Fearless
(1993)
Hollywood tends to make a hash of any exploration of existential
or spiritual themes. The urge towards the simplistic, the treacly or the
mawkishly uplifting, without appropriate filtering or insight, usually
overpowers even the best intentions. Rarely, a movie comes along that makes
good on its potential and then, more than likely, it gets completely ignored.
Such a fate befell Fearless, Peter
Weir’s plane crash survivor-angst film, despite roundly positive critical
notices. For some reason audiences were willing to see a rubgy team turn
cannibal in Alive, but this was a
turn-off? Yet invariably anyone who has
seen Fearless speaks of it in glowing
terms, and rightly so.
Weir’s pictures are often thematically rich, more anchored
by narrative than those of, say, Terrence Malick but similarly preoccupied with
big ideas and their expression. He has a rare grasp of poetry, symbolism and the
mythic. Weir also displays an acute grasp of the subjective mind-set, and possesses
the ability to invite us the viewer to identify with his protagonists’ disarray,
be it Max (Jeff Bridges) in Fearless
or Billy Kwan (Linda Hunt) in Year of
Living Dangerously. Weir avoids restricting himself to literal definitions
or rigid interpretations of the world and our place in it, and he is willing to
entertain the merging of dreams, reality, and perceptions of time. He sets his characters
loose in vivid landscapes of heightened awareness and texture, from the untouched
beauty of the natural world to the dense metropolis. There’s a sense in his
films of the limitations of knowledge and experience, of the untapped vastness
beyond the ken of any one individual.
In Fearless he addresses
these big ideas more directly than before, and so lays himself more open to
falling short of his targets. His next picture, The Truman Show, also sets out its store overtly (this might be one
of the reasons I found it a little disappointing, although in fairness I probably
need to revisit it), but Fearless
manages the rare feat of tackling its subject matter head-on – from its
on-the-nose title down – and being
provocative. This may be because it still leaves enough unsaid, so the viewer it
continues to resonate within the heart and mind long after the end credits are
over. It’s rarely the dialogue in Weir’s films that remains with the viewer;
it’s the images and the emotions they carry.
Rafael Yglesias adapted his own novel for Weir, itself based
on the 1989 crash of Unite Airlines Flight 232 from Denver to Chicago (in
particular, it has been suggested that survivor Jerry Schemmel was the loose
inspiration for the character of Max Klein). Yglesias has since adapted others’
works to mixed results, ranging from the positive (Death and the Maiden) to the less demonstrably so (From Hell, Dark Water). He makes a number of astute narrative choices that
prevent the story from becoming over-linear. In part this comes from remaining
with the inscrutable point of view of Max, and Weir expresses this through
utilising different film speeds, lighting effects, and editing techniques. More
fundamentally Ygelsias incorporates a mystery element, parts of which are never
fully answered. We open on the devastation following the crash, as Max,
carrying a baby and leading a small boy, emerges from a tall field of corn.
When we are shown the devastation from overhead the effect is not dissimilar to
that of a horror movie; Weir invokes unsettling strings and disorientating
perspectives (whistling in ears and slow motion emphasising the shell shock of
the victims).
Following this we periodically return to the flight, but
only in glimpses. It isn’t until the last five minutes that we see the crash
itself, rendered in a dream-like, ethereal manner; there is a haunting beauty
and peace amid the horror and destruction, mostly because Weir chooses Henryk
Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) as an accompaniment. Through
eliminating the sounds of terror and hysteria expected of such a disaster, the
director conjures an entirely different perspective. This is appropriate, as it
is Max’s subjective experience of the crash we are seeing; his peace comes from
the certain knowledge of imminent death (“Everything’s
wonderful”) and he can express that deep calm and quietude to others (“Walk towards the light”). This is the big reveal, if you like; the
solution to the puzzle of what happened to affect Max so. And yet, Weir also
avoids spoon-feeding us complete answers. Max’s uncertainty over whether he is
alive or dead, aside from his comments at various points (notably in the hotel
room he heads for as soon as he leaves the crash site; “You’re not dead”), does not quantify his state of mind because it
is unquantifiable. Weir also infuses the flashback with symbolism, further
removing it from the literal realm. We see the interior of the craft as an
empty shell, a corridor to the (after) life outside, making Max either the
“Good Samaritan” who leads passengers to safety or a self-appointed guardian angel
(as Carla refers to him) ushering them heavenwards.
