Waking the Dead

Waking the Dead is a 2000 American drama film directed by Keith Gordon. The screenplay by Robert Dillon is based on the 1986 novel of the same name by Scott Spencer. The film flashes back and forth between the 1970s and 1980s and centers on the relationship between Fielding Pierce, a young Coast Guard officer with political ambitions, and radical and idealistic Roman Catholic Sarah Williams, who is drawn to programs designed to better the lives o... more

Waking the Dead is a 2000 American drama film directed by Keith Gordon. The screenplay by Robert Dillon is based on the 1986 novel of the same name by Scott Spencer. The film flashes back and forth between the 1970s and 1980s and centers on the relationship between Fielding Pierce, a young Coast Guard officer with political ambitions, and radical and idealistic Roman Catholic Sarah Williams, who is drawn to programs designed to better the lives of the underprivileged and has mixed feelings about his career goals. In the opening scene, Fielding sees a television news program reporting Sarah's death in a Minneapolis car bombing following a church-organized excursion to Chile to feed the poor and organize resistance to the oppressive right-wing government. He never quite recovers from the news, and he finds himself increasingly haunted by the past, in which the couple were as romantically close as they were politically apart, divided by his desire to work within the system and her... less