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R: ARCHIVE, S: MOVIES, D: 03/23/2000,

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