Alison: Wait a minute, aren’t you allergic to
strawberries?
This ambiguity persists throughout, and this can only be
intentional. Max knows he has experienced something life-changing but also that
this event is almost entirely inexplicable; to himself, let alone to others. He
lives life as in a waking dream, a form of intermediate, personalised,
purgatory. Max is neither in the afterlife nor quite on solid Earth. So his
demonstrable acts, those that prod him into a consciousness that he is not
dead, dare the universe to prove him wrong. As his exasperated wife Laura
(Isabella Rossellini) grasps, Max must push himself back to the mortal edge, jump
off a building everyday, to lose his fear. Initially his ecstasy seems wholly
positive, as he puts his head out of window of his rental car, heading down a
desert road, to the sound of The Gypsy Kings’ Sin Ella. And his first of several brushes with strawberries, a
confirmation that he is in some kind of other state or realm, whether or not he
is still material, is further validation; he is allergic to them, so he should
die. They are (providing an overtly Biblical analogy) “Forbidden fruit”.
But later, it appears to be the stresses and strains of the
world, the fear of mortal living and mundane pettiness, that push him over the
brink and into harm’s way. First when he encounters a parade of reporters
outside his house, and the panic (marvellously shot by Weir, Max’s world slows
down momentarily as he is overcome by their sensory assault) causes him to take
flight. He runs through the city
streets, the camera jump-cutting ever more tightly on his features, until, to
prove his indomitability, he walks across a road awash with speeding vehicles unperturbed
(and Weir’s tell-tale light from heaven appears to lead the way just before he “jumps”).
Safely on the other side, Max shouts ecstatically to the God he does not
believe in, a challenge of sorts (“You
can’t do it! You want to kill me but you can’t!”). This in itself captures
the mixed readings that can be taken from his state. The best Max can come up
with is “I thought I was dead” but
when he professes to Carla that they are ghosts, even though he knows they are
alive, on some level it is clear he actually thinks they are in another realm, despite his lucidity with regard to logic and
qualification of such statements as “You’re
safe because we died already”.
Max’s behaviour is expressed as that of an addict, who needs
another fix of life when he can feel the effects of his previous rush wearing
off and the old wasting canker reasserts itself. His new persona has a
distinctive moral code, one that bypasses traditional mores; he wont lie (and
the suggestion that he should sends him into a rooftop spin) yet he’s willing
to entertain the thought of an elicit affair, and displays an honesty (or what
he believes is honesty) that is borderline cruel when discussing Carla and his
passé marriage with his wife. There is also an air of self-affirmation in his
repeated statements that he is not afraid; through Max’s voicing of the
sentiment we know it is not as true as he wants it to be. It’s a crutch that
props up his new view of himself.
When Max first arrives home, he’s like an alien (a Starman?)
in his own house. He needs to fully engage with his experience and those around
him, from those drawn in the broadest terms (his lawyer, his psychiatrist), to those
closest (his wife, his son) immediately undermine or limit him; he is beseiged
by their demands. His encounter is pigeonholed by his shrink and seen purely as
moneymaking machine by his lawyer; in both cases the response is restrictively
rationalist and defined. But Max knows better. Fearless makes no attempt to be some kind of text on post-traumatic
stress disorder, even though it goes into the methodology of dealing with survivor
experiences. Weir doesn’t want to be limited by a didactic characterisation,
and its clear from the picture’s most discussed element – the strawberry allergy
– that it’s a jumping off point for a meditation on mortality and life
experiences. What it means to be living. If we undergo a profound and changing event,
should we reject that insight or awareness or understanding in order to
preserve the status quo? Should we revert to society’s expectation of normality,
even if we subjectively know something different to be “true”? Should we do our
best to return to a “reality” that encourages a sleepful state, a lack of awareness?
There’s a relevant question here about our capacity to be sucked into
mundanity, deceit and social order; are we living on remote control?
