The book is the book.
The movie is the movie.
In the book Sarah is alive, having faked her own death to further the revolutionary cause in Chile, what with the appearance of Chilean agents having murdered an American citizen on American soil too good for her and her allies to pass up.
In the book she also sacrifices her love for Fielding because she comes to realize if he succeeds in getting where he wants to go she will only be a liability to him. This was already becoming obvious in 1974; looking into the future she could see Fielding would never be a Senator or President with her at his side.
That's the BOOK.
The movie has a different take on the story, like it or not.
While the book gives concrete evidence that Sarah is indeed alive and living underground for her own political/religious reasons, the movie does no such thing.
In fact, the visions of Sarah that Fielding has in the movie have strong supernatural components. Despite what some say here, the film does give evidence for a 'ghost' scenario.
Think of the first time Sarah manifests herself to him. He's walking along a well lit snowy Chicago street.........and all of a sudden, without warning the lights go out and................he hears a voice whispering to him from out of the darkness. Sarah's voice. Saying something she had said to him 10 years past. And then the lights come back up and no one is around. If Sarah is really alive how does she pull that off? If he's hallucinating it, since he wasn't even thinking of Sarah at the time how could this be wish fullfillment?
The chase scene ending in the Catholic Church only BEGINS because Sarah lets Fielding see her in the window. Even though she has a head start, she stays just within his sight as she leads him down various snowy streets and alleys and across a park.........straight to a Catholic Church. Fielding is right on her heels yet somehow she completely disappears.
To believe Sarah is only a hallucination is to believe he deluded himself into a mental breakdown and then rescued himself by.........deluding himself out of it.
I'm one of the viewers who choose the scenario for the film that it is Sarah's spirit coming back to save Fielding by 'waking' him from the dead.
From a review I wrote earlier about this film on another web-site:
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A hit at the Sundance Film Festival that year, this Jodie-Foster produced love story then regrettably sank without a trace, until it seems to have made a comeback on cable tv due to a growing cult following.
In the film, political aspirant Fielding Pierce (played by Billy Crudup) loses his first love, Sarah Williams (in an incredible performance by Jennifer Connelly), a revolutionary activist involved in the Chilean Sanctuary Movement of the Catholic Church when she is killed in 1974 in Minneapolis by a car bomb while chaueffering two Chilean dissidents.
The movie shifts back in time between Sarah and Fielding meeting in 1972, falling in love, his losing her tragically in 1974, and then jumping forward 10 years to 1984 as he is being groomed to be a Senator. We see him having to compromise with power brokers and people who want to use him.
The compromises he's making bother him, because he and Sarah both wanted to change the world for the better, but he always wanted to work within the system while she advocated being outside of it.
Fiedling's ambition to rise to the top of the governmental system so as to change it from the top down was in sharp contrast to Sarah's leftist idealism of revolution, which demanded changes by overthrowing that system. They understand this about each other from the very beginning, and it's a joy watching them verbally fence over their ideas even as they fall for each other.
Despite their clashing political idealogies Fielding and Sarah were passionately in love, and he understood how having her viewpoint helped keep him grounded from the temptations of power, even as he attempted to pull her back from the more questionable aspects of the early 1970's counterculture.
But then he lost her. He was grounded with her against the temptations and now he's been cast free, trying to fight them on his own. And it's becoming apparent he's losing this fight.
And now ten years later, just as he starts to prepare for the end of a grueling election run that will put him in the US Senate if he wins, he suddenly begins to see and hear Sarah again - whispering to him on a dark snowy night; running away from him on a Chicago street; calling him on the phone in the middle of the night.
Is his conscience playing tricks on him? Is it her spirit trying to tell him something? Or could she still be alive?
It's a captivating, mesmerizing film, with an ending that is just stunning and that people still debate years later.
The ending of the movie is intentionally left ambiguous by director Keith Gordon. Was it really her? Was she alive all along? Did he hallucinate her? Or because she really was dead, did God, seeing their pain, in a special dispensation of His grace, allow them finally a chance to say goodbye? At least in this life?
Crudup and Connelly's performances are riveting. The magic they had together three years earlier in 'Inventing The Abbotts' doesn't come close to what they create between each other here.
While Connelly is stunning as the beautiful young revolutionary who's memory haunts Fielding, it's Crudup's outstanding job of conveying Pierce's emotional agony to the audience that makes the buildup to the ending reach such a crescendo.
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From a post I made specifically regarding the ending:
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Regarding The Ending
As film critic Roger Ebert points out, the ending as envisioned by director Keith Gordon is purposefully ambiguous. Assuming Sarah really did die in the car bombing, only two options are permissible to explain the film's ending.
