SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot.
The conventions of the air-disaster movie are well established. First we’re introduced to a stock company of passengers and crew (nervous old lady, pompous businessman, etc.), then they’re all herded on to a plane marked ‘Destination: Catastrophe’. Fearless, living up to its title, jettisons this whole weary scenario. Instead, it plunges us straight into the aftermath of a crash, with Jeff Bridges wandering out of a cornfield into a scorched-earth desolation of shattered fuselage, burst luggage and dismembered human fragments. (This film, it’s fair to bet, is unlikely to do great business on the inflight movie circuit.)
The uncompromising opening is typical of a film which rarely takes the expected route or the easy option. Its central crux – the liberating epiphany experienced by Max Klein in the last moments before the crash – is never explained, still less explained away. Peter Weir and Rafael Yglesias (scripting from his own novel) offer us various hints, but in the end what’s happened to Max remains as enigmatic as what became of the vanished schoolgirls in Weir’s first hit, Picnic at Hanging Rock. It’s refreshing to see a mainstream Hollywood film that so resolutely refuses to manipulate its audience, but rather invites us to watch and reflect and make up our own minds.
The metaphysical dimension is neither endorsed nor ruled out. Sometimes Max seems to be conducting a feud with a vindictive deity (‘You want to kill me, but you can’t!’ he yells triumphantly at the sky, having walked unscathed through hurtling traffic), at other times he comes close to setting up in competition. ‘So there’s no god, but there’s you?’ Carla asks half-jokingly when he expounds his ideas, and taking a shower soon after the crash he thoughtfully fingers a small, stigma-turn-like wound in his left side. In a diner he gazes enraptured at a waitress’s name-tag inscribed ‘Faith’, but whether he’s found faith, and in what (himself, or some outside principle?) is left undefined.
The one certainty is that Max has freed himself from his previous phobic, inhibited self. ‘I can’t get back. I don’t want to,’ he tells Laura. But where a more glib film might present this as pure gain, a man liberated to ‘live life to the full’, Fearless makes clear that in many ways Max (played by Jeff Bridges with something of the same disquieting ambiguity, at once affable and remote, that he brought to the alien in John Carpenter’s Starman) has become a lesser human being. The young boy, Byron may see him as a hero and second father, and Carla feels ‘it’s like God sent him to me’ – but to his wife and son he’s a monster of selfishness, blandly shutting off the pain he’s causing them. He talks of feeling more alive than ever, but part of him – a good part, in both senses – has died.
Another reading of the film, of course, would be that Max has in fact died in the crash, and that everything bar the flashbacks is his moment-of-death experience. ‘We’re safe because we died already,’ he assures Carla, and on his drawing board Laura finds a series of mysterious vortices that resolve themselves into two celestial images: Doré’s depiction of the heavenly host from Dante’s Paradise, and Bosch’s Ascent into the Empyrean. These images are echoed in the final scene, where the dying Max finds himself walking through the tunnel of the fuselage towards a brilliant light. Here as in The Last Wave (which offered its own unorthodox take on death and visions), Weir taps into mystic levels.
If religion gets sceptical treatment in Fearless, the same goes for the secular alternatives. At one point Dr Perlman (subtly portrayed by John Turturro as a man hamstrung by his own sense of inadequacy) stages a group therapy session for the crash survivors. Far from offering us reassuring scenes of traumas being sobbed out on supportive shoulders, the session degenerates into an agonised mess, with angry accusations tearing the group apart and leaving everyone in a worse state than before. Facile comfort, once again, is not on offer.
The film sounds only one false note, when in its final moments Max is brought back to life. Dramatically and emotionally it would work far better if he died, and the last-ditch reprieve smacks of a loss of nerve on somebody’s part. That apart, though, Fearless strikes audaciously out on its own individual track, and it’s a melancholy thought that it will probably fare far worse at the box-office than Weir’s meretricious crowd-pleasers like Green Card and Dead Poets Society.
Philip Kemp, Sight and Sound, May 1994
With thanks to
Peter and Ingrid Weir
The Cars That Ate Paris and The Plumber will be released on BFI Blu-ray on 25 May
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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