Actor-turned-director Keith Gordon has crafted a touching love story that transcends time, political ideology, and even death. The movie opens in 1974 as Fielding Pierce (Billy Crudup) watches a TV news report announcing the death in Chile of three American activists, including Sarah Williams (Jennifer Connelly), his one true love. The story flashes back to when they first met, showing how he was always more conservative, with grand political aspirations, but the relationship worked because they both shared dreams of making the world a better place, one from inside the system and the other from outside. The movie also flashes forward to his life in the early '80s, when he gets tapped to run for Congress. He starts having visions of her, but he is never quite sure if she's a hallucination arising out of his stress, a manifestation of his political consciousness, an out-and-out ghost, or maybe she's still alive somehow. Whatever she is, his deep longing for her is making him crack up. Gordon smartly jumps the story back and forth in time, forgoing an "objective" reality in favor of a more subjective and emotional one. It is a structure based on memory, and that in tandem with the content is what makes Waking the Dead a very powerful film indeed.--Andy Spletzer
2.
Fielding Pierce (Billy Crudup) is a promising young congressional candidate who becomes obsessed with the idea that his dead lover, Sarah (Jennifer Connelly), is still alive. Because of her involvement with a group called Sanctuary that harbors Chilean dissidents, Sarah is presumably killed in a car bombing. However, Fielding is never completely convinced that she's truly gone and years later begins to see and hear her presence. Filled with revealing flashbacks, the film follows the deeply involved romance of the ambitious Fielding and the idealistic Sarah during the 1970s while also portraying Fielding's struggle to win his congressional bid in the 1980s. As his political campaign progresses, so does his belief that Sarah is still alive, leading him to question his sanity and begin a desperate search to find her.
WAKING THE DEAD is an eerily atmospheric drama, awash in chilling shades of black, white, and gray. Director Keith Gordon's use of flashback and nonlinear storytelling effectively conveys the deep power of memory and love that transcends traditional conceptions of time. Alternating between the past and the present, Gordon's adaptation of the novel by Scott Spencer is a dreamy, mysterious affair that features supremely convincing lead performances by Crudup and Connelly as well as solid supporting turns by Janet McTeer and Hal Holbrook.
3.
It is 1972. Young Coast Guard officer Fielding Pierce (Billy Crudup) is passionately drawn to Sarah Williams (Jennifer Connelly), an idealistic activist. She becomes his great love, and he becomes hers: "We will never be apart," Sarah writes him, in a letter. But, in 1974, fate brutally cleaves their futures: Sarah is murdered in a car-bombing.
It is 1982. County attorney (DA's office) Fielding Pierce lives well in Chicago with his socialite girlfriend, Juliet Beck (Molly Parker). Juliet's uncle, Isaac Green (Hal Holbrook), is Fielding's mentor. The governor hand-picks Fielding to run for a Congressional seat. Fielding will soon have everything he's strived for...except his lost love. Suddenly, he becomes consumed by memories, and then visions, of Sarah. Fielding's sister, Caroline Pierce (Janet McTeer), lends personal and professional support, but his life begins to unravel. Is Fielding losing his sanity, or is Sarah still alive? As the past floods into the present, Fielding struggles to focus on what is, and what was, most important to him.
4.
Where does true love end and obsession begin? In the middle of a congressional election, candidate Fielding Pierce begins having visions of his lost love nine years after her death. Waking The Dead is the story of one man's choice: eternal love or the loneliness of power and ambition.
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