Movie: Fearless (Peter Weir, 1993)
In Witness, Peter Weir sent Harrison Ford, playing a New York cop, to an Amish community. Dead Poets Society had a progressive, free-spirited professor teach poetry in a rigidly conservative boarding school. Green Card forced two strangers to live and act as a married couple. In Master & Commander, a pacifist man of science found himself on a warship on an irrational mission. With this in mind, it's perhaps no surprise that at the height of his powers Weir stretched his interest in exploring what happens when people are placed in situations antithetical to their (preferred) way of life to the breaking point. The Truman Show and Fearless both turn the entire world into an alien environment to its main characters. The main difference is of course that in The Truman Show external factors are to blame, while in Fearless the problem is entirely psychological. Max Klein (Jeff Bridges) miraculously survived a plane crash and now he feels he should be dead. What's more, he isn't entirely sure he is alive, despite all the empirical evidence for it. If that makes it sound like a twist is coming, it's not. Max really is alive (and with only a minor scratch to remind him of the accident) and the film is about how he and the people around him try to make sense of the situation.
Fearless is a good film that at times purposefully keeps a little distance from the audience. Max is utterly confounding and his behaviour changes dramatically from scene to scene. It's never entirely clear what his character is building up to, how he feels, or why he takes certain actions and it's as impossible for us to understand him as it is for the others around him, or even for himself. That is sometimes a little frustrating, but it's the only way to put you in the shoes of Max and his loved ones. It makes sense then that Fearless is at its best when Weir's filmmaking matches the absurd irrationality of the situation. I loved the moment when Max, in one of his many reckless attempts to show/confim that nothing can hurt or kill him, disregards a warning sign to keep out of a construction area, and ends up walking along an empty highway, framed against the San Francisco highline as if he is the only sign of life in the city. Even better is the detour Max takes with Carla (Rosie Perez), a fellow survivor who feels guilt over losing her baby in the crash, in a mall where they decide to buy gifts for their dead family members. Conveniently, at just the right spot in the mall there is a piano player playing just the right tune for a dance. It's a brush with magic realism that sets up the film's best scene, one that fully embraces the frantically confused headspace of Max, leading to a terrible decision with positive consequences.
I wish the movie took that stylistically evocative and subjective approach a bit further. Jeff Bridges' wonderfully ambigous performance (At certain moments, his tone of voice, facial expressions and dialogue are all incongruent with each other and often you just cannot get a reading of his emotional state) and the agressive close ups of Max eating strawberries (as a kid he had an almost deadly allergic reaction to them) go a long way, but Weir still communicates Max' unstable state of mind mostly through conventional dramatic realism. In addition, the film also sometimes tries way too hard to become a statement on The Way We Live Now, in particular with the addition of an insurance lawyer who is shamelessly exploiting the dead in trying to squeeze out more money for the survivors of the plane crash. He is pointedly funny the first few times he appears, but Tom Hulce' hysteric performance contributes to him way overstaying his welcome.
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