Cinema: Waking The Dead

Billy Crudup plays a Coast Guard officer bound for Vietnam; Jennifer Connelly, a peacenik. Naturally they fall in love. Hey, its the '60s. When she's killed in a car bombing, he goes on to a conventional political career. Years later Connelly starts haunting Crudup: phone calls, glimpses on the street. Is he hallucinating? Or was the bombing a pretext, letting her slip deeper into the radical underground? We never really know--or care. That's partly because of the inept production design (Montreal is visibly not New York City or Chicago), partly because of the flat direction and writing (also Gordon's). It's time to let these socio-political ghosts die.

--By Richard Schickel