Max’s inability to fully comprehend what has happened to him
doesn’t invalidate his experience or make it illusory. One might argue Fearless doesn’t allow for seeing this
experience as genuinely positive, but I don’t think that’s the case. His
insight is insufficiently developed; he has not suddenly become
enlightened. He grasps an aspect of life
and death, but his interpretation of his own survival is mistaken and that part
has negative consequences. It isn’t that Max has to choose one or the other, to
reject all that he has perceived, it’s that he has to accept that what he is
experiencing isn’t wholly positive, its an attractive state but it involves
self deception that causes others suffer. The crux is Max must eventually leave
purgatory, because he is neither one thing nor the other – a ghost between
worlds.
Max: People don’t so much believe in God as they
choose not to believe in nothing. If life and death, they just happen, there’s
no reason to do anything.
Max pronounces himself an atheist, which gives a twist on
the classic view of the light at the end of the tunnel as an affirmation of a
benign afterlife. For him, there’s peacefulness in the mere fact of ceasing to
be. The picture doesn’t delve into a meditation on whether his beliefs are
right or wrong, but there’s an essential conflict in the symbolism used by Weir
and the views Max espouses. As a result, viewers are invited to reach their own
conclusions based on individual preferences. In the novel, the strawberry is
explained for those who require literal scientific answers; those who have NDEs
(near-death experiences) may experience an awakening of previously dormant receptors,
which could include allergy centres. But it’s clearly intentional on Weir’s
part to play with classically metaphysical ideas and imagery in this regard.
The strawberry symbolises that Max has passed on; having emerged from a crash
site, he is now caught between planes (on a rung of Jacob’s Ladder?) While he
can eat strawberries without ill effects it proves he is not the man he was; his
feeling that he is dead, or is a ghost, is validated and still has resonance. Where
there is doubt is that we are not invited to identify with any belief, unless
it fits our own design. Max doesn’t ultimately affirm anything (or reject his
atheism) as much as he reintegrates himself with physical, earthly meaning. One
might argue that is the proof of the
divine (Carla’s comment on love) but if so it is closer to a humanist perspective.
Roman Catholic girl Carla (Rosie Perez, in a particularly
shrill performance) is stricken with guilt over her lost son. A point is made
of rejecting Turturro’s reductive logic, whereby he sees her religiosity as
preventing her from moving beyond her grief and self-blame; Non-believer Max
expressly rejects Perlman’s take (“I’m
filled with guilt and shame. How is that ‘old world’?”) What Perlman lacks,
and Max is too remote to embrace, is empathy, which is where Carla’s strength
lies (this is also displayed by Laura). We aren’t supposed to take Max’s
rejection of God (based on a very emotional response to the death of his
father, rather than the application of scrupulous reasoning) as gospel; Perez’ reaction
to his non-belief is positioned to fundamentally undermine his ethos and points
out something Max has omitted from his new dawn; “There’s no reason to love”. Logically,
this follows, and it’s the flaw in Max’s reasoning that surely few would embrace,
whether they are espousing or rejecting spiritual belief.
When Max returns to home becomes clear that he isn’t an
island. He just likes to think he is. He adopts the posture of brutal honesty
with those around him, most harshly with his wife Laura; this is the clearest
sign that his own psyche is scarred, as he cannot countenance giving anything
to a relationship of 16 years standing. Instead he transfers his need for human
contact to Carla without even realising it; while he does “save her”,
ultimately she saves him through displaying a level of understanding he lacks.
Her encounter with his wife, and realisation through her of where he has gone
awry, guides Max back to Laura. When Carla tells him she cannot see him any
more it is initiates his awakening, because it forces him to recognise that,
far from being freed up, he has boxed himself in. Previously, the picture has
flirted with Christ imagery; the cut in Max’s side, even the poster (and the
hand-touching on the flight), but I’d argue this is designed as a contrast, to
highlight what he isn’t rather than to suggest what he is. Max doesn’t see
himself as a saviour, but he does see himself as untouchable and apart much in
the manner of one who has been touched by God or made a prophet.
Max: This is it. This is the moment of my death.
