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There is something about Jennifer Connelly that just irks me. It is an indescribable aura that makes her unappealing to me and uninteresting to watch her act. To me she is just a dark space on the big screen that neither hinders nor supports a movie. She is just there. However, through these Are You With Us? columns, my opinion on Connelly has changed. After seeing her one-two-three punch of Dark City-Waking the Dead-Requiem for a Dream (matter of fact, those films were released in that order), I unintentionally have grown a fondness for Connelly. In today’s column, I will be talking about the middle film, a melodramatic and romantic book adaptation that showed me she can light up the screen.

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.

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