Waking the Dead

 

Waking the Dead 2000

• Director: Keith Gordon
• Seen by this director: Episodes of Leftovers, Homicide Life on the Street
• Based on the book by Scott Spencer
• Cast: Billy Crudup, Jennifer Connelly, Paul Hipp, Hal Holbrook, Janet McTeer, Molly Parker
• Personal “oh yeah him/her” reaction, i.e. have seen this actor in:
• Billy Crudup – Public Enemies, Big Fish, Almost Famous
• Jennifer Connelly – Alita Battle Angel, American Pastoral, Winter’s Tale, Creation, He’s Just Not that into You, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Reservation Road, A House of Sand and Fog, A Beautiful Mind, Pollock, Requiem for a Dream, Dark City, Labyrinth
• Hal Holbrook – most memorably Mark Twain
• Janet McTeer – The Woman in Black, Island, As You Like It, Wuthering Heights
• Molly Parker – American Pastoral, Darwin, The Road, Nine Lives, Sunshine
• Why? I remember it as good.
• Seen: Once before. Now 10 November 2023         

             Sarah (Connelly) is a radical leftist, anti-war activist, helper of Chilean refugees who have fled Pinochet. Fielding (Crudup) wants to be senator - or why not president? – so that he can represent the working class and change the system from within. They become passionate, if incompatible, lovers.

       She is killed by a car bomb targeting leftists.

       Or is she? Ten years later Fielding is about to be elected into Congress when he starts seeing her. Is he crazy? Or is she alive?

       It’s an unusually intelligent love story and an unusually sensitive political drama. Crudup and Connelly are terrific.

 

4* of 5