FEARLESS

Recently I watched Peter Weir’s 1993 movie “Fearless” again. I’ve always liked it hugely. I think now I like it more than ever.

For me it is thematically and stylistically closer to his earlier movies “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (1975) and “The Last Wave” (1977).

In the earlier movie, a group of teachers and young girls from a finishing school picnic at Hanging Rock on Valentine’s Day in 1900, and a young teacher and some the girls go missing. They are never found, and the movie becomes a meditation on unsolved mystery and its effects.

In “The Last Wave” mysterious weather events occur in Australia. A lawyer is drafted to defend an Aboriginal man accused of the mysterious death of another, and after a strange series of dreams he comes to believe that the defendant has knowledge of the strange weather being linked to an upcoming apocalypse, a great wave he believes will sweep over the land.

In “Fearless,” Jeff Bridges, a passenger on a plane that crashes, shelters a young boy during the crash and afterwards leads the boy, a baby that he carries, and a few other passengers to safety, becoming a hero. Alone, he walks away from the crash site and catches a cab to the nearest hotel. During the crash he had felt that he would die and in the moment achieved a strange kind of peace. Now he believes that having survived the crash he is invulnerable in his new-found state of peace. He finds it difficult to speak anything other than what he sees as truth. Tensions develop between him and his wife and son. ​

​The boy he saved is drawn to being around him as much as possible. He befriends a young lower-class Latino woman (Rosie Perez) who had survived the crash but lost her two-year-old son torn from her arms by the impact. She ultimately refers to him as an angel. But he is not. He is a man caught up in a deep and mysterious spiritual state.

​All three of the movies involve mystery and dream. Possibly “The Last Wave” is the least successful of the three, but it is still worthy. “Picnic at Hanging Rock” has, among many other fascinating aspects, a wonderful depiction of hot and steamy unfocused sexuality among young post-pubescent girls and young teachers on Valentine’s Day, which Down Under is in the heat of summer. That sensuality is somehow part of the mystery.

In “Fearless,” moments occurring before and during the early stages of the crash are shown in the opening sequence, with then a cut to survivors walking through a cornfield. Throughout the movie, in waking flashes and dreams, the Jeff Bridges and Rosie Perez characters relive bits of the experience, but the entirety of the crash is now shown until the final section of the movie in which the Bridges character lies on the floor of his home in anaphylactic shock. The long and beautifully conceived and edited crash sequence is set not to action or suspense music but Henryk Górecki's “Symphony No. 3, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,” continuing through the end credits and culminating in soprano Dawn Upshaw’s heartbreaking vocalization.

Bridges has had a long and remarkable career as far back as “The Last Picture Show.” He has turned in many notable performances. For me, his performance here is his finest.