Grade: B

Verdict: A haunting romance.

Details: Starring Billy Crudup and Jennifer Connelly. Directed by Keith Gordon. Rated R for sexuality and profanity. 1 hour, 43 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: Perhaps a better title for "Waking the Dead" would be "The Haunting." This earnest and ultimately affecting film, based on a novel by Scott Spencer, deserves kudos simply for trying to be about something. It's a romance in which the lovers are less star-crossed than at political cross purposes. It's also a kind of ghost story in which a young, up-and-coming politician is haunted by ... well, that's pretty much the theme of the movie.

Bouncing back and forth between the early 1970s and 1982, when clean-cut Fielding Pierce (Billy Crudup) is running for senator, the film focuses on Pierce's passionate affair in the '70s with a liberal —some would say radical #&151; activist named Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) and his current political campaign.

In the earlier sections, we see the two as soul mates with conflicting approaches to society. She's a committed leftist working through the church for the usual catalog of '70s causes. He's more middle of the road, believing that you change the system, not wreck it. When she calls him a cog in a machine, he says that cogs make machines run better. She replies that they go in circles until they're worn out and replaced.

Then she's killed in a car bombing (it's the first scene). Or is she? A decade later, the heartbroken Pierce has tried to get on with his life, including his long-held dream of running for political office. But suddenly he's starting to hear Sarah's voice in the dark, to half-glimpse her across a crowded street. Is he going nuts, or is she somehow back from the dead?

Director Keith Gordon ("A Midnight Clear") gets a lot of the '70s period details exactly right, from Pierce's idiotic, trend-surfing brother in his fringed vest (by the '80s, of course, he has an earring) to the fatuous and sometimes venal limousine liberals through whom Pierce hopes to realize his ambitions. And Gordon gets us to care about these characters even when they lose their individuality and verge on symbols.

Mostly he gets us to consider the idea of commitment — to a person, to a cause, to a lifelong dream, to the ever-receding past.

Crudup is, in a word, superb. His glad-handing campaigning, with its forced heartiness, eerily suggests what a run for office by John F. Kennedy Jr. might have looked like. And a nervous breakdown in a restaurant in front of his family is a pure tour de force. This guy can out-act Matt Damon and Ben Affleck combined. Hopefully, the right movie and role (read, more commercial) will prove it.

Connelly, who here looks like a cross between Ally Sheedy and Ali MacGraw in "Love Story," has a more limiting role. To her credit, she never completely alienates us even when she's being her most hippie-dippy.

"Waking the Dead" has pacing problems. It has slight tonal problems. But it's a good fit for anyone who loves fine acting; anyone who has ever believed, as Sarah does, that "sometimes meaningless gestures are all you have"; and anyone who knows that loss can become a kind of shadow-life obsession-oblivion.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service