We were sitting round talking about M Night Shyamalan's latest movie, Unbreakable, and someone asked: "Ah, but have you seen Fearless?" To which the buffiest film buff present declared: "That must be the most overrated underrated film of all time." That's a specialist category I could love; perhaps the National Film Theatre will do a season of overrated underrated films or, better still, underrated overrated ones.
Directed by Peter Weir, Fearless is underrated because it is very nearly superb, and was not much liked when released in 1993. And it's possibly overrated because it trips itself up in the final stretch, so frustratingly that you almost want to wash your hands of it. It makes instructive viewing alongside Unbreakable.
Shyamalan's film is about a man who is the sole survivor of a train crash, and discovers that he has powers that distinguish him from the rest of humanity. In Weir's film, Max Klein (Jeff Bridges) is one of several survivors of a plane crash. He too comes to believe there is something special about him - that he has not only escaped death but transcended it.
Early in the film, we get the strangest, subtlest inkling of what's happening to Max. Visiting an ex-girlfriend, he treats the two of them to a plate of strawberries - ripe and red, shot in succulent close-up. He pops one into his mouth and beams with the joy of life. Then his ex reminds him that he used to be allergic to strawberries - that one nearly killed him.
It's not just fruit he no longer fears. He casually walks across a busy freeway, then dances on the edge of a rooftop. He has witnessed the moment of his own death, and passed through it. He's unbreakable - or perhaps just in an extreme state of denial.
Weir's film - adapted by Rafael Yglesias from his own novel - plays with rather higher stakes than Shyamalan's avowedly comic-strip story. Fearless wants to go the whole philosophical and psychological nine yards, which makes it much less clear-cut than the average Hollywood essay in deep feeling. Max has become either an angel or a monster, either painfully honest or boorishly tactless. He turns his back on terra firma - on his kids and his wife, played with nervous intensity by Isabella Rossellini - and forms a bond with a young woman (a vividly pained Rosie Perez), who has lost her child on the flight. He both befriends her and takes drastic steps to cure her of her Catholic guilt.
Fearless dazzles you with the intensity of its images, shot with unnerving cleanness by Allen Daviau - notably the scene in which Bridges walks down a deserted flyover and through what appears to be a deserted city, as well as the opening slow-motion drift through a cornfield and Bridges impassively wandering through the carnage from the plane crash. Bridges is at his complex best, too - does any other Hollywood actor have the same knack of appearing at once a warm, vulnerable human being, yet also an abject, strutting creep? The film's boldness in overtly tackling big themes (guilt, mortality, theology) explains why it was a box-office dud. Fearless is a dazzling anomaly - the closest Hollywood has come to producing a Krzysztof Kieslowski film. Compare Kieslowski's Three Colours: Blue, in which Juliette Binoche survives the death of her family in a road accident.
Arguably, Fearless takes on too much, and there comes a point when all the talk gets a little leaden and theatrical. But the big flaw is at the end, when Weir feels obliged to lay on a major climax, in the form of an apocalyptic and extremely detailed flashback to the plane crash itself. And at the very last second, the film loses its nerve totally, and pulls back from the tragic abyss it's poised to leap into. Without revealing too much, it involves another strawberry, and what could have been devastating becomes one of Hollywood's ready-made redemptions.
Shyamalan, however, making a film that is supposedly pure entertainment, signally resists such compromises. Not only is Unbreakable's ending more than a little disturbing, but the film thrives on understatement, refusing, for example, to show the train crash that changes his hero's life.
I'd like to think that Unbreakable, like Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense and Christopher Nolan's rigorously mathematical Memento, shows signs of a new no-frills approach to storytelling in American cinema. Shyamalan is committed to telling a story and nothing in the film is superfluous to that. Fearless's last-minute failure of nerve is that it wants to send us out of the cinema feeling good, or at least relieved. Unbreakable doesn't - and perhaps its success will help other Hollywood films to resist pulling back at the brink. But what a brink - a centimetre more, and Fearless would have been pure west coast Kieslowski. In a parallel universe, I like to imagine it being the first part of a Peter Weir philosophical trilogy - Three Flavours: Strawberry.
• Fearless is available on video from Warner Bros.
