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Peter Weir: A View From the Apocalypse
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11414 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1994 |
2,799 Words |
| Author
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John C. Tibbetts
John C. Tibbetts, an associate professor of theater and film
at the University of Kansas, contributes regularly to national
music publications and is editor of the recently published
Dvorak in America.
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Moments before impact, the plummeting airplane begins to break into pieces. Passengers, crew, luggage, and fragments of the cabin bounce off each other, spin out of control, and hurtle off into space. At the center of the vortex, however, there is a strange, quiet peace. A serene melody sounds out of the void, enfolding the scene in a loving embrace. Silhouetted against a brilliant circle of light stands one of the passengers, Max Klein, tears in his eyes and a smile on his face. Slowly, deliberately, he moves away toward the light. But then a still, small voice is heard: "Come back . . . come back." He turns around, uncertainly; he stretches out his hands--
The climactic scene from Fearless may be the most terrifying airplane crash ever filmed, yet it transpires in a preternatural calm. In director Peter Weir's hands, it is not a disaster but a benediction. It is not the moment of Max Klein's death, but his release into life.
"As long as you enter my world, or allow me to throw you into my world," says Weir, "you find yourself where nothing is quite as it seems."
Fearless, released late in 1993, was Weir's tenth film. Its disturbing yet lyrically beautiful examination of the trauma suffered by crash victims is entirely typical of the celebrated Australian director's work. Like Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream (a character he invokes literally in Dead Poets Society), who visits terror, trauma, and magic upon the inhabitants of Theseus' court and Oberon's fairy wood, Weir enchants his characters and audience alike, plunging them into a halfworld of primordial chaos, magic, and unexplained mysteries, where terrible engines of destruction and violence are at work. Since his most famous film, Picnic at Hanging Rock, burst upon the world in 1975, Weir has become the screen's greatest poet of apocalypse--of flood (The Plumber, 1978, and The Last Wave, 1977), fire (The Cars That Ate Paris, 1974, and Mosquito Coast, 1986), war (Gallipoli, 1981, and The Year of Living Dangerously, 1982), and numerous other natural and man-made disasters (Witness, 1985; Dead Poets Society, 1989; and Fearless). "There's a feeling we're all involved in an adventure that's somehow larger than life," says golden-haired Archy, a young Australian soldier preparing for the fatal charge at the end of Gallipoli.
Consistent with apocalyptic traditions, Weir employs "angels," luminous characters who seem to exist apart from the waking world, who induct us into and (sometimes) out of these disasters. Some are Christlike figures (with strong elements of the
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