FEARLESS
A film review by Ralf Benner
Copyright 1995 Ralf Benner
Jeff Bridges moves right into the front ranks of American actors with his performance as Max in Peter Weir's FEARLESS. Because the movie takes us deep into one of our worst fears--knowing that we could die in a plane crash--Bridges's work here is a balancing act; he has to make us believe in him as plane crash survivor, a savior and that he's so full of bliss as a result of the crash that he's temporarily without fear. This series of character shifts would drive any really good actor to boozing, because so much of what Max does is conveyed by thoughts behind the eyes, behind the silences. Movie actors rarely get into this kind of cerebral communication, and maybe the only ones who'd dare to try are those unafraid of the unrelenting, magnifying camera. Bridges's emotional marvel of an achievement is all the more singular in that Weir puts the camera right on top of him. Close-ups are perilous in that they can distort as well as expose a lack of technique; when the camera is practically breathing on them, most actors fall back on handy poses and stares and audiences can sense that sometimes there's nothing behind the masks. This happens a lot to Robert Redford and Clint Eastwood, occasionally to Robert Duvall. Not here: as the camera moves in, Bridges keeps right on going, holding back nothing; the close-in camera accelerates his rapport with us, soothing our qualms. (In the opposite direction, Michael Douglas's crowd-pleasing male bitchery gets cheerfully speeded up when the camera gets in his face and we see the flaws and nearly feel the fire breath coming out of him, but he's safe--he's always playacting.) What makes unsafe Bridges a revelation--and how good Weir is as director--is that while we can feel the fears of the passengers and the haunted doubts and troubles of the survivors, we're able to feel Max's sudden freedom from mortality as our own anxieties are ever-increasing. In that FEARLESS plays havoc with our gloom-filled anticipations about what we know is coming, there are times when we hate Weir for putting us through what would otherwise seem like a depressing chronology of events from a TV disaster-of-the-week film (in fact, Charlton Heston played in one, from the pilot's perspective)--and some of us hated the movie company for having the insensitivity to release this picture at a time when millions of us would be flying over the holidays--but when the movie climaxes and goes to black, we're absolutely wiped out yet strangely exhilarated. Some in the audience were crying, others sobbing, most of us for a moment or two unable to move at all. The impact rests on Bridges's failure-proof hydraulics. Has there ever been a more reassuring face in a plane cabin, in life or on screen?
Jeff Bridges has usually been an outsider looking in, big-time success having eluded him despite appearing in more than twenty movies, including THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, THE ICEMAN COMETH, KING KONG, WINTER KILLS, BAD COMPANY, FAT CITY, SOMEBODY KILLED HER HUSBAND, CUTTER'S WAY, THE MORNING AFTER, NADINE, the neglected TUCKER: THE MAN AND HIS DREAM, THE FABULOUS BAKER BOYS. And in spite of scoring a mild success with JAGGED EDGE, in which he pulled a Tommy Lee Jones from THE EYES OF LAURA MARS: we're allowed to invest feelings in him, only to get suckered. His first Oscar nomination came for THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, but it was his second Oscar-nominated performance, in THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOt, that audiences perceived within him a loner's stir: he was onto something unexpressed in his relationshp with Eastwood. (And it's what's not defined that has made the movie a cult favorite.) I never could get into STARMAN, for which he received his third nom, because it committed very early on one of those entertainment no-nos by having something called Karen Allen as a romantic co-star. (Hiring her for any movie is like breaking the unspoken law about having babies and kids in soap operas: that is, no Allen, no babies and only kids who are bad seeds.) AGAINST ALL ODDS was a totally unnecessary remake of the classic film noir OUT OF THE PAST, but certainly watchable: with bronzy flesh, muscular chest, closely-cropped beard and sun-bleached hair, Bridges's blue eyes stand out more than usual; they have the deepest blue center and this blue bleeds to the outer perimeters in lighter and lighter shades. Faked? Maybe, yet he's never looked this attractive before or since and I can't begin to tell you how much this helps the movie, which is filled with a ton of ludicrous moments, the most hilarious not the banging at the counterfeit Chichen Itza ruins but the nipple