Fearless

Life, death, love, fear, and God (along with the application of darkness and light to the artistic portrayals of these words) are the most daunting themes in literature, art, dance and film. Yet, to varying degrees of success, these are the most frequently addressed ideas in the arts. Cliché’s are easy to come by. Masterpieces are not.

While Peter Weir’s feature film, Fearless, is one of my favorite movies, I will not call it a masterpiece. But the director does handle the concepts of love and fear, life and death and a bit of God, masterfully, through his protagonist Max Klein, played by Jeff Bridges. He does this with repeated motions. For example: a character’s movement through a hallway, the opening of a door, the resultant light and the subtly abutting darkness. The corridor, the door, the light and the darkness represent the character’s search for answers to the death he avoided. Weir adroitly sidesteps cliché by housing Max’s actions in an organic progression throughout the narrative.




After surviving a plane crash in which many people died, Max walks away from the wreckage with the sense that he has “passed through death”, he begins to think that death can no longer touch him.




He experiments with tempting fate, first, as he punches the accelerator of his rental car upward toward 90 MPH, sticks his head out the window and drives with his eyes closed; second when he orders a bowl of strawberries at a diner, having been deathly allergic all his life. The third time, he walks across 8 lanes of freeway traffic and reaches the other side without a scratch. He lies on his back and screams up at God, “See? You can’t kill me.” His fourth dare finds him standing at the edge of a tall building in a Christ-like pose; he dances on the precipice with the wind blowing all around him. He is unscathed in each instance.




Max is not a jackass. He is not flaunting his invincibility. He is trying to understand it, which is why he continues to put himself in a position of testing it.



































Throughout the film, Max walks through corridors, opens doors and steps into light. The hallway of the motel to which he retreats after the crash, the hallway leading to his dead friend’s apartment where he goes to inform the wife of her husband’s fate, the corridor between file stacks through which he runs, fleeing from the promise of a lie. He opens doors. He stops before entering the bedroom door of the emotionally battered fellow survivor, Carla (played by Rosie Perez). The doorway to the roof, the door to the cockpit, the door from his home to the outside all signify a step into the next world. The doors open into light and light is what beckons him. He is trying to leave the darkness. He claims to have passed through death but rather he is walking toward it, trying to touch it. The light comes in two forms. It shines on his face then it shows him the way. We see the light shining on his face as the plane is going down. It shines through the window. The light shines on his face when he realizes how he can salvage Carla. We see it when he walks toward it on streets blocked by “Danger” signs. We see it as he emerges from the cornfield leading survivors to safety. It shines on his face when he crosses the 8-lane highway. Each scene of hallway, door and light represents not just his search but also his conviction of the existence of the other side.




His home is cast in darkness. It is bleak and oppressive. It is a place where lies live, something Max no longer does. He suffers through a strained dinner with his wife and son in the narrow, darkly lit dining room. The dismal workspace his wife keeps in the kitchen is surrounded by darkness. The view up to his office from the kitchen is also devoid of light.




His wife, played by Isabella Rossellini, begins to understand his limbo when she explores his office and finds the images he has been collecting and drawing. At the top of the pile are violent telescoping circles that swirl to a black center. Eventually the sketches of the center are white. The final image she sees on his desk is Hieronymus Bosch’s Ascent into the Empyrean with its accompanying message; “The dying shall go into the light of heaven naked and alone”.




Throughout the film, Weir uses the filmic devices of lightness, darkness and movement through delineated space to explore the difficulties of the examined life and shows that it is not a comfortable journey, though it is an essential one to the survivors in question.


I like movies.