MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Fearless’: Bellyful of a Plane Crash Survivor : Peter Weir’s often remarkable film stars Jeff Bridges as a man who becomes insufferable after going through a near-death experience.

“Fearless” (at the AMC Century 14) ought to be the cause of unconditional celebration, but it’s not. A provocative look at disaster’s aftermath, at what it can mean to survive a near-death experience, “Fearless” is compellingly directed by Peter Weir and features a performance by Rosie Perez that is remarkable even by her standards.

Yet despite all these good things, despite even a strong and illuminating conclusion, “Fearless,” a film that so wants to be inspirational, instead leaves a feeling of irritation in its wake. Hamstrung by a key miscalculation and an unfortunate loss of nerve, it achieves a good deal but falls short of its own aspirations.

What “Fearless” is more than anything is the story of one man’s spiritual odyssey. Max Klein (Jeff Bridges), a San Francisco architect, is discovered by the camera in a central California cornfield, holding an infant and leading a child but with a look of troubled disorientation on his face.

As this powerful sequence unfolds, it becomes suddenly and awfully clear (helped by Allen Daviau’s focused cinematography) that a major plane crash has just taken place. Instead of experiencing the impact, we view the site from the air and from the ground, strewn with the detritus of lives that will never be the same. Suddenly, flames are seen, Carla Rodrigo (Rosie Perez) screams, “My baby’s in there,” and everything erupts.

None of this, however, much concerns Max. The child and the infant are not his but strangers he has led from the wreck. Disposing of them, he stealthily flees the scene, taking a taxi to the nearest hotel, where he strips and, amazed, runs his hands down his intact body, murmuring to himself, “You’re not dead.”

This realization soon becomes the driving force in Max’s life. Once a nervous flier, he shocks airline representatives by insisting on taking a plane home. And when the airline seats him next to Dr. Bill Perlman (John Turturro), a psychiatrist specializing in crash survivors, Max airily dismisses his concern.

Back in San Francisco, Max more or less shrugs at the emotional greeting of his wife, Laura (Isabella Rossellini), and their son. Neither can he connect with the hysterical wife of his partner, a fellow passenger who did not survive the crash. Completely full of himself, and feeling, as he later tells Perlman, that the crash was the best thing that ever happened to him because it opened him to “the taste and love and beauty of life,” he considers himself a member of a club no one else can possibly join.

Though much of the point of Rafael Yglesias’ screenplay (and presumably of the novel it is based on) is to illuminate this change in Max, the hard fact is that in simplest terms the crash has turned Max into a total jerk, smug, insufferable and pompous, possibly acceptable on paper but not on screen.

Feeling he has moved to some high astral plane, Max becomes the most tedious man on the planet, and it is so deeply unpleasant to experience his act that spending long periods of time in his company, as “Fearless” insists we do, makes considering the moral implications of his situation, as the film probably wants us to, impossible.

Though Jeff Bridges is one of the best of American actors and does everything here that Weir and the script asks of him, it feels like a mistake to have cast him as Max. Because Bridges brings a kind of innate swagger to many of his roles, the end result is to make Max so intolerable and impervious to empathy that it becomes difficult not to wish he’d died in that crash after all.

While it is possible to argue that this unpleasantness in Max’s character is the whole point of “Fearless,” the canvas that trait is played out on is not so easily defended. For, in typical Hollywood fashion, “Fearless” has lost its nerve and pulled the implications of its punches where Max’s world is concerned.

For the most honest impact, Max would be acting like an oaf in an environment that clearly did not deserve it. But, perhaps concerned that he would look even more like a jerk than he already did, the filmmakers decided to indicate that he has good reason to act badly, turning Max into one of those “King of Hearts” wise fools who understand things sane folks do not.

So for most of the picture, the only foils Max has are either venal, like the hero-worshiping press; corrupt like the lawyer Brillstein (Tom Hulce), well-meaning but helpless like Perlman or weak like Max’s wife. By stacking the deck with these real-world excuses, the filmmakers encourage the audience to think less badly of Max, to say, “See, he’s right to act self-satisfied and dismissive; he is the only strong and honest soul in a world full of deceivers, weaklings and cowards.”

The only person who doesn’t fall into this category is Carla, and it is no accident that the scenes with her are almost uniformly “Fearless’ ” most solid and affecting. Carla, acutely played with a fine-tuned sadness by the usually rambunctious Rosie Perez, has never gotten over the death of her baby in the crash. Introduced to Max by Perlman, at his wit’s end about both of them, they form an unexpected bond that has repercussions no one anticipates.

Aside from the Carla-Max friendship, the second half of “Fearless” (rated R for language and airplane crash realism) features a remarkable series of flashbacks, parceled out in small but effective doses, to the crash itself. As with much of the film, these scenes are adroitly done and bring to mind director Weir’s memorable early Australian work like “Picnic at Hanging Rock” and “The Last Wave.” But finally these moments only cause regret that all of this adventurous, frustrating film is not up to the standard its best sections set.

‘Fearless’

Jeff Bridges: Max Klein

Isabella Rossellini: Laura Klein

Rosie Perez: Carla Rodrigo

Tom Hulce: Brillstein

John Turturro: Dr. Bill Perlman

A Spring Creek production, released by Warner Bros. Director Peter Weir. Producers Paula Weinstein, Mark Rosenberg. Screenplay Rafael Yglesias, based on his novel. Cinematographer Allen Daviau. Editor William Anderson. Costumes Marilyn Matthews. Music Maurice Jarre. Production design John Stoddart. Art director Chris Burian-Mohr. Set decorator John Anderson. Running time: 2 hours, 2 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (for language and airplane crash realism).