Review of Fearless (1993) by Stuart K — 06 Feb 2015

Directed by Peter Weir, and written by Rafael Yglesias from his own novel. This came about after Weir had struggled to find a suitable follow-up to Green Card (1990), but after reading Yglesias' book, he was inspired and saw it as a very human story.

It's actually a very underrated film from Weir, it has a brilliant lead performance by one of the best actors of our time, and it has a very good supporting cast too. After a plane crashes on route from San Francisco to Houston somewhere in rural California, architect Max Klein (Jeff Bridges) is one of the survivors, he's found by many of the emergency services helping people out of the wreckage and comforting them.

However, Max walks away, rents a car and drives away to Los Angeles. He doesn't seem to have a sense of fear anymore, and when he returns home to San Francisco, he gains a lot media attention, but Max seems to politely shun it.

Psychiatrist Dr. Bill Perlman (John Turturro) believes Max is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and it's made Max distant from his wife Laura (Isabella Rossellini). It's a different kind of film, and it would make a good companion piece with Robert Zemeckis' Flight (2012), Bridges gives one of his best performances and this should have been a massive success, given the prestigious pedigree this film has, however it didn't click with cinema audiences at the time, which is a massive shame.