'Dead' Is Deadly By Desson Howe Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, March 24, 2000

Billy Crudup and Jennifer Connelly in "Waking the Dead." (Gramercy Pictures)

We're supposed to feel the pain of Fielding Pierce (Billy Crudup), who almost blows a budding political career because he can't live without his dead girlfriend Sarah (Jennifer Connelly). We're supposed to be so sensitized to Fielding's unfulfilled yearnings that when he starts "seeing" her around Chicago we practically believe those sightings, too.

But we don't find a way to Fielding's heart because, quite simply, he doesn't have one. Or a head. Or a body. In Keith Gordon's movie, adapted from the Scott Spencer novel, Fielding's a handful of characteristics but not a character.

The movie begins with Sarah's death in 1974. In a scene clearly reminiscent of the Orlando Letelier assassination in Washington, Sarah – a political activist – perishes in a car bombing somewhere near Minneapolis along with the two Chilean refugees she was helping.

Learning about this tragedy on a news broadcast, Fielding clutches both sides of his head and freaks. The rest of the movie is a flashback here, a flashback there, here a flashback, there a flashback, everywhere a flashback. It's 1972, it's 1974. Now, it's 1982. Oy. I prayed for the present.

Here's what we learn about Fielding: During the early 1970s (cue movie extras in bell-bottoms), Fielding has just graduated from Harvard. He wants to work within the system, so instead of running off to Canada to avoid the Vietnam War, he joins the Coast Guard.

He wants to be president. He's ambitious. He's good looking. He's on the verge of a great political career in Chicago, under the guidance of kingmaker Isaac Green (Hal Holbrook). I have now run out of things to tell you.

One day, Fielding goes to visit his hippy-brother-publisher Danny (real name: Paul Hipp) and falls heavily for Danny's assistant, Sarah.

It's love at first trite. Fielding's the straight guy in uniform. Sarah's the idealist, the activist, who works for such causes as helping people escape the Pinochet regime in Chile. At one point, she tells Fielding she doesn't want him to go to Vietnam, because "if you go over, you'll be getting shot at by the people I want to win."

Fielding and Sarah, who've had political differences over the years, have a fight before she goes to Chile. They have unfinished business. So Fielding never lets go of her, even though she's gone to that cardboard cutout factory in the sky. As he runs for election as a congressman, he starts to see visions of her. He hears her. He feels her. And those flashbacks show no sign of abatement.

Gordon has wonderful abilities when it comes to directing ensemble casts ("The Chocolate War" and "A Midnight Clear"), but this story never lets him get off the ground. He never makes these creations (I can't bring myself to call them characters) break free of their thumbnail descriptions.

Connelly is easily the warmest performer in the film. She gives her utmost to the role. But she's part of an overall conceptual scheme that just doesn't work. As for Crudup, he has the toughest job of all: to convincingly show romantic obsession and heartache and ambition, without a glimmer of flesh on his skeleton.

As his visions of Sarah become more real, and his polls start to plummet just days before the election, the movie becomes increasingly remote. And we have to listen to him deliver speeches like this:

"I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. Something has happened to me and I'm very lost. And it doesn't stop. It's not getting better. I don't get better. I'm not getting better. It's just going on and it's going on. And there's nothing that I can do about it. It's not stopping. It's not stopping."

Enough?

WAKING THE DEAD (R, 106 minutes) – Contains nudity, sexual scenes, obscenity and mild violence.