Waking the Dead
It's better than Ghost, I guess. Keith Gordon's Waking the Dead
is a sometimes ponderous, occasionally moving, mostly unremarkable meditation
on the dynamics of life and death, love and loss. For all its high-flown
dramatics, the film doesn't have much to say.
Fielding Pierce (Billy Crudup) is a good-hearted Coast Guard enlistee with
senatorial aspirations; Sarah Williams (Jennifer Connelly) is a socially
committed college peacenik. Within days of their 1972 meeting, they're consumed
with an unquenchable love. Unquenchable, that is, until Sarah is killed in a
1974 car bombing. Destroyed by his loss, Fielding nonetheless puts his life
back together and over the next decade inches up the political ladder. Problem:
though years have passed, he's never forgotten his true love. His Senate
campaign pushing him to the breaking point, he begins to hallucinate that Sarah
is alive. Is she in the flesh, or is she a figment of a stressed and fractured
psyche? Good question. Does it get answered? That too.
Yeah, Waking the Dead has its flaws. But Connelly and Crudup are
passionate leads, and the story, though it comes to a dead end, makes you
think. And there's no Whoopi Goldberg.
-- Mike Miliard