So ultimately it’s the acceptance of his mortality (“There’s no God but there’s you?”), that
he can share “the touch and the taste and
the beauty of life” with the woman he has consciously excluded, that brings
him back. Earlier he has rejected her advances towards inclusion in his state
of awareness, presenting both the idea that it is the best thing that ever
happened to him and the opinion that he is glad she wasn’t on the plane (so she
could share his experience); “You’re
right I don’t make sense and I don’t want to”. And we have seen her
discovery of his papers and sketches of drawing of spirals of light, the
attraction towards the heavens (The
Ascent into the Empyrean by Hieronymus Bosch); it’s his solitary, lonely
pursuit. But his third encounter with strawberries in the movie is prefigured
by his explicit invitation “I want you to
save me”. If I were to pose a criticism
of this scene, it would be that the “I’m
alive! I’m alive!” of Max floundering into life, embraced by his wife, is
perhaps a little much (not least because it’s an entirely graceless final
shot), but it doesn’t dent the power of the final 10 minutes of the film. Less relevant are criticisms of CPR proving
ineffective following anaphylactic shock; they are as beside the point as
attempting to plough a furrow of logic explaining the on-again, off-again,
strawberry allergy.
Often in films, when a (male) partner strikes out on their
own, embarking on some sort of hero’s journey, the audience is encourage to
dislike the spouse for their failure of the spouse to understand. Despite the
appeal of Max’s state, of his disinterest in adopting the conformity of others,
this doesn’t happen with Laura. She shows consistent perseverance and
willingness to allow him to work things out. It would be entirely
understandable for her to respond with anger to his not telling her he survived
the crash (his “I thought I was dead”
is about as much clarity as she will get). Even with his blunt disregard for
their history (“I’m not scared to end out
marriage”), she doesn’t give up, even though he pushes her to breaking point
(“I’m going to survive this. I hope you
make it”). There are moments where Max is over the top, although we can see
his point (his brattish son given free range to run off playing computer games
when he should be eating his dinner), but there is never a moment where we
don’t sympathise with Laura. In particular, the scene where she gets the wrong
end of the stick regarding the relationship between Max and Carla (though not
without good reason) finds her defusing her frustration by showing
understanding for Carla (“I’m very sorry
about your little boy”). There is also a perception that Rossellini’s soulful
delivery manages to overcome the sometimes slightly lumpy dialogue (“Max isn’t an angel. He’s a man. He’ll not
survive up there”).
Carla: I want you to go home, Max. I want you to
live again. You’re not a ghost any more.
Max: I can’t get back.
Carla: Yes you can.
Max: I don’t want to.
Fearless was
roundly ignored at the 1994 Oscar ceremony, except in one category; Best
Supporting Actress. And the nominee was… Rosie Perez, with a voice so grating
it could cut glass. I can’t say I’ve ever been a fan for that reason, but in
spite of this handicap she delivers a compelling performance here. You may need
to prepare yourself going in, though, as her going on and on about poor little
Bobo causes some wear-and-tear. Carla features in some of the best and weakest
scenes in the movie. Hers is the character that has to get through to Max where
others fail, so Perez has to be able to achieve this through more than just
perforated eardrums. It turns out that the God-fearing woman actually needs
reassurance in a very rational manner, which accords with the her explosive
reaction to Max’s suggestion that they have experienced the same epiphany (“Bullshit. I didn’t die in my head. My son
died”). He has a religious experience, of a sort, but she just has aching
guilt.
Her eruption at the flight attendant who told her to hold
her baby during the flight (rather than securing him in his seat) is entirely
understandable; she needs someone to vent at, and the scene in which she sniffs
the head of a baby, unbeknownst to baby or parent, is quietly touching. Carla
is central to the key dramatic scene in the picture too, which somehow manages not to suffer from using the most obviously
rousing anthem (U2’s Where the Streets
Have No Name). As she holds onto his toolbox as a surrogate child, Max
proves to Carla in the most extreme way possible that there was no way she
could have saved Bobo. Letting go of her guilt is instrumental to her decision
to leave Max behind (she also leaves behind money-grabbing hubby Benicio Del
Toro, in an early role), but it’s also the realisation, through Laura, of what
Max is doing to himself. Carla can’t
return to “normality” because it is no longer there for her (her statement to
Max, “Things can’t go back to they way
they were” is also a simple stark truth about her life generally), but Max’s
challenge will be to take what he has learned and apply it to the safe boring
life he has broken with (“You can’t save
everybody, Max. You’ve got to try taking care of yourself”).
