Waking the Dead(2000)- User Reviews

A film seeking to delve deeply into a topic deserving of such profound excavation generally and prudently limits its explorations to a single such task. Waking the Dead defies this common wisdom and attempts a discussion of four great cinematic themes in less than two hours: love, death, politics, and madness. The intersection is a distorted and disorienting place, both for the film's protagonist, Fielding Pierce (Billy Crudup) and the audience. One cannot give credit merely on the basis of earnest intentions and grandiose purpose, but this exemplar does better than fall short of an ambitious task. Rather, it royally succeeds in conveying the intensity of its motifs, but proceeds too deliberately through them, forestalling their full exposition. The end of the movie is not jarring, but simply devoid of resolution; there is no catharsis to this tale, only a sense that the film is slipping away. But that very sensation is clearly intended, paralleling Fielding's sense of loss after his lover's death. He, no more than the audience, gets no swift and sure resolution, but only a long slide into vapidity.

Fielding is an ambitious young man from a working-class seeking to make the world a better place from inside the system. He's served in the Coast Guard, and plans a career in politics. Meeting Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) by chance in his brother's office, they fall immediately into bed, and in love (although both Sarah and the filmmakers take care to make it clear she's not that kind of girl, just one unexpectedly thrust into a meaningful relationship). But the viewer, in a chronologically titillating piece of dramatic irony, already knows that Sarah is destined to die in a horrific terrorist act only a couple years after the two meet. The film oscillates between sharply realized moments of quotidian life and surreal remembrances, imaginings, and moments of madness. The directorial aptitude of Keith Gordon (behind the equally sharply executed Mother Night (1996)) and the cinematography of Tom Richmond is on excellent display here, but neither should nor does command the audience's attention. This is a tale about the exposition and intersection of ideas.

The film is crisply bifurcated: a first half where Fielding relives, through flashbacks, his life with Sarah before the accident, and a second half in the present as he undertakes his long-awaited campaign for Congress. The first half is about love and politics; the second half, despite its narrative backdrop, is about death and madness. At times, the remembered dialogue between Fielding and Sarah grows maudlin to the cynical audience of today, inured by the pabulum of romantic comedy to treat sincere professions (and acts) of love as almost inherently saccharine. But it is easy to forget how shamelessly sappy real people are in their professions of devotion when you're seeing it projected it onto a giant screen. It's hard not to believe that Fielding and Sarah love one another deeply and enduringly, though this is mostly a testament to the rarefied acting skills of Crudup and Connelly. Politically, the two are at loggerheads, with her raging against the machine even as he makes more clear his dedication to become a cog. It will be politics that drive them apart--then again, as one character memorably notes, "all life is politics." Fielding and Sarah are as supremely united in love as they are divided by their political means. That they share the same ends is beside the point. Love is that which unites; politics that which divides.

And after the flood, the deluge. Fielding and Sarah parted on bitter terms, at a moment of profound schism over their political differences. Fielding has evidently never faced his guilt and regret over this, and as he plunges into an unexpected political race, his long-suppressed grief and denial of her death begin to emerge, catalyzed by the re-entry into his life of the very thing which divided them so profoundly. In trying to deal with the fact of her death, Fielding's beleaguered mind finds itself falling short of the challenge, and a schizoid descent into madness is the result. He begins to hallucinate, seeing Sarah everywhere, in everyone. The affective portrayal of madness subsumes the discourse on death, since it is Fielding's inability to confront her death that engenders it. Indeed, rarely has film better depicted the descent into insanity that Waking the Dead. Fielding's soliloquy to his assembled family is a brilliant achievement of both acting and screenwriting, conveying both the terrible burden of impending madness, and the desperate helplessness to change anything. Anyone ever afflicted by a debilitating mental disease should recognize the insidious horror when control of oneself seems to be slipping away, and empathize with Fielding's almost manic protestations.

In the end, of course, death remains the final issue on the table, in the film as it is in life. In contradistinction to the earlier dramatic irony whence the audience could condescend to Fielding's innocent lack of foreknowledge of Sarah's demise, the viewer is no wiser by the end; indeed, one wonders whether Sarah might truly be alive as Fielding has imagined all this time. That the film can convolute the audience's mind from a firm belief in Fielding's madness to an equally genuine suspicion that he might have been right all along is a testament to its efficacy, bringing the audience into synchrony with Fielding ever more closely.

Into the intersection of the four themes comes the Hegelian synthesis, the overarching quintessence which at once unifies and distinguishes them. From the very first day of their lives together, Fielding and Crudup profess a deep commitment to their respective destinies, the purposes which they know deeply--and therefore which the audience comes to know deeply--are the fulfillment of their existence. It is the very clash of their separate destinies that provides them with so deep and abiding a love, the tattoo of their destinies that drives their political march, and the perceived abrogation of destiny occasioned by Sarah's death that leads Fielding into apparent insanity. When the film returns explicitly to destiny in its final most moving scene between Fielding and Sarah, it only evokes and toys with the leitmotif that has been implicitly discussed in the interstices of its four threads throughout.

Waking the Dead serves as an admirable and affecting movie, whose greatest sin is to strive after goals too incompatible and magnificent to imagine success a possibility. Yet the intersection of such powerful currents begets deep and moving eddies. Just as Fielding and Sarah so nobly but vainly seek love where their commitment to diverging destinies renders it impossible, the film itself seeks a harmony ultimately impossible. Just as much of the film is self-referential, crafted structurally to illustrate the narrative themes, so too is its ultimately vain struggle for cohesion an illustration of the movies leitmotif: that some things are destined never to be truly united. That the film fails at such harmony too may be the most important and emergent message, and ought not be held against it.