Cast: Billy Crudup, Jennifer Connelly, Molly Parker, Janet McTeer, Paul Hipp, Sandra Oh, Hal Holbrook, Lawrence Dane
Director: Keith Gordon
Producers: Keith Gordon, Stuart Kleinman, Linda Reisman
Screenplay: Keith Gordon and Robert Dillon, based on the novel by Scott Spencer
Cinematography: Tom Richmond
Music: tomandandy
U.S. Distributor: USA Films
While movies like last year's Fight Club and the upcoming American Psycho represent the best that can occur when a screenplay toys with its audience's expectations (the vernacular expression is a "mind f**k"), Waking the Dead offers the opposite experience. I saw this film during its World Premiere at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival, and less than a half hour into the proceedings, I regretted having placed it on my festival schedule. Sadly, sitting through Waking the Dead wasted two hours that could have been spent seeing something else, sleeping, or inserting needles under my fingernails. Of course, the Sundance program guide made the film sound marginally interesting, but Festival Director Geoffrey Gilmore shamelessly embellishes every description he writes.
Waking the Dead is bad in just about every way that a movie can be bad. It's a bland and lifeless production with all the energy and ferocity of a rabbit (non-Monty Python genus) on Prozac. The acting is awkward and "off", Keith Gordon's direction is ineffective, the storyline is plodding, and the characters are uninteresting and impossible to connect with. The chemistry (or what passes for it) between lead actors Billy Crudup and Jennifer Connelly fizzles when it should sizzle, causing us to openly disbelieve the supposedly passionate relationship that lies at the heart of this misbegotten motion picture. The camera loves both actors, who are attractive individuals, but looks are only an asset when there's something to complement them. Crudup and Connelly have done laudable work in the past (both were strong in their previous outing together, Inventing the Abbotts), but there's nothing here to indicate that either is capable of a multi-dimensional performance. He whines all the time while she goes through the motions.
Waking the Dead takes place during two time periods: 1972-74 and 1982-83. In the first, we meet Fielding Pierce (Crudup), a young Coast Guard officer with political aspirations, and his girlfriend, Sarah Williams (Connelly), a social activist. Although Fielding and Sarah's politics don't always match - they're both liberals, but he believes in practicality while she's an idealist - their deep, abiding love enables them to get through several difficult times. However, there are limits to what any relationship, no matter how solid the foundation, can survive, and theirs is becoming strained when tragedy strikes and Sarah is killed in a car bombing. Ten years later, Fielding is in the midst of a difficult Congressional campaign when he begins having visions of Sarah. But is this really her or is his overactive imagination conjuring up her image as a means of finding the closure and catharsis he never truly experienced?
The central problem with Waking the Dead is that the plot is presented in such a fragmentary manner that it's difficult to become involved in events or to care about the characters. The '70s scenes fail to successfully set up the '80s sequences - even in its early days, the passionate affair between Fielding and Sarah feels forced. Likewise, Fielding's internal ethical struggles pitting values against political reality are unconvincing. All of this does not make for a compelling or interesting story, and I lost interest before the halfway mark. In the end, I didn't care whether Sarah was dead or alive. And the movie's supposed resolution is as murky as everything that precedes it. Even the transparent twist at the end of 1999's hugely overrated The Sixth Sense was more rewarding than what Waking the Dead serves for its coup de grace.
The supporting cast doesn't offer much help. Actually, beyond the two leads, no attempt is made to develop anyone, so the work of Molly Parker, Janet McTeer (a 2000 Oscar nominee for her work in Tumbleweeds), and Hal Holbrook is wasted. Gordon (whose previous outing was Mother Night) botches things at nearly every turn, taking a potentially involving core idea and transforming it into a wasteland of poor choices and ignored potential. Through its title, the film suggests the ability to arrest the attention of corpses, but it's going to have a hard time keeping living audiences awake.
© 2000 James Berardinelli