Source: Entertainment Weekly

Joan and Larry were always going to be together at the end of Eternity. The road to their reunion was the part that was in flux.

“We always knew where we wanted to end up, but how we got there changed several times over the writing process. What Joan went through changed dramatically,” Eternity director David Freyne, who also co-wrote the film, tells Entertainment Weekly. In the film (now playing in theaters), Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) struggles to find her way back to Larry (Miles Teller), her husband of 60 years, after being reunited with her first love, Luke (Callum Turner).

In early drafts, Freyne says, it was Larry who embarked on that emotional journey. “It was really important to me that it’s Joan’s decision in that final act. It has to be her going back to make her choice, that was the biggest change that happened in the writing process,” he explains.

Eternity explores the complexity of love through Joan and her two husbands when they all meet in the afterlife. Larry unexpectedly dies shortly before Joan, who has just received a terminal cancer diagnosis, and is excited to reunite with his wife in the afterlife. Once she shows up at the Junction — the first stop on the way to the afterlife, where the recently deceased get a week to decide where they want to spend eternity — much sooner than even he expected she would, she runs into Luke, who died not long after they were married while serving in the Korean War. He never made an afterlife decision, opting to wait for her, so he’s been working as a bartender at the Junction for 67 years. Now, Joan has to decide who she wants to spend eternity with.

After much back and forth, she makes her choice: Luke. Joan risks it all to reunite with her first husband despite building a life and family with Larry. That young love was powerful, and they never got to fully see it through — so the two take the chance to reclaim the time they lost. Joan, though, quickly realizes she will never feel for Luke the way she does for Larry…those feelings can’t be replicated.

“[Joan and Luke] didn’t grow together,” Olsen says. “Whatever the experience was that they had maybe should have been left for the time they had, and she’s trying to figure out how the hell to get the f— out of there.”

In Freyne’s imagined afterlife, people choose where to spend eternity (there are a variety of “worlds” — mountains, beach, city, outer space, eternal adolescence, etc.), and that choice is supposed to be permanent. But Joan, now anxiously pacing around her chosen mountain eternity with Luke, is trying to figure out how she can reverse her decision. As a rule follower, she has to go against her nature to remedy her choice and reunite with the man she loves. “It’s very hard for her to be so rebellious, and at the end of the movie, I’m kind of a felon,” Olsen quips.

Turner sees Luke as emotionally stunted by the era he died in, which shapes his expectations of love. “He’s caught up in these gestures, and he can’t understand [true love] because he feels that he’s experienced it, but I don’t believe he did,” Turner shares about his lovestruck character. Dying young during the time period he did, Luke has strong feelings about what a man should be and looks to old movies (in the vein of Gary Cooper and Clarke Gable) for what love should be — and he thinks waiting for Joan for 67 years is why she chose him.

“He’s caught in that space,” Turner continues. “He’s not allowed himself to discover who he really is, so he’s doing what he thinks he should be doing.”

That belief and the massive gesture of waiting for Joan seem easy to get swept up in, but Joan lived a whole life after that relationship and found love with someone else.

The choice is fitting with the exploration Joan undertakes while trying to find love again with Luke. “It’s not that her love for Luke wasn’t great, but she’s not the same person anymore,” Freyne says about Joan’s big decision. Joan was holding onto cherished memories, but in the end, it was the life she made with Larry and the woman she became during that time that was a bigger deciding factor when considering what she wanted in the afterlife. “She does love Luke with all her heart, but she’s just not the same Joan. That’s what she learned,” he explains.

Joan’s final choice not only results in the right ending for her and Larry but also pushes Luke to move forward with closure on his first love. “He can go off and be who he wants,” Turner says. “He can go and discover who he is.”

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