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intertribalAfter I saw Picnic on Hanging Rock, I looked up all of director Peter Weir's movies. I saved Fearless (1993) to Netflix, and I just watched it yesterday. It's one of the best movies I've ever seen, and I really recommend it to everyone and anyone.
Besides being directed by Peter Weir, it has this going for it: it's about a plane crash. Or rather, the aftermath of a plane crash. The main character, Max Klein (Jeff Bridges), walks away from this crash that killed his best friend and business partner physically unscathed - he even saved the lives of several people on the plane by calling out to "follow him" out of the wreck. But psychologically, Max has been changed. He thinks the crash is the best thing that ever happened to him, that he now can eat the strawberries he was previously seriously allergic to, that he can truly savor life, that he's already dead, that he's invulnerable - he walks through traffic, shouting to the sky, "You want to kill me, but you can't!", and throws away his son's videogame because in real life people don't come back to life. He forms a bond with Carla Rodrigo (Rosie Perez), who lost her baby in the crash and is totally despondent and just wants to die, and drifts away from his family. On the one hand Max seems to have changed for the better - he seems to have a more authentic, organic, Zorba-the-Greek-ish approach to life. On the other hand his life is now punctuated by mental freak-outs spurred by media attention on him as a "savior" or demands by his lawyer and business partner's widow that he lie about the seconds of suffering endured by the partner in order to collect as much damages as possible, and these freak-outs require him to, say, stand on the edge of skyscraper rooftops and dance around, to "refuse to live as a coward."
Max is a character that Werner Herzog would probably love to make a documentary about. He's one of those people who's now living in exile within a society that is recognizably absurd and flawed, one of those penguins in Encounters at the End of the World that leaves the herd and starts heading for an ice mountain, inevitably toward death. Except Fearless is an attempt to reconcile this Herzog-ian character with the material world, and with other people.
The most mindblowing, beautiful scene in the movie is the plane crash itself, which you don't see until the end - and unfortunately that scene is only on YouTube with Coldplay glued to it. The trailer doesn't do it justice, so instead I'm including another great scene (the first time I cried was during this scene - the plane crash scene was like, waterworks). Carla has just confessed that she "let go" of her baby at the moment of impact, and thus she is to blame for her baby's death - Max decides to prove to her that "there's no way you could have held onto your baby when you're going hundreds of miles an hour."
Seriously, see this movie.
Besides being directed by Peter Weir, it has this going for it: it's about a plane crash. Or rather, the aftermath of a plane crash. The main character, Max Klein (Jeff Bridges), walks away from this crash that killed his best friend and business partner physically unscathed - he even saved the lives of several people on the plane by calling out to "follow him" out of the wreck. But psychologically, Max has been changed. He thinks the crash is the best thing that ever happened to him, that he now can eat the strawberries he was previously seriously allergic to, that he can truly savor life, that he's already dead, that he's invulnerable - he walks through traffic, shouting to the sky, "You want to kill me, but you can't!", and throws away his son's videogame because in real life people don't come back to life. He forms a bond with Carla Rodrigo (Rosie Perez), who lost her baby in the crash and is totally despondent and just wants to die, and drifts away from his family. On the one hand Max seems to have changed for the better - he seems to have a more authentic, organic, Zorba-the-Greek-ish approach to life. On the other hand his life is now punctuated by mental freak-outs spurred by media attention on him as a "savior" or demands by his lawyer and business partner's widow that he lie about the seconds of suffering endured by the partner in order to collect as much damages as possible, and these freak-outs require him to, say, stand on the edge of skyscraper rooftops and dance around, to "refuse to live as a coward."
Max is a character that Werner Herzog would probably love to make a documentary about. He's one of those people who's now living in exile within a society that is recognizably absurd and flawed, one of those penguins in Encounters at the End of the World that leaves the herd and starts heading for an ice mountain, inevitably toward death. Except Fearless is an attempt to reconcile this Herzog-ian character with the material world, and with other people.
The most mindblowing, beautiful scene in the movie is the plane crash itself, which you don't see until the end - and unfortunately that scene is only on YouTube with Coldplay glued to it. The trailer doesn't do it justice, so instead I'm including another great scene (the first time I cried was during this scene - the plane crash scene was like, waterworks). Carla has just confessed that she "let go" of her baby at the moment of impact, and thus she is to blame for her baby's death - Max decides to prove to her that "there's no way you could have held onto your baby when you're going hundreds of miles an hour."
Seriously, see this movie.
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no subject
Date: 2010-02-02 09:33 pm (UTC)This is one of my favorite movies of all time too. I love how there's not one character in this movie whom we don't like, and yet there's still conflict. It's about living and dying. I was weeping and weeping when I saw it. Jeez, I'm getting teary just thinking of it.
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Date: 2010-02-02 09:55 pm (UTC)Yeah, by the end it was getting up there with the most I've ever cried watching a movie. It's funny, cuz I've always been obsessed with plane crashes, and I feel like this movie - especially the flashback to the crash, when he's walking up the aisle telling people it's going to be okay, and goes to sit with the boy who's by himself? - really encapsulated the emotions I'm searching for when I watch Air Crash Investigation.
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Date: 2010-02-02 09:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-02 09:59 pm (UTC)