Classic Movie Review: 'Fearless'

Fearless (1993)

Directed by Peter Weir

Written by Raphael Yglesias

Starring Jeff Bridges, Rosie Perez, Isabella Rossellini, Benicio Del Toro

Release Date October 15th, 1993

Published November 7th, 2023

Fearless stars Jeff Bridges as Max Kline, an architect who survives a deadly plane crash. We meet Max just as he's emerging from the smoking hull of the plane, several passengers trailing behind him. He appears stunned but also serenely calm as he holds the hand of a child and is carrying a baby. After handing off the child to a first responder, Max goes in search of the mother of the baby. After reuniting mother and baby, Max simply wanders off. He doesn't merely leave the side of the mother, he leaves the site of the crash.

Fast forward to a hotel for a quick shower and Max is off. We next see him arrive at a home where the woman inside, a married homemaker, recognizes him and welcomes him inside briefly. The two are ex-lovers and they share a few memories over lunch. And then, Max is back at his hotel where he's located by authorities who've been trying to account for him since the crash. The airline wants to give Max a free train ride back to his home in San Francisco but Max, unexpectedly insists on flying back, first class. This is despite his having had serious fear of flying prior to having survived this crash.

Back home we will learn that Max has a wife and son that he no longer appears to care for. Nearly dying has made Max a creature of the moment, a man with no time for anything that isn't his immediate desire. Much to the dismay of his otherwise loving and caring wife, Laura (Isabella Rosselini), Max has no interest in being home. Instead, Max seeks out one of his fellow survivors, Carla (Rosie Perez), with whom he pursues a relationship, mostly friendly, though he does eventually talk about running away with her.

In the background, and with shockingly little attention paid to it, the young boy that Max saved now cannot sleep and only wants to be around Max. The boy's father even brings his son to see Max, though Max has no time for him. And that's that plot sorted. This suffering child, desperate for the attention of some strange dude, and there is zero resolution to that plot. This is an ongoing problem for Fearless, a movie that keeps getting interrupted by other characters while it stays stubbornly focused on Max's of the moment whims.

When we aren't focused on Max, other characters are talking about Max in a distinctly Poochy-esque fashion. When Poochy/Max isn't on screen everyone must talk about Max and his heroics, how he saved people and how he was so calm and serene. You might assume that the story is going to be about how Max's fog of beatific reverence for living life to the fullest might eventually lift, but no. Peter Weir is going for something far more esoteric, a more narrowly focused point intended for the likeminded individual.

I've met many people who love Fearless and talk about the exploration of survivor's guilt and the way grief can be overwhelming and all encompassing. I can see that perspective but it didn't quite get there for me. I can see where someone who wants to see something more in Fearless may find it, but I did not have that experience with the movie. My experience was of a gravely disjointed movie, filled with stops and starts, and focused on a character who is not a typical movie character, he's a non-heroic hero. There is nothing wrong with the idea of portraying a character who acts heroically but is otherwise not a hero, but I don't know if that is what either Jeff Bridges or Peter Weir were going for.

Weir keeps his cards close to the vest as to how he feels about the character of Max. He studies the character closely but keeps his hands off and the film has the frenetic feel of Max himself, an unpredictable oddball desperately trying not to return to the man he was, whoever he was before his closest friend, played in flashback by John De Lancie, is killed in the plane crash that he survived. The pair were business partners on their way to Houston to pitch their company for a big job when the plane crashed.

Fate chose Max to survive and for his friend to die and the randomness of that notion seems to be what fascinates Max and makes him fearless, as if fate had decided he should live and will keep him alive until some random moment in the future. In the meantime, Max sets about screwing with his life, messing with his lovely wife, trying very hard to screw up the lawsuit that will provide for his family and that of his late friend, and bonding with Carla, whom he consoles over the death of her child by crashing the car they are in, into a wall.

Yeah, that's a thing that happens in Fearless. In a bizarre attempt to alleviate the guilt Carla feels for failing to hold onto her 2 year old son as the plane crashed, Max puts Carla in the backseat of his Volvo, has her hold onto a toolbox, roughly the weight of a two year old, and then he drives straight ahead into a wall as fast as possible. This proves to Carla that she could not have possibly held on to her son during the crash, no matter how hard she tried. Fixing Carla so easily is the catalyst for Max to perhaps go back to his regular life. Well, except that he still has a death wish.

It's all rather disjointed and strange and because it is so centered in Max's experience, and he's seemingly unreliable, it's hard to know what we are supposed to think when Max nearly kills himself, more than once. The rest of the world is trying to go on but Max can't escape the idea that fate has a plan specifically for him and it means screwing up his life and the life of everyone he knows in order to, I guess, force the hand of fate. It's a lot and it's a lot of nothing in many ways as well. I don't usually want a film to be conventional but the storytelling of Fearless is often so unconventional that its off-putting.

Fearless is the subject of the latest I Hate Critics 1993 Podcast. Myself, and my co-hosts Gen-Z'er M.J and Gen-X'er Amy, are reviewing the movies of 1993 in release order, one or two movies a week. The goal is to see how well these movies have held up, why some movies are forgotten, and why some movies have stood the test of time for 30 years. It's also an attempt to see how culture has changed in just a mere three decades from the perspectives of people who were alive at the time and from someone who wasn't born yet. I Hate Critics 1993 is a spinoff of the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast and you can hear the I Hate Critics 1993 Podcast on the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast feed, wherever you listen to podcasts.

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