1. Fielding hallucinated her.
2. Fielding is visited by her spirit.
Either of those endings 'works' since the premise is that Fielding's (and Sarah's) pain is eased by their finally being able to say goodby to each other. (At least in this life)
However, there is another interpretation that some have ventured, based on some of the things the mysterious Sarah says on that final night she finally shows up in Fielding's apartment 10 years after she supposedly died in the car bombing.
1. She keeps talking about how 'their lives' are different now and how their goals 'in life' have taken them so far apart.
2. She makes a statement about how 'they' told her that over time her longing for Fielding would go away, and how distressed she is because it never has left her.
It has been pointed out that a dead person coming back likely wouldn't speak like this. So for some viewers it's a viable alternative that Sarah, the driven idealist, made the ultimate sacrifice of her love for Fielding by either faking her own death or using the car bombing as a means of faking her death so she could fully pursue her revolutionary ideals. Only she still watches Fielding from afar and still caught up in her longing for him she begins getting too close and ends up finally realizing he needs the closure of a final visit.
Now while it's certainly true in the book that concrete evidence is provided that Sarah is indeed alive and in hiding for political reasons, in the movie all such evidence is absent. In the books Sarah directly tells Fielding it was such a good opportunity to bring down the Allende government in Chile by accusing them of having murdered a young American citizen on American soil that she sacrificed her love for it.
Nothing of such a concrete nature makes it into the film.
Of course you can still make the claim from what is shown in the film that Sarah is alive, but the ache of the ambiguity the audience is left with is because her reasons for doing what she has done in hiding from Fielding and pretending to be dead are never explained.
What about the scenario that Fielding simply hallucinated everything? That his inner conflict over all the compromises he was making awoke the memory of Sarah's pure idealism inside of his heart so strongly that he begins deluding himself into believing he's seeing and hearing her?
This too has some very real problems. These hallucinations work him up into a state so that he is literally melting down. What finally comes to the rescue? ANOTHER HALLUCINATION.
It's simply hard to believe he hallucinated himself into a emotional meltdown, and then hallucinated himself out of it.
I lean towards the interpretation of the film that Sarah really did die, but that it also really is Sarah that appears to Fielding at the end. There is something that is just so supernatural about her first manifestation to Fielding that introduces her return into his life.
He's not even thinking about her, just trudging along a snowbound Chicago street when...............suddenly all the street lights dim. Then he hears a voice from the darkness, Sarah's voice, repeating something she had said to him over 10 years earlier.
As Fielding looks around in bewilderment, instantly recognizing the voice and alarmed, the street lights come back up..........and there is no one around.
But this initial experience happens so abruptly and unexpectedly it's hard to see it as a hallucination or an example of wish fulfillment.
Therefore my interpretation is that it really is Sarah trying to reach Fielding and give him guidance at this crucial time in his life. She can see he's losing his way, losing this fight against the temptations of compromise and it moves her to help him.
Which brings up a valid question. If Sarah died and her spirit is in Heaven, how is she able to suddenly come back to Earth and begin appearing to her true love?
If just anybody could do that, visitations of this sort would be going on all the time. They are in fact rare.
Why would God allow one person to come back for a special event, or several events, but not everyone?
As a general rule, except for dreams that could very well be true visions, people aren't allowed to return from the dead and visit living people. (I am speaking as a Christian here).
But we all know there are exceptions and the Bible does talk about a few of them.
God has, in the past, allowed significant exceptions to the natural circumstances of the world. These things are called 'miracles' and while some are in response to prayer, others are simply God dropping His grace from Heaven onto some unsuspecting soul.
This is what I think is happening to Fielding here. He gets a 'grace bomb' dropped onto him in the form of his true love returning temporarily from heaven to 'wake up' his dead spirit.
Many fans of the film believe THIS is the actual meaning of the film's title; Fielding isn't really 'waking up' Sarah, instead she's coming back to wake HIM up.
I believe at first Sarah is attempting to - while still keeping Fielding at a distance - guide him back from the brink of selling his soul to the system.
In one appearance she makes to him, she lets him get a good look at her in a window, and when he comes, she runs away from him, leading him to follow her down snowy streets and dark alleys until finally guiding him into a Catholic church. We see earlier in the film before she dies that her faith was extremely important to Sarah; it had a lot to do with who she was. Seeing Fielding is losing his way, she has guided him to a place where he can receive help.
While her attempts to remind Fielding of his real ideals of changing the system from within instead of being seduced by it does work, it also causes Fielding an ever increasing amount of emotional agony.
These powerful, re-opened emotional wounds boil over in a scene near the end of the film when Fielding arrives at a dinner at a posh restaurant with family members and then proceeds to have a full-blown meltdown. At the last moment he manages to get control of himself, but it's now apparent he is really in deep, serious trouble spiritually.
