Fearless Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		4.0

Fearless Blu-ray Movie Review

Between the Dark and the Light

Reviewed by Michael Reuben November 21, 2013

In the twenty years since its first release, Peter Weir's Fearless continues to defy easy description or categorization. It has elements of tragedy, satire, supernatural thriller, psychological drama and an indefinably foreign quality that one associates with some avant-garde experiment from a European auteur—except for the familiar American locations and the people who look just like average U.S. city dwellers. One of Weir's many achievements in Fearless is creating the visual equivalent of the experience of the film's protagonist, who sees everything in a new light. Even a shopping mall, that most prosaic of places, looks different through Weir's camera (with the assistance of cinematographer Allen Daviau, who photographed E.T.).

So effectively capturing a sense of dislocation comes at a price. Fearless was a critical success but a box office disappointment, and it has never been a hit on home video, despite a devoted following. Its DVD release was a full-frame edition with a weak transfer, and for many years the only way to view the film in its original aspect ratio was to acquire the increasingly rare laserdisc. The situation has now been remedied thanks to a fine presentation through the Warner Archive Collection ("WAC"), which was undoubtedly the only vehicle for a cult favorite like Fearless to reach its fans on Blu-ray.

Fearless features one of the eeriest openings you'll ever see, as Max Klein (Jeff Bridges) wanders through a foggy (or is it smoky?) cornfield, holding a baby and leading a boy by the hand. Gradually they emerge into an open area, where the wreckage of a plane lies strewn over a huge area. It is Intercity 202 from San Francisco to Houston, and it went down in mid-flight after the aircraft suffered a hydraulic failure. Most of the passengers did not survive.

Rescue workers rush over to Max to assist, but he remains oddly detached. To an onlooker who asks, he denies being a survivor of the crash. Shortly after encountering the rescue operation , Max takes a cab from the scene and checks into a motel. The next day, he rents a car and drives to Los Angeles, stopping en route to visit an old friend (Debra Monk) he hasn't seen for years. He never mentions the plane crash. Max doesn't even think to contact his wife, Laura (Isabella Rossellini), and son, Jonah (Spencer Vrooman) to tell them he's alive, until the authorities track him down through credit card receipts and Intercity Airlines arranges to bring him home to San Francisco.

The novel of Fearless by Rafael Yglesias, which he adapted for the screen, was rich with Max's internal reflections on the strangeness of the world as it appeared to him after the crash. For the film, Jeff Bridges expresses those thoughts through one of his finest screen performances in a career filled with exceptional work. Max does not say much, but he reacts to everyone and everything in strange and unpredictable ways, often courting extreme danger either to prove that he's already dead and a ghost or, perhaps, to see whether he still feels alive. To his wife, he is distant and mysterious. To his son, he has become a stranger who prefers spending time with the boy, Byron (Daniel Cerny), he led through the cornfield, who now regards Max as a savior. To Brillstein (Tom Hulce), the attorney representing him in settling with Intercity, Max is dismissive and cutting, but Brillstein is so professionally thick-skinned that he shrugs it off. To Dr. Perlman (John Turturro), the grief counselor hired by Intercity, Max is openly contemptuous. What could a mere shrink know of the strange new world that Max now inhabits?

But it is Perlman who introduces Max to Carla Rodrigo (Rosie Perez), another survivor who won't talk to Perlman. Prostrate with grief over the loss of her two-year-old son, whom she called "Bubble", Carla can barely get out of bed. Her husband, Manny (Benicio del Toro), seems more concerned with the size of the settlement that his dead son is worth, but Carla, a devout Catholic, wants to know why God took her boy. Max and Carla come from different worlds, but their shared experience of the randomness of death allows them a connection that they can make with no one else. Laura Klein fears she is losing her husband to this woman, but she's wrong. Their relationship isn't romantic; it's deeper. Ultimately, it's also transitional, because neither of them can remain in this state forever. One way or another, something has to give.

Because of accounts from survivors, Max is hailed in the press as a local hero and good samaritan who saved lives by leading survivors out of the damaged fuselage before it was engulfed in flame from leaking jet fuel. Throughout the film, Weir shows us fragmented flashbacks to the disaster in the skies, followed by preparations for an emergency landing, and then the crash in all its chaos. What is gradually revealed is that heroism, like life and death, often emerges from random circumstances entirely beyond our control. Repeatedly, and from a variety of angles, Fearless keeps returning to the necessity to accept the many things over which we lack control—including, above all, the inevitability of our death and the deaths of those we love—coupled with an equal necessity to move forward while we are here, to continue living and be present, lest we miss out on the many benefits life has to offer (some of which Max Klein rediscovered after the crash). Balancing such competing imperatives is no easy task. Maybe that's what it really means to be "fearless".

Fearless Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Fearless' cinematographer, Allen Daviau, began his career shooting Steven Spielberg's early short Amblin', from which the director's production company took its name. In his extensive work with the Spielberg in the Eighties, Daviau became noted for a deceptively simple style of lighting that created an illusion of depth. Daviau's lighting is well represented on WAC's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, which has been taken from nearly pristine source material, with only a few occasional speckles to indicate that this is anything but an A-list title. I don't know whether the transfer is recent, but certainly no previous releases reflect anything near this quality in sharpness or detail, which are superior throughout. A fine and natural-looking grain pattern is evident, and no indication of high-frequency filtering, artificial sharpening or other inappropriate digital manipulation are in evidence.

Black levels are appropriate, which is essential for key scenes like the grief counseling session, where darkness surrounds the participants. The color palette ranges from the odd green of the corn in the opening shot to the blues, grays and whites of the San Francisco sky and the more garish colors of the mall that Max and Carla visit during Christmas shopping season. A scene where Laura Klein leafs through a portfolio of her husband's drawings reveals a wide range of vivid colors.

The average bitrate of 21.61 Mbps is at the low end of the spectrum for Warner releases, but Fearless has only one major action sequence, which is the main crash scene. The compressionist appears to have allocated the available bits appropriately so that artifacts are not an issue.

Fearless Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

When Fearless appeared in 1993, digital multi-channel formats were just beginning to come into general use. Fearless was released in Dolby Stereo Surround, and that mix has been provided here as lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0. The sound editing is extremely sophisticated, with precise uses of silence, or the removal of all sounds except music, or a voice, or some other element that is meant to take over the soundfield. Although the sound design depends on these kinds of effects more than any use of the surrounds, there is still a fair amount of surround activity when the mix is played through a surround decoder: voices at the crash site, turbulence during the flight, rattles and buckling during the air disaster, etc.

The dialogue is generally clear, and the musical score by Maurice Jarre (Lawrence of Arabia) is powerful and moving.

Fearless Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Other than a trailer (1080p; 1.33:1; 2:02), the disc has no extras. Note that, although the trailer is formatted as 1080p, the source is not of high quality.

Fearless Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Despite stellar work all around, the sole Oscar nomination for Fearless went to Rosie Perez for her performance as grieving mother Carla. If you only know Perez for her typecast loudmouth roles in such films as White Men Can't Jump and It Could Happen to You, you will be amazed at the emotional range of which she is capable when given the opportunity. She enters the film screaming in panic, then has to play despair, grief, shame, suspicion, joy, embarrassment, courage (in a quietly stunning scene with Max's wife) and, finally, a unique form of love. It's a tour de force that fully stands up to Bridges's extraordinary work. Highly recommended.