Fearless
People who have been close to death see things in a different way compared to those who haven’t. Peter Weir’s “Fearless” expresses that perfectly in the character of Max Klein, played by Jeff Bridges. When we first meet him, he is coming out of a cornfield, with a baby in his arms, and a young boy next to him. He is being followed by other people. Their plane has just crashed, and when we get to the road, we see survivors and emergency workers. A woman is pulled from some of the wreckage, screaming about her baby; we next see the wreckage explode. Max reunites the baby with its mother, and wants to leave. I don’t know he could get away with that in real life, but Max’s mindset is not one of clear decisions, as we will see throughout the film.
Working from a screenplay by Rafael Yglesias, who’s adapting his novel, Weir presents Klein in a state of fearlessness about life, and a moment of clarity. It’s really Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and everyone else can see he’s not quite thinking straight. His wife (Isabella Rossellini) and son (Spencer Vrooman) feel a distance growing from him. Brillstein (Tom Hulce), their lawyer, wants him to just cooperate to maximize their settlement with the airline. And the psychiatrist (John Turturro) the airline has assigned to help survivors cannot get through to him, so he tries to connect Max with Carla (Rosie Perez, in her Oscar-nominated role), the woman who lost her child in the crash from earlier. It’s when faced with Carla that Max begins to open up; in fact, both of them begin to heal.
I’ve actually been near death twice in my life. Once when I was born, and once in 2007 when I failed to take care of myself, and then had to go to the ER with pneumonia and a collapsed lung. That second time, I remember being immediately admitted, and laying down on a hospital bed; my next memories, I was in a hospital room, my parents were there, and my dad was watching football on the TV. It wasn’t until the next day that I found out I had been in a medically-induced coma for 8 days, rather than in there for just a weekend. (I had gone in on Friday night.) I did not experience PTSD the same way Max does in “Fearless,” for a variety of reasons, but it’s one of the reasons this story is so impactful and emotional to me- Weir puts us in the mindset and emotional experience of a man struggling with finding his way after a life and death experience, the surreal nature of realizing just how close you were to death, and not being able to really talk to anyone about it, because they simply wouldn’t understand. I’m not sure if “Fearless” is the best film on the subject, but I think it’s the most honest one.
This might be the best work of Jeff Bridges’s career. (“The Fisher King” is probably my favorite.) The way he encapsulates Max’s sense of feeling indestructible, as well as distant from those closest to him, is a very fine tightrope. You go too extreme with the former, and the film becomes cartoonish melodrama; you go too extreme with the latter, and you lose any sense of empathy you might have for the character. Bridges nails it- we understand his psychological mindset, even if we don’t understand how he could feel that way, and we understand why he would feel cut off from his loved ones, even if we don’t know the actions that might have led him to do that. When Perez enters the picture, the heart of the movie- about how these two survivors will survive- comes into focus, and their chemistry is wonderful. It’s easy to see why Perez was nominated for this performance- when she breaks down late in the movie, it’s a devastating moment, leading to one of the most emotional stretches in the film- and it’s a shame other directors failed to see what an asset she could be to a movie like this. Her work is on par with Bridges.
Weir is one of the most incisive, empathetic filmmakers who’s ever worked. You can feel his compassion for the characters he’s telling the story of, but it doesn’t move into melodrama or rank sentimentality. Like Bridges in this film, Weir finds a sweet spot between expressing emotions and leaning in to intelligent storytelling and theme explorations, and his technical skills- the way he uses sound, cinematography and music- help fill in the blanks, where needed. This is one of the best examples of that he’s ever made.