Seeing his pain from Heaven, how he is virtually crippling himself with his sense of loss, Sarah arranges one final appearance where she comes as an angel of mercy for a real visit that allows them both to heal their souls and come to grips with the separation they have had to endure, and must continue to endure, at least until they are reunited at some point in the future in Heaven.
The ambiguity of the ending makes it so each interpretation is 'valid' which was director Keith Gordon's intention all along. No matter what you think happened, the ending result is that Fielding is no longer in pain. He can go on with his life, loving Sarah in his heart, never forgetting her, thanking her for reminding him as he assumes power exactly what he wanted it for in the first place, while also looking forward to the day they can be together again at last.
But you have to admit the ending is all the more powerful if it REALLY IS her, her spirit or her herself there with him, instead of him in a room by himself.
As you can see, this film greatly affected me, and I highly recommend it to any who have not seen it.
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shipperly-groom
13 years ago
I totally agree that the film and book shouldn't be confused. A director worth his salt takes a book as a starting point, and makes something new and different of it, even if he follows the action closely in many ways.
Where I differ though is in the contention that an 'hallucination' can't 'cure' a character of his hallucinatory breakdown. I think that misrepresents quite crudely the director's assumptions about grief and mental processes in general, and the way film-makers use symbolism and imagery to communicate those processes and their key themes. For example, a story that features a 'ghost' visiting a key character doesn't necessarily suggest that the author/ director believes in the possibility of the supernatural as a objective reality. And a character experiencing a mental breakdown doesn't have to behave in accordance with or conform to psychiatric models as they are understood in contemporary medical practice. The fictional world only has to be internally consistent and true to the framework and themes the creator has chosen.
Fielding's breakdown, it seems to me, reflects not only his unresolved grief but his sense of moral conflict over the path he is pursuing. Trying to put actual mental health labels like schizophrenia on it (as some comments have), because that is condition most often associated with hallucinations misses the point (and in any case his kind of hallucinations are not typical of a schizophrenic breakdown). What the hallucinations are is a way of conveying that he has not - cannot, in fact - let go of this woman and her significance in his emotional and moral life. In other words, they are symptomatic of an incomplete grief process that is threatening his hold on reality, and his yearning for Sarah - and that pretty much is all they represent.
And 'process' is the key concept here. The hallucinations don't cause his breakdown, they are signifiers of it. The pressure of the election campaign forces him to confront his loss, and his subconscious begins to recreate the experience of Sarah's physical voice and form. At first these are relatively fleeting, but by the end he fully embraces and realises his ultimate wish fulfilment - that she never actually died. His mind creates a scenario (about the only plausible one consistent with her truly having loved him yet willingly abandoned him) in which her death was faked 'for the good of the cause'. Even though this means she very calculatingly chose the 'cause' over him, it would mean she was still alive and creates the possibility of her returning to him. That his mind is working towards this is shown in the way she 'leads' him to the church - the symbol of her moral idealism and commitment to political engagement. And when his sister specifically tells him she also once mistook someone who resembled Sarah but was definitely NOT her, to try and persuade him his 'sightings' are not reliable, he chooses instead to hear that she actually saw Sarah.
What is the evidence for this reading? When Sarah arrives at his office, she remains the same (style of clothes, hair) as she was in his memory of a decade earlier. This in itself is strongly suggestive that she is not real - at the very least fake dead political activists living 'below the radar' would surely change their appearance to reduce the chance of discovery. And she proceeds to give him everything his subconscious most needs at that moment; reassures him that he is still the centre of her emotional world; that (as he himself says to his sister) the pain doesn't, as people tell you it will, get better; that the political differences that finally separated them posed no threat to the intensity of their personal connection; that it's not safe to keep talking about her (she doesn't say for who, but it just as well applies to him as her, as he's doing himself no good politically or personally by doing so). And most importantly, that what matters is not getting what you want in life, but doing what you are meant to. Finding these answers, which are all within his own psyche, and don't require a paranormal intervention to access, completes the process of his 'breakdown', and provides the 'closure' he needs to be the politician he always hoped to be. The 'hallucination' didn't cure him, but the subconscious mind that created it has in effect healed itself.
It's been suggested that Sarah must have some existence independent of Fielding's mind because we see her watching over him while he sleeps, which he could not be aware of her doing while actually sleeping. But that makes the error of looking at everything that is presented on screen as reportage. In fact the idea of her watching him sleep (because that is part of what the Sarah he creates, who could have survived and visited him, would do in their fantasy encounter) fits perfectly well with Sarah as Fielding's 'wish fulfilment' manifestation.
I disagree that a ghost Sarah on an away-day from heaven is more powerful than this reading. Actually I think that turns it into sentimental 'love never dies' mush. This is a love story, certainly, and an emotionally very powerful and haunting one. But essentially underpinning that it is Fielding's story, about reconciling yourself to profound loss and finding a way forward through grief.
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