bit at Rachel Ward's Cozumel hideaway. Propped against Bridges' chest, the gaunt, masochistic Ward flicks her fingers across his nipples and instead of being aroused, he lays on some pro-football gibberish, totally oblivious to his own erogenous zones. (Some okay touristy shots of Cozumel, the real Chichen Itza, a spectacular one or two of Tulum, one of the most breathtaking spots in the Yucatan peninsula, and an hysterical but hysterically good theme "Take A Look At Me Now" by Phil Collins.) In THE FABULOUS BAKER BOYS, Bridges didn't get the acclaim that his co-star Michelle Pfeiffer did but in his blurry-eyed, greasy-haired seediness, he was its sick-soul center, something like a Bukowski boozer on reduced intake maintenance, though not quite the "cold razor-blade" Pfeiffer accuses him of being because, after all, a cold blade wouldn't have insisted on his dog staying in a swanky hotel room. (Animal lovers surrendered to him no matter the misgivings of his character once they saw Eddie the dog on couches, beds and on that hotel ballroom stage, laying at the piano.) Before the chance to show his magnum force in FEARLESS, Bridges came within reasonable striking distance in Terry Gilliam's "The Fisher King," which is rather like the antithesis of his Max. As a wrecked boozer D.J. whose favorite pastime was pouncing on yuppies for advocating "yuppie inbreeding" and for negotiating sex as "love moments," Bridges got robbed of a full due because his character's transition happened off screen, his drunk moments were fairly weak, and though he got sturdier as the movie plodded along, most of our attention went to Mercedes Ruehl, who, tramped to the max in red lipstick, red fingernails, red bra and slip and off-the-shoulder blouse and dangling "fuck me" earrings, never stopped acting, reacting, gesturing. (When the camera captured cigarette smoke blowing from her nostrils, she's a magnificent retrograde dragon with that old time religion--a heart of softened gold.) She also blew Bridges away, though perhaps he let her. But there's a connection between THE FISHER KING and FEARLESS. In the former, Bridges is one of the "janitors of God," called upon to clean up the mess he's made of things, and to help clean up the mess of his new best friend Williams. The latter has him as one of the angels of heroism, almost rapturously saving others and, finally, having to save himself.
If Bridges' dive into temporary decay and manginess in THE FISHER KING doesn't altogether grab us because we're fixated on Ruehl, Williams and, in her best screen performance to date, Amanda Plummer, he certainly puts sleazer Mickey Rourke on notice in AMERICAN HEART. Looking like too many bums walking the streets here in Houston (or the cons who appear via satellite on Geraldo), in long hair pulled back in a ponytail and unsightly mustache, with cigarette smoke clouding a hardened-by-prison-life face, Bridges is one constant amazement: is there any other American actor right now who can so physically give himself over to scroungy characters and still keep us watching? (Rourke so immerses himself, as he does in BARFLY, that he becomes repulsive, an audience turnoff.) Unfortunately, as directed by Martin Bell and written by Peter Silverman, AMERICAN HEART is overly depressing and, sadly, boring: it's like a Bukowski story told from a fifteen-year-old's point of view. What we come away with is that crime never pays--for the lower class.
One of the crash survivors in FEARLESS, Rosie Perez, who's somewhat like a dwarf Lena Olin, takes no back seat for acting honors; she's prodigious in her mother's pain and guilt in believing she's responsible for the death of her two-year-old Bubble, who was thrown out of her protective arms when the plane impacted. And when Bridges forces her into recognizing that she's not at fault, you come close to believing that the red tool box she holds in her arms is her baby; she pulls from us primal instincts about our children in ways we've rarely, perhaps never felt before from movies. And though Weir gives her a first scene of closure, setting to rest her agony and her appreciation for all that Bridges has done for her, he gives her a second one that makes it less of a neat sum-up; we can see in her eyes a whole litany of regrets. There are two scenes that don't quite satisfy. When Perez enters group therapy, her pent up anger is released, and while it's logical, she reaches such levels of piercing shrill that you can't help but question why Weir didn't ask that she reduce the octaval tones a bit. The other is more a technical error: Perez goes to see Bridges in the hospital and she gives him a box of Whitman's Sampler. Only there's no plastic wrapping on the box. Did the cast munch on the goodies between takes?
