Search Videos, TV Listings, Movies, Photos & Celebrities
Search
| | |
ONLINE VIDEO GUIDE SPONSORED BY

Waking The Dead

2000, Movie, R, 103 mins

  • Main
  • Review
  • Cast & Details
  • News
  • Photos
  • TV Listings
  • Discuss

Waking The Dead: Review

WAKING THE DEAD
starstarstarstar
Director Keith Gordon tries to pull an intelligent, thought-provoking movie out of Scott Spencer's intelligent, thought-provoking novel about a young politician haunted by either his conscience or his dead girlfriend. For the most part he succeeds... all the film needs is a little life. Eight years after his girlfriend Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) died in a 1974 car bombing that also left two Chilean exiles dead, young and politically ambitious Chicago D.A. Fielding Pierce (Billy Crudup) is offered a shot at a congressional seat in an impoverished district. It's what Fielding has worked for his entire life: Harvard undergrad, a stint with the Coast Guard during Vietnam, law school and the tutelage of a powerful Chicago politico (Hal Holbrook). But just as Fielding accepts his party's nomination, he begins to sense Sarah's presence and recalls her deep commitment to helping the poor and politically persecuted. These are more than just memories: Fielding begins getting strange phone calls and thinks he sees Sarah across crowded rooms. Pangs of conscience, or has his better half really come back from the dead? Spencer's sardonic, mercilessly self-aware first-person narrators are difficult to translate to the screen — witness the debacle of Endless Love, his haunting novel of romantic obsession that became the abysmal potboiler starring Brooke Shields. Crudup captures the essence of a man facing moral compromise, but the story's central ambiguities are rendered too literally. A tale of conscience lost and found becomes little more than a smart but tepid ghost story for idealists and '60s survivors, and not a terribly spooky one at that. --Ken Fox

Latest Videos on the Web

click to play
Waking The Dead
A man finds his melancholy turning to...
Network: Video Detective
Posted: 3/17/2008
play more info
more Waking The Dead web videos (1 total videos)
Find more in the Online Video Guide - Enter a TV Show, Movie, or Celebrity
find videos
Advertisement

Advertisement

Related Websites

You might be also interested in the following websites:

Most Popular TV Shows

  1. Dancing with the Stars
  2. Supernatural
  3. America's Next Top Model
  4. One Tree Hill
  5. House
more popular tv shows

Most Popular Celebrities

  1. Miley Cyrus
  2. Carmen Electra
  3. Kim Kardashian
  4. Jessica Alba
  5. Sarah Palin
more popular celebrities

Most Popular Movies

  1. Body of Lies
  2. Eagle Eye
  3. Nights in Rodanthe
  4. Burn After Reading
  5. Righteous Kill
more popular movies

Top Videos

  1. DWTS
  2. Sci Fi
  3. Moonlight & Mistletoe
  4. Celebs
  5. So You Think You Can Dance
more top videos