Not everything between the two of them works; some of
Ygelsias’ dialogue is a little ripe (“The
United States is finished, but you and me, we’re in peak condition” Max
tells Carla), and the “Let’s buy presents
for the dead” scene is frankly misjudged, the kind of cute idea that only
happens (or only should happen) in an over-scripted Hollywood fantasy. But
Bridges and Perez overcome any deficiencies. Despite her alarming vocal range.
The heightened world of Max requires heightened characters.
The vampiric ambulance chaser lawyer Brillstein (Tom Hulce) and Turturro’s Dr
Perlman border on caricatures, designed to make us flinch at morally and
spiritually (respectively) bankrupt grotesques. Yet I don’t think either is out
of place here, even if a few of the scenarios they’re asked to set foot in are.
Brillstein’s unabashed revelling in the potential big bucks to be made from the
disaster is a less dishonest version of the kind of media porn that occurs
whenever such an event takes place. The mainstream media merely attempts to veil
their excitement and round-the-clock jubilation beneath mock-reverence for the
dead. Brillstein’s shameless enthusiasm becomes almost likable, with his
repeated refrain of “I know, I’m terrible”.
His attempts to guide Max into misrepresenting his experiences and reactions to
the crash (emphasising that he saw his partner’s body, suggesting that if Jeff
– Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Jon
de Lancie – was known to be in pain rather than having died instantly there
would be a bigger settlement), because “Pain
and suffering are compensable”, actually have a an irrepressible honesty.
Max knows where he stands with Brillstein and thus is able to deal with it; “I don’t want to tell any lies”. And Brillstein,
in turn, is willing to work around his client’s moral qualms (after Max has
screamed the car down, Brillstein responds “Next
time just say no”). Even the car crash is an opportunity (“We could even improve our numbers”).
Brillstein has no emotional attachments, so his seeking to make capital (a
third of the settlement) isn’t objectionable in the way Manny’s behaviour is.
And it means Max doesn’t have to navigate the unnerving practicality with which
Nan (Deidre O’Connell) seeks compensation for the death of husband Jeff (such a
petty-minded fellow he changed Max’s booking to get cheaper seats and kept the
difference). Hulce brings the same nervous exuberance to Brillstein that was so
memorable in Amadeus (he has largely
retired from acting, but a role like this, even fairly minor, is a reminder of
what an effective screen presence he can be). Again, the lawyer scenes aren’t
immune from the occasional Yglesias overkill. Probably the worst line in the
movie, designed to sound clever but really just limp, comes as Max refuses to
say sorry during a meeting at Brillstein’s office; “This is America in the ‘90s. Nobody apologises any more. They write a
memoir”. I guess it’s a positive that this kind of thing stands out as bad,
meaning that 90% of the script flows seamlessly.
Perlman: You think I’m a fraud don’t you?
Max: Doctor, in the three months I flew with you
from LA, I haven’t thought about you much at all.
Perlman is fascinatingly flawed, essayed by Turturro with
the kind of awkward perfection that was the actor’s stock-in-trade at that
point. It’s very noticeable that, while Brillstein is an irritation to Max at worst,
a mosquito buzzing around him, Perlman is an unwanted intrusion; he represents
an uncomprehending obstruction to Max living out the great experience to which
he has been privy. It isn’t just Max; at various points both Carla and Laura
also express their doubts about Perlman’s abilities. “I’m trying to help him is all” he tells Laura when she suggests he
may be playing God (an accusation Carla also levels at Max, so maybe this is as
much about whose paradigm wins out in the end), or matchmaker, with the lives
of Carla and Max.
Perlman is frequently quite hopeless; unsubtle, clumsy, well
meaning but inexperienced. He is highly self-conscious about his own
deficiencies, hence his line to Max about being a fraud. This not only clues us
in that Perlman is polluted by ego in his work but also handily tells us how
much time has passed. If Fearless is anything to go by, Yglesias and Weir are quite
unconvinced by the methods of psychiatry in dealing with trauma survivors, or in
just about anything come to that. Perlman’s actions are entirely hit and miss.
