

The movie opens with a couple in their 80s, bickering while driving to their daughter’s gender-reveal party. They’ve been married for over 60 years. Joan has terminal cancer, but it’s her husband, Larry, who dies minutes later, after choking on a pretzel.

The scene jumps to an afterlife way station called the Junction, where Larry must choose from a variety of options as to where to spend eternity. Joan dies and arrives a few days later. Both are now in their 30s again and are quickly joined by Joan’s first husband. Luke had died in the Korean War soon after he and Joan had married, and he’s been bartending at the Junction for 67 years, waiting for Joan. 

This sets up the movie’s main conflict: Who will Joan choose to spend eternity with? Cranky, unexciting Larry, with whom she’s built a life, or heartthrob Luke, who also turns out to be great in the sack?

In shock, Joan can’t make up her mind. In an ode to The Bachelorette, Joan takes excursions to exotic locations with each husband. Like Joan, Luke loves the mountains. At “Mountain World,” everything seems idyllic — the surroundings, the accommodations, the sex. By contrast, “Beach World” with Larry is hot and overcrowded. Still, the couple enjoys reminiscing. 

In a moment of misdirection, the plot offers a third choice, opted for today by many feminists: foregoing men altogether. When Larry sees Joan about to embark for Paris with a lesbian friend who has died, he realizes Joan looks as she must have when she’d met Luke. Larry imagines that the opportunity of a life with Luke will make Joan happy, and he bows out of the competition, exchanging his happiness for hers.

It’s a pivotal moment. Rooted in Christian theology, pure marital love means to “will and choose the good of the other,” often expressed through self-sacrifice. 

But it makes sense. Joan and Luke appear to be soulmates. They’re compatible and make a handsome couple compared with Larry’s ordinary looks. 

Although this soulmate idea has ancient origins, the myth took strong root in our culture beginning in the 1970s alongside the sexual revolution and passage of no-fault divorce laws. The philosophy is based on intense romantic and emotional connections between couples that “complete” them, signaling they have found “the one.” 

The concept has been disastrous for marriage. Soulmate marriage lasts only so long as it remains self-fulfilling. Under it, divorce rates have escalated. Alternative lifestyles have proliferated, such as cohabitation, polyamory, and same-sex marriage. When couples hit a rough patch, it’s assumed a mistake has been made for which no-fault divorce offers easy course correction.

Surely, Joan and Larry weren’t destined to share eternity if they’re still bickering in their 80s, right? But for Luke’s untimely death, he and Joan might have remained together. After all, potential life with Luke looks a whole lot like the greener-pastures mentality that fuels no-fault divorce.

In “Mountain World” for eternity with Luke, Joan discovers a secret tunnel filled with tableaus of her past with both husbands. Her short life with Luke has only a few frames. Life with Larry stretches over six decades of memories, not all of them happy, not all of them easy. But these memories have substance and meaning. Despite their ups and downs, Joan and Larry continually reaffirmed their choice to stay together. Their marriage endured, and Joan was content. Perfection isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. 

Discussing the research of psychologist Scott Stanley, marriage expert Brad Wilcox observes that “an important benefit of having a long-term view in marriage is that the relationship is evaluated on the basis of a shared past and a shared future, rather than only on the basis of what happens in the here and now.” This coincides with Joan’s realizations in the tunnel. 

Joan misses Larry and knows she’s made a mistake. Her choice also provides a welcome contrast to our burgeoning gray divorce revolution. Besides, Luke has already made friends in “Mountain World;” he’ll be fine without her. Although eternity choices are irreversible, Joan finds her way back to the Junction, where Larry is now bartending.

Before the authorities can catch them, they escape to a bland-looking suburban community, probably not unlike the one they had inhabited while alive. It’s the inward commitment that has sustained them, not the outward conditions that had confused them for a time in the afterlife. In the end, the film blatantly rejects what drives our society’s divorce mentality: the search for greener pastures.

The New York Times reviewer thought a better ending would have been to send Luke and Larry off to “Bro World” to see where their mutual chemistry might take them, with Joan traveling to Paris with her feminist friend. (Note: “Man-Free World” was already at full capacity.) 

Sadly, distorted views of relationships continue to plague our culture. Polling shows two-thirds of Americans believe in soulmates, outstripping the percentage of those who believe in the God of the Bible. However, Brad Wilcox predicts that the soulmate philosophy of marriage will begin to die off. Let’s hope Eternity is proof that the countdown has begun.

A former New York City litigator and copyright attorney, Beverly Willett is the author of the legal thriller in process “Nobody’s Fault,” about a constitutional challenge to no-fault divorce. Her memoir, “Disassembly Required: A Memoir of Midlife Resurrection,” was released by Post Hill Press in 2019. She has written for The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Washington Examiner, First Things, The National Catholic Register, and more. She also cofounded the Coalition for Divorce Reform. Contact her at beverlywillett.com and follow her on X @BeverlyWillett.