I did see "Waking the Dead" last weekend. I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that Jennifer Connely could act. I thought it was a decent enough movie, with an interesting premise and one of the more believable romantic relationships I have seen in recent years. The film was also refreshingly centrist - it is damned rare that a film takes on the left, the way it does in the scene where Crudup lays into the Chilean refugees with moral superiority issues.
Where it just doesn't work at all is with Crudup's crisis of conscience. It isn't all Crudup's fault - the screenplay refrains from giving us any evidence that he *has* compromised himself, until one jarring scene where he is an utter bastard to 2 different people, which is completely out of character. But Crudup does bear responsibility for that godawful restaurant breakdown.
However, I think some of the film's critics seemed to have been asleep. I have heard a lot of comments about the unbelievability of the ending, which is just weird considering that (spoilers) the film was deliberately being ambiguous over whether the ending was all in Crudup's head.
