Are You With Us?: Waking the Dead
By Ryan Mazie
December 29, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
As a fan of Billy Crudup (known to me as Almost Famous’s Russell Hammond, known to most as Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan), one of today’s most underrated and underworked actors, I decided to watch Waking the Dead. Although I had never heard of the film before, the plot sounded intriguing and I was excited to watch for the first time a movie through my Wii by using Netflix Instant Watch (thrilling stuff, folks!). After a few seconds of buffering, the movie started and my attention was immediately caught. The first scene of the film shows a crying Crudup, watching the news, learning that Connelly’s character has perished in a Minneapolis car bombing while on an underground Chilean refugee trip. Happy days! Connelly is out of the movie and it is less than a minute in.
However, that is not the last of Connelly as we jump back to the ‘70s and see Crudup as Fielding Pierce, a financially well-off Navy Coast Guard officer with Congressional ambitions, falling in love with an outspoken equal-rights advocate, Sarah Williams (Connelly). As their career passions progress, the two seemingly drift apart. Fielding is becoming more conservative as his political career becomes a reality, while Sarah is more radical, unwilling to become another cog in the political machine. Unfortunately, Sarah meets her aforementioned death and throws Fielding’s life into a rut. Trying to move on, as he nears a Congressional win, Fielding starts having hallucinations of Sarah that become more and more realistic, interrupting his campaign. But do the hallucinations feel so realistic because they are not hallucinations at all? Is Sarah alive? Is her ghost lovingly haunting Fielding in a passion that has never died?
Now readers, print out the previous paragraph, take your scissors, and blindly rearrange each sentence. What could have been an effective straightforward narrative is a constant time-jumping adventure through the ‘70s and ‘80s. While this structural device is sometimes effective, in a film asking us to put in our emotions, it is hard to care for a character when we are constantly yanked back and forth, seeing their relationship either progress or digress without context. The time jumping also makes Sarah’s motives seem almost cold to what she is doing emotionally to Fielding. While in a linear time line we would have seen her motivations, in pieces it is hard to reason with why she would give up a once in a lifetime relationship for a radical refugee cause.
The superfluous fractured narrative cannot solely be placed on the film, since it was the same structure used in the Scott Spencer novel the movie is adapted from. Director Keith Gordon is a faithful devotee to the novel and had the original cut of the film run almost three hours (on the DVD, over 40 minutes of deleted scenes are included). The final cut runs at a much slimmer 105 minutes, and there are noticeable moments where an additional scene explaining motivation or extended context is needed. A could-have-been-interesting subplot involving Fielding’s troubled brother (Paul Hipp) and an illegal immigrant hooker he falls in love with (Sandra Oh) falls by the wayside, along with one involving his sister (Janet McTeer) possibly having seen Sarah before in New York. Not to mention there is about a two-second shot of Ed Harris, even though he is listed prominently in the credits. What needed the most development, though, was the fleshing out of Connelly’s character. While we see Sarah’s motivation, it is hard to believe that Fielding will so easily let her risk her safety in just a few short word exchanges. However, the actors’ performances lessen the believability problems and melodrama.
Crudup is in full-on sad sack mode, but his performance never seems like he is spinning in circles. It is captivating to see Crudup chase after Sarah (or his imagination) to discover the truth of what happened to his love. More enthralling is Connelly. She shockingly (to me at least) brightens every scene she is in and makes each of her reappearances feel new again. While at first her motives seem cold, her character’s passion of helping others shines through as well as her love for Fielding that make the choices seem difficult but reasonable.
The weakest spot in the film is Robert Dillon’s melodramatic screenplay. While he remains faithful to the book, the scenes selected to be incorporated in the movie between Fielding and Sarah are mainly of their yelling matches due to political differences. While we understand their opposite ways of thinking makes them attracted to each other, everything from dinner party topics to daily activities ends up with raised voices. The most notable change from the book to the film is the ending. While the novel’s ending is fairly clean-cut on what happened to Sarah, the film is ambiguous.
Is she a ghost? A hallucination? Actually alive in some sort of massive cover-up? I believe she was a hallucination, but any of these answers would suffice if the film had stronger supernatural tendencies. However, as a thinking man’s romantic drama, a more definitive answer would have been appreciated. Asked to put in your time and emotion, there is little payback in either respect with such ambiguity.
Actor-turned-director Keith Gordon does a more than serviceable job directing – adding finesse to the time jumps and emphasizing less on the specific news, but more on the always current events of love, political differences, going beyond to help others, and terrorism, making the film with us possibly even more so today then when released.
Produced by PolyGram Film Entertainment for an economical $8.5 million as one of their last films before being swallowed up by Universal, and released by USA Films (now known as Focus Features), Waking the Dead was released March 24, 2000 in 62 theaters to the sour tune of $150,422. This would be more than half of its eventual $270,745 total. This was quite the underwhelming figure for a film that has Jodie Foster as its executive producer and attracted the likes of Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, Hilary Swank, Drew Barrymore, Winona Ryder, Liv Tyler, and even Britney Spears auditioning for the roles of Fielding and Sarah.
With a weak critical response, Waking the Dead’s only critical recognition was in the form of a Spirit Award nomination for Best Screenplay. Then the movie was seemingly put to sleep. Even on Amazon I had trouble locating the DVD (turns out there is a popular BBC TV series with the same name). After a few page scrolls I finally found a VHS copy and then a few more scrolls a DVD copy (funnily enough, the VHS tape is the only one in stock, new).
With the aid of Netflix Instant Watch, Waking the Dead has been resurrected for easy accessibility for today’s audiences. A good movie (an Oscar-winner compared by today’s dramatic romance film standards), Waking the Dead is worth a viewing if only for the performances delivered by Crudup and Connelly. However, if sappy kisses are not your thing, Waking the Dead is one you won’t be losing any sleep over missing.
Verdict: With Us
6 out of 10