He does want to help Max but he’s ill
equipped, unable to really listen and lacking the tools to know and execute the
best remedy. So, his intuition to put Max and Carla together is a positive one;
both help each other in the long-term. But his ability to manage a survivor’s
meeting is woeful (this is another scene where the playing is a little off;
while Carla’s confrontation with Nancy is very powerful, it is prefaced by a
boorish businessman talking about how he needs to get back to work – it’s a little
too broad).
When Max slaps Perlman during the latter’s first attempt to
tell him how he feels (“Max isn’t himself
right now”) the rebuke feels entirely justified. Perlman has intruded,
laying down rules for Max’s subjective experience when he has no right to do
so. Even his diagnosis for putting Max and Carla together is off beam; “She won’t talk and he won’t admit the crash
was bad”. Perlman’s discipline won’t allow him to entertain Max’s
understanding of his experience as it inevitably evolves; he immediately wades
in and negates its significance, attempting to reduce it to a measurable and
quantifiable mean that all can agree upon (in a self-help group). And because
we are with Max, however much we can’t get in there with him (like Laura) we
are sympathetic to his state; we know that Perlman must be missing something, Their
is an immediate scepticism about the character because he dismisses the
validity of Max’s aberrant state. It has to be something wrong; but perhaps its
entirely right for Max until it no longer serves its purpose. Even Laura, most
tangential to the therapy side, identifies Perlman’s weaknesses straight away when
she asks him to stand as a tree amid her dance class’s performance. Like Max,
Perlman has set himself up as an arbiter for people’s problems and woes but he
lacks the wisdom and balance to be effective. He is limited through allowing
only one curative perspective, so he muddles through.
Weir has returned to the heightened or even antic state a
number of times in his career. Most overtly, an encounter with an event beyond
the readily explicable and everyday is found in Picnic at Hanging Rock and also its follow-up The Last Wave. While Picnic
offers no explanation and its protagonists find no solace, more common is the
lead’s attempts to control their environment despite seeing it from a mistaken
perspective (Harrison Ford’s Allie Fox in The
Mosquito Coast, Linda Hunt’s Billy Kwan in Year of Living Dangerously). More recently The Truman Show threw in the idea that the whole world is mad, with
Ed Harris Christof as Weir’s clearest example yet of a man playing God with the
lives of others. Fearless might be the
most positive Weir’s films to broach this theme. The chain of contacts surrounding
Max all have an influence on bringing him back, even if they don’t realise their
effect. Despite what he would like to think he isn’t alone and remote, in an
intermediate and invulnerable state; it’s only when Carla leaves him that this
really comes home to roost. Where Weir won’t be pinned down is in what this all
means, and I’d suggest that’s why Fearless
tends to strike a chord no matter who watches it. If one is disposed to,
one can take away from it an agnostic reading, or even a purely materialist
one.
My take is that Weir populates his picture with classical
“heaven” imagery and symbolism for a reason (corridors of white light, shining
signposts validating an altered state, biblical metaphors and language, the
all-important strawberry); that Max’s experience is meaningful and not to be dismissed as something to move beyond,
forget and leave behind (one might reduce it further; Max undergoes this in
order to rekindle his dwindling marriage, to rediscover what is really important,
but I think that’s rather too glib and limiting). Has he glimpsed into the
beyond? And if so, once he has returned, what is he to do with that knowledge?
Weir leaves this open, and that’s the picture’s masterstroke. It’s why Fearless will continue to resonate with
future generations because, for all its affirmation of the importance of the
here-and-now and those that surround us and love us, it recognises that we all
need to keep asking the big questions.
Brilliant analysis. I loved this movie for what it showed and didn't say. I loved that it was a jumble of symbols and emotions. Had Weir left out 'I'm alive...' it would have been pretty close to perfect.
ReplyDeleteI disagree about Rosie Perez. I actually think, with her grating voice and blue collar character, she was a deft casting choice. She was nothing that Max would have pursued prior to his experience and for that, it made it more believable to me.
Again, great analysis.
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