Fearless (1993)
Directed by Peter Weir
After surviving a plane crash that kills many others, Max Klein develops a sense of invulnerability, leading to radical, compulsive actions. Can a psychologist and a fellow guilt-ridden survivor bring him down to earth?
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What critics compared Fearless to
Peter Weir's elegiac, underrated "Fearless" (from a script by Rafael Yglesias) dealt more explicitly with survivor's guilt.
But they might confuse it with "Fearless," the spooky Peter Weir-directed masterpiece that stars Jeff Bridges as a plane crash survivor who believes himself invincible after the tragedy.
He knows that he has a gift, but unlike Jeff Bridges' plane crash survivor in 1993's "Fearless," he hides from it and takes the rest of his family down with him.
The magic and the guilt of survival have been explored before in movies, notably in Peter Weir's brilliant, underrated Fearless.
One might surmise his confidence in predator-wrangling is derived from the residue of bravado a near-death experience leaves behind, like the Jeff Bridges character in Fearless .
(Poor Kelly Reilly, cast as the junkie who’s really sexy, plays Rosie Perez to Denzel’s Jeff Bridges, but their relationship is never persuasive like the one in Fearless .
For two refreshing takes on the genre, check out Peter Weir's Fearless (1993) and Don McKellar's Last Night (1998).
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Rather than a film like Fearless, in which Jeff Bridges and Rosie Perez played plane-crash survivors who could no longer connect with the living world, Crash takes the even darker, more difficult decision to represent the world created by the collision survivors—not necessarily to understand them but to imagine what their lives, particularly their experiences of their bodies, are like.
After giving us a plane crash that rivals the one in director Peter Weir's "Fearless" for suspense and horrible beauty, the usually flashy and fun-loving Zemeckis ("What Lies Beneath," "Back to the Future," "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?") opts for an almost documentary-style approach here, with cunning use of silence, darkness and the sound of pounding rain to convey Chuck's disorientation and desperation.
As the ship moves from place to place, the action is staged with great physical energy by director Peter Weir, a man whose previous works (including "Witness", "The Truman Show" and "Fearless") would hardly lead one to believe that he could possibly be the right person for the job.
In one of his lesser-known films, Fearless, Weir began with an extraordinary sequence that captured the claustrophobic horror of being trapped inside a ruptured airplane poised to crash.
Weir's specialty as a director is the exploration of isolated systems (the Amish community in Witness , the boat in the middle of the sea in Master and Commander ), and in Fearless he got a real doozy: a mind defining itself in defiant separation from the rest of society.
Director Peter Weir, whose past credits include Witness, Dead Poets Society, and Fearless, has wed this cautionary tale about media strength with a surprisingly affecting (if somewhat uneven) drama about one man's search for the meaning of life.
Instead, The Truman Show finds a near-miraculous balance of humor and feeling in the keen intelligence of the script by Andrew Niccol (Gattaca) and the prodigal inventiveness of Dead Poets Society director Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock, Witness and Fearless) at his very best.
Yet the dazzlingly original "The Truman Show" - probably the only movie that could bring the imaginative director Peter Weir ("Fearless") and comic Jim Carrey together - proposes a very different vision of our media age, one in which all of humanity is enthralled for some 30 years by the same television program.
Peter Weir’s new movie, his first since the perplexing “Fearless,” is an even rarer creature: the sunlit black comedy.
Weir's last film was Fearless, about a man who survives a plane crash, believes himself to be invulnerable, and begins taking serious risks in his life.
To name a few: Jeff Bridge's Max Klein and Rosie Perez's Academy Award-nominated performance as Carla Rodrigo in Fearless (1993), Weir's last effort.