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22 December 2023
\"This is it. This is the moment of your death.\"
- Max Klein
As the 1993 Peter Weir film Fearless opens, we are struck with a sight familiar to anyone who has seen the beginning of the ABC television series Lost: a man stumbles from a field, disoriented, after surviving a major airplane crash. But while Lost is a fantasy world with strange monsters and secret hatches, Fearless takes on a world even more amazing. What happens to people when they go through an experience of this magnitude?
We watch as Max Klein (Jeff Bridges) walks away from the crash without a scratch on him, leaving him unable to reconnect with his family. His lack of injuries leads him to believe he’s invincible, and to those he helped walk out of the field he is viewed with near messianic qualities. Along the way, Max Klein reconnects with the passengers he met during the disaster, and this drives a wedge further into his family relations.
For the first half of the film we are left in the dark about what exactly happened on the plane as it went down to make all these characters hold on so tightly to each other. But when the moment is finally captured on celluloid to the strains of Górecki’s \"Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs)\", you will never forget it.
The quality and power of acting in this movie is as good as you are ever going to find, with my only gripe being Rosie Perez portraying a mother who blames herself for her baby not making it out of the crash alive. She squeaks and wails a little too much for me, but is more than made up for by stellar performances from Isabella Rossellini, John Turturro, and in a very early role, Benicio Del Toro.
Enough cannot be said about the performance of Jeff Bridges. He turns in one of those performances that seems so real, so wounded, so genuine that in his soulful brow you would never even think of it as acting. Why Bridges has not been more widely hailed for his brilliance at nearly every single role he takes on is a crime against nature.
Fearless is a stunning, emotionally gripping movie that was sorely under-marketed upon its release, but is a stunning tour de force that really must be experienced.
artid
3525
Old Image
8_6_freakfilms.jpg
issue
vol 8 - issue 06 (feb 2006)
section
entertainmental