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Fielding Pierce: I never saw Sarah again. I think I've managed to help some people in Congress - do some good. Less than I'd have liked, but more than I feared. To this day I still don't know if Sarah was real that night or just a product of my broken heart. But Sarah, if you are alive, and it was you that night, here for one last moment of sweetness before going back out to try and make things better in the world... I can only say, keep fighting. God be with you. I love you. And if it wasn't really you - if your visit was only the you that still lives in my heart, the you that never gave up, that taught me what being brave was all about - if it was only the you that I will carry with me, in my soul, until the day I die... I can only say, keep fighting. And God be with you. I love you.
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Sarah Williams: You, um, still haven't told ,e how you got the idea you wanted to be a senator.
Fielding Pierce: That's not actually what I want. I want to be the President.
[Sarah smiles]
Fielding Pierce: Why are you smiling?
Sarah Williams: Because you mean it.
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Sarah Williams: You have to love me too. Not an image, not an idea. And not in spite of who I am.
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Fielding Pierce: The thing about Harvard for somebody from the working class like us - we come from a working class background - is a terrible sense of isolation, of aloneness there.
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Danny Pierce: Remember what Sarah used to say? Sarah Williams. You do remember Sarah, don't you?
Fielding Pierce: Go fuck yourself.
Danny Pierce: I know you do. She'd see some junkie on the street and people just waling by, nobody even noticing, but she'd see him and she'd say, "How do you know that's not Jesus?"
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Sarah Williams: It is so infuriating loving you sometimes!
Fielding Pierce: Well, the feeling's mutual.
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Fielding Pierce: Uh, I'm sorry, but do you believe that I'm going into politics so I can become a corrupt son of a bitch who sells electrodes to the Chilean secret police?
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Sarah Williams: You can't be everything to me.
Fielding Pierce: I want to be.
Sarah Williams: Oh, dear. I love that you said that.
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Sarah Williams: We will never be apart. We may be at each other's throats or we may be separated by 5,000 miles, but we'll never be apart.
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Fielding's father: [giving Fielding some advice after a speech] And you get too personal. I mean, if anybody really knew Kennedy, you think they would've voted for him? You gotta be strong. So strong you're gonna want to blow your brains out. But you won't/ SO strong, people can say right to your face, "you're a dirty, lying son of a bitch", and it's not gonna make a bit of difference.
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Danny Pierce: It's a damn good feeling knowing you're out there patrolling New York Harbor, son. The fucking Cong could be shopping on Fifth avenue like that.
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Fielding Pierce: I am so sick of having to apologize for being an American.
Father Stephen Mileski: North American.
Fielding Pierce: Uh, God, I'm so sorry. Yes, North American. But I can't help noticing that when people run to freedom they tend to wash up on North American shores. This country is till the best that we've been able to do in the whole fucking history of the planet
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Sarah Williams: I don't want to watch you turn into a cog in their machine.
Fielding Pierce: That's so fucking condescending. Sometimes cogs can make machines run a little but better.
Sarah Williams: Sometimes yes. Mostly they turn in circles and wear out. Then they get replaced.
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Fielding Pierce: I risk throwing away everything that I've worked for. This way eventually, I can make some real substantial changes without throwing away my life on some ultimately meaningless gesture.
Sarah Williams: Sometimes, meaningless gestures are all we have.
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Sarah Williams: Ambition is... the ice on the lake of emotion.
[They walk for a moment in silence]
Fielding Pierce: Who said that?
Sarah Williams: I did.
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Fielding Pierce: I'm in this whole fucking room by myself, and I'm choking on the collective sense of superiority.
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Amazon.com
Actor-turned-director Keith Gordon has crafted a touching love story that transcends time, political ideology, and even death. The movie opens in 1974 as Fielding Pierce (Billy Crudup) watches a TV news report announcing the death in Chile of three American activists, including Sarah Williams (Jennifer Connelly), his one true love. The story flashes back to when they first met, showing how he was always more conservative, with grand political aspirations, but the relationship worked because they both shared dreams of making the world a better place, one from inside the system and the other from outside. The movie also flashes forward to his life in the early '80s, when he gets tapped to run for Congress. He starts having visions of her, but he is never quite sure if she's a hallucination arising out of his stress, a manifestation of his political consciousness, an out-and-out ghost, or maybe she's still alive somehow. Whatever she is, his deep longing for her is making him crack up. Gordon smartly jumps the story back and forth in time, forgoing an "objective" reality in favor of a more subjective and emotional one. It is a structure based on memory, and that in tandem with the content is what makes Waking the Dead a very powerful film indeed.--Andy Spletzer
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