* * * * (out of 4)
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Keith Gordon is one of the best filmmakers we have working today, and he's been quietly building a strong body of work which merits attention. His cult classic anti-war film, A Midnight Clear, and his tour de force adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Mother Night were two of the fifteen or twenty best American films to come out in the 1990s. Gordon is particularly good at visualising internal landscapes, particularly slow collapses into a paralyzing madness and terrible guilt.
It's difficult to say whether or not Waking the Dead is his best film, since it's one of those movies which seeps into you as you view it, and stays with you in the days that follow. It's certainly his most challenging in terms of tone, structure and theme, deliberately convoluted and fragmented, moving back and forth between two different, contrasting eras (the idealistic '70s and the aggressively opportunistic '80s) and the evolution of its deeply troubled central character, Fielding Pierce.
Fielding's journey is comparable to that of Howard W. Campbell, Jr., the unreliable narrator of Mother Night, and in some ways its antithesis. Campbell was an idealistic writer who pretended to be a Nazi (or, alternately, pretended to be a Nazi spy) and discovered, much to his horror, that you must be careful what you pretend to be because in the end you are who you're pretending to be.. Ultimately, Mother Night is a tragedy about the inner destruction of a would-be hero.
Fielding, similarly, has idealistic hopes in his youth to do some small good in the world within a liberal political system, but for much of the film he is caught between his personal ambition for success and those hopeful dreams of social change. He comes from a struggling blue collar family, and worked enormously hard to get to where he is, but where is that place, and what is it he really wanted in the first place?
Gordon's theme is idealism, and that is closely connected with Fielding's spiritual love and connection with Sarah Williams (Jennifer Connelly,) a young hippie and political activist who works with Fielding's deadbeat brother (raspy Paul Hipp.) The opening scenes in 1972 play out as colorful and a little goofy, and Gordon draws out a few silly moments between Fielding and his brother to the point where an audience may become a little restless, but stick with the film.
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