Playing Bridges' wife is the beautiful, crooked tooth Isabella Rossellini. Watching her here, or in one of my favorite movies COUSINS, we're aware of a spiritual linkage between her and her mother:we could swear that Ingrid is with us again, her presence so strong and supportive. It's too early to tell if Rossellini will be as good an actress, but right now, she bests Ingrid in being natural, at-home, without the little actressey tricks to fall back on, which have sometimes marred Ingrid's performances. With Bergman, there was frequently an unwillingness to be exposed; she hid behind an aura of cool stateliness that she actually fought against but often lost to. Rossellini, maybe because she has her mother as object lesson, perhaps because she's been a sought-after model, is the reverse: she's artless as vulnerability, which is what makes her so right and glowingly alive in COUSINS; when Ted Danson, in his best screen role thus far, risks all and asks her to dance at his father's wedding, the rush of love and warmth is limitless. The lack of self-centeredness helped her enormously in BLUE VELVET, about which she was the only thing I found worth watching. (I know this will pique the Lynch fans, who can't seem to get enough of his gory silliness.) Here in FEARLESS, as a dance instructor, she shows a maturity--and a thick neck--not seen previously, and though she's been straight-forward about martial problems (as with William Peterson in COUSINS), she hasn't before played the troubled wife as a 911-er. And she doesn't play the wife as the Madonna of our dreams; her patience has its limits.
Peter Weir may be the most talented director of the middle class's contretemps and vicissitudes, showing us our own foibles, how we lock ourselves into situations that we really deep down inside know are hopeless or wrongheaded, no matter how meritorious the intent. Those who worship the director above all else might call Weir's mc introspections his "auteur": the waste of young lives being needlessly sacrificed in GALLIPOLI; Mel Gibson's reckless Australian journalist in THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY barely escaping from the slaughter as he runs to the last plane jetting out of an Indonesia dissolving into chaos after years of corruption and apathy; Harrison Ford in THE MOSQUITO COAST as the bespectacled, immersed in deglamorization Allie Fox, novelist Paul Theroux's slowly-turning-mad adventurer-inventor who, with his family, departs an America he believes will be destroyed in an apocalyptic war and settles in a Central American country. (Ford's a Robinson Crusoe with a "Lord of the Flies" cap on; he pioneers his new world ingeniously, but the encroachment of self-fulfilling doom, generated by his own paranoia, is always festering within him. That it's a fable is, I think, one of the reasons Ford succeeds here: his legendary-like movie heroes give him credence; he's been out of the real world for so long that it seems natural for him to go mad. It's not a pleasant character, and by the end, knowing that he has destroyed himself and has come close to destroying his family, he's thoroughly dislikable. This is, of course, why the public rejected the movie--it didn't want to see a hero self-destruct.) And there's the gooey WITNESS, filled with such heavenly-blessed family values that to fault it might suggest to some that I'm against family, against "goodness." Weir dismisses the very realities he uses to set the plot in motion--a young Amish boy witnesses a murder and can identify the murderer--and we're never allowed to see how what the boy witnessed affects him. The real witnessing is Harrison Ford's in how the Amish live so admirably their humble lives--and how he's affected by it. But the goodness in the family life fails to reward the audience with what it wanted most: Ford carrying off that Amish amazon (Kelly McGillis) at the end. Intractable upper middle class values get the Weir once-over in DEAD POETS SOCIETY which is rather like a catalyst to action against the constrictions of humdrum education, and while it's not a mistake to put a vibrant Robin Williams at the center, it is, I think, a mistake on Weir's part to allow Williams his impromptu standup routines. Harming the movie even more is the destiny of one of the pupils; his fate is de rigueur.
The lack of box office for FEARLESS, considering its subject matter and that its visual dinginess and claustrophobia intensify what is a vivisection of pain, seems predictably bad movienomics--this is, after all, a February or March kind of picture, when most of us are safely away from airplanes. But I'm fully prepared to defend Jeff Bridges' performance as the most unfairly neglected in the 1993 awards from critics' associations. Nothing I've seen throughout that year compares to what he does here, and that includes Hopkins in that megabore THE REMAINS OF THE DAY. And politics, not acting, won Tom Hanks his awards. One certainty: FEARLESS won't show up as any in-flight entertainment.
-- RalfBenner@aol.com
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews