Fearless

Starring: John Turturro

Directed by: Peter Weir

RS: Not Rated

1978 Drama

Two traumatized planecrash survivors, played by Jeff Bridges and Rosie Perez, teach each other how to live again. It sounds like one of those inspirational made-for-TV weepies you'd rush to avoid. But Fearless resists glib categorization. Despite a few lapses into cliché, this darkly comic and emotionally bruising film is alive with fresh provocations. It's an original.

There's a notable resistance to pandering in the trenchant debut script by Rafael Yglesias, adapted from his 1993 novel. And director Peter Weir shows no fear about unsettling an audience. It's a return to form for the Australian film-maker (Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli) after a brief wallow in the Hollywood schmaltz of Dead Poets Society and Green Card. In Fearless, Weir crafts a visionary and haunting film that is packed with astonishing images of beauty and terror.

You feel disoriented from the outset. It's bright daylight in a cornfield. A man appears incongruously dressed in a jacket and tie. He is carrying an infant and holding the hand of a small boy. The scene looks eerily serene. Then sounds begin to filter through -- a deep rumble, a high wailing noise. As the man moves into a clearing, we see the remnants of a plane, an incinerated body still strapped to a seat, a woman screaming as a rescue crew drags her away from the wreckage.

The facts are soon sorted out. The man is Max Klein (Bridges), an architect who was flying from San Francisco to Houston on business. His partner has been decapitated in the crash. The screaming woman is Carla (Perez), whose 2-year-old son -- she called him Bubble -- has also perished. When approached by authorities, Max denies he's a passenger. He takes a cab to a motel, checks his body for bruises and goes to bed without calling his wife (Isabella Rossellini) and son (Spencer Vrooman) to tell them he's not dead. Looking in the mirror, Max can hardly convince himself.

These early scenes, stunningly shot by Allen Daviau (E.T.), establish a heightened reality that recalls the mystical imagery of Weir's Last Wave. Max rents a car and drives wildly, as if tempting fate. He returns to the scene of the crash, staring at the effect of a raindrop on a speck of dirt. Everything seems magnified to Max, including his own sense of power. He feels invincible. An allergic reaction to strawberries nearly killed him as a child; now he devours them. When the airline tracks him down and offers him a train ride home, Max forgets his lifelong fear of flying and hops on a jet.

In San Francisco, Max listens as his lawyer (Tom Hulce, in a savagely funny caricature of a shark) works out a plan to milk the insurance company. "I know, I'm terrible," says Hulce, delighting in his own trickery. But the new Max won't lie, even to help his partner's widow and kids.

While the media hail Max as a good Samaritan, his family grows alienated by a journey into self-discovery that shuts them out. A never-better Rossellini is forceful and passionate as the wife who can no longer recognize the caring man she married. But we can -- not in the scenes with Max as an alien at home but in his moments with Carla, as he tenderly draws her out of her guilt about letting go of her son as the plane crashed. Perez explodes off the screen in a vibrantly touching performance. "I feel an overwhelming love for this woman," Max tells his wife, who wrongly sees a sexual threat. Max wants to save Carla.

His god complex is part of what Bill Perlman (John Turturro), the therapist hired by the airline, calls post-traumatic stress disorder. Max walks boldly into traffic and stands on high ledges. Though Perlman says some combat veterans suffer from similar delusions of omnipotence, Max dismisses him as a quack. He doesn't want to be a case study. Neither, thankfully, does the movie, which focuses on the spiritual links between characters -- something exceedingly rare in American films.

Bridges is a marvel; he may be the most underrated actor of his generation. How else do you show the range he does in American Heart, The Fisher King, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Tucker and the trip from The Last Picture Show to Texasville and still not have an Oscar? He blends subtlety, ferocity and humor into a portrayal that ranks with the year's finest.

Watch him cut to the heart of the scene in which Max takes Carla shopping to buy presents for the dead; she for Bubble, he for his father. Max sees himself and Carla as ghosts, adrift in a parallel universe since the crash, which is shown in flashback. It takes another near-fatal accident to wrench them back into reality. Though the details of both accidents are jolting, they tend to ground the film. Fearless soars highest on the power of suggestion. Out there flying blind with Max, Weir creates something unique and spellbinding.

PETER TRAVERS
668 10-28-93