A Question of Mortality

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: FEARLESS

DIRECTOR: PETER WEIR

WRITER: RAFAEL YGLESIAS

THE BOTTOM LINE: In one of the year's most unusual movies, a disaster story is turned into a haunting mystery play.

They stumble silently out of a cornfield, tattered, battered survivors of some disaster either natural or unnatural. The almost hallucinatory opening sequence does not tell us what befell them. No one speaks. There is no sound except an eerie musical theme. But these stunned faces are familiar to us. We see them every day on television, in newspaper and magazine photos. They haunt our century. And our anxious imaginings. For these are the faces of those whom cataclysm has inexplicably spared and who must now pass their borrowed time contemplating fate's enigmatic workings.

In the case of Fearless, the cataclysm is a plane crash. Among the survivors is Max Klein (Jeff Bridges), an architect. He comes out of that field leading a young boy and cradling a baby in his arms. We learn later that he led others to safety as well, despite the fact that his partner and best friend died horribly just a few feet from him. Max's opposite number is Carla Rodrigo (Rosie Perez), whose baby was wrenched from her arms and killed on impact.

Max soon develops a near Godlike sense of immortality. He imperturbably noshes strawberries, to which he previously had a deadly allergy. He stands on the edge of high buildings daring the winds or a misstep to carry him away. He deliberately crashes his car into a wall at high speed. Nothing can touch him -- except the plight of Carla, who has been reduced to an almost catatonic state by grief. He feels compelled to bring her back to life, and he is quite obnoxious in this, his final rescue attempt.

His arrogance alienates him from his wife (Isabella Rossellini) and son. They -- like John Turturro's determinedly patient psychiatrist, a specialist in traumatic stress, and Tom Hulce's determinedly impatient tort lawyer, trying to extract a settlement from the airline -- would prefer a more humble and malleable response to a near death experience.

For that, finally, is what this remarkable movie is about. We discover that Max has literally seen the light, that blinding white light that features in so many reports of out-of-body experiences. He has walked some way down the tunnel to the afterlife that is also a convention of these tales. Arrogance, a belief that he is of the elect, is an entirely plausible, if quite unexpected, response.

That's the great thing about Fearless -- its unexpectedness. The most one might expect these days in a movie about a plane crash is Airport '93. The ; best we might hope for in a study of survivors is psychological faith healing. But Rafael Yglesias has written what amounts to a meditation on mortality. In the process, he has provided director Peter Weir with a route back to his best vein, that of Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave, those curiously creepy movies in which ineffable, quite insoluble mysteries slowly insinuate themselves into ordinary life. Together, the filmmakers have given Bridges a singular figure -- beamy, spooky, secretive -- to play and provided Perez, a ferociously real, marvelously touching actress, with a role that should make her a star.