AN EMOTIONAL FAREWELL
Star Wars: The Last Jedi creates powerful closure for science fiction icon Carrie Fisher, writes Michael Cavna
If the moment does not move you, you’ve got a heart as cold as planet Hoth.
Whether you love or hate Star Wars: The Last Jedi, it’s near impossible not to experience a jolt when reality crashes into fantasy as we witness the near-death of Leia Organa, as portrayed through the most affecting Star Wars performance Carrie Fisher ever delivered.
Dec. 27 will mark the first anniversary of Fisher’s death from cardiac arrest, at age 60, after a flight home to Los Angeles. It is a testament to how beloved Fisher was, as performer and writer and raconteur, that her sudden passing still feels so unreal to many fans, and that she still feels so very much with us. Who within the Star Wars family, or fandom, did not love Carrie?
Now, the long shadow of her passing hovers over The Last Jedi. When we see Leia critically injured in the film’s first reel, blasted by the First Order immediately after her Dark Side son Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) refuses to shoot her and the bridge of her command ship, we are momentarily thunderstruck.
Are we about to mourn the character who is so inextricably linked to the actress we are still mourning?
What follows that strike is an effect that has proved divisive among viewers: Leia, who up until now in the franchise has never fully revealed her Force powers, is floating in frigid space — as if nodding to frozen Superman — before creating a Forcebubble and floating her way toward a Resistance ship. (Did your audience cheer, weep, gasp or laugh when her pointed hand moved? My audiences let out a range of such reactions.)
Director Rian Johnson has said Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy was persuasive in suggesting that this was an ideal moment for Leia to reveal her Force powers, especially because Luke had previously mentioned her Force potential as a twin Skywalker herself. And so, the director has said, Leia saving herself became akin to a person finding previously untapped superhuman strength to hoist a car to save a life.
Leia goes into a coma, and we are brought back to a year ago, when Fisher held on before succumbing, after four days of fan thoughts and prayers and heartfelt hashtags on social media.
Then in the film, when the Resistance needs her most, Leia returns like Lazarus, her cooler (bandaged) head prevailing after hotly wired pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) has scrambled to try to save the dwindling forces and even staged a mutiny.
The close-ups of Leia while she’s in a coma, and then when she returns to the bridge, are so moving that we half-wonder whether the writer-director altered any of the story after Fisher’s death.
The filmmakers have insisted that Johnson did not. Fisher had completed filming shortly before her death, and the eerie scenes are said to be just a function of coincidence.
Later in the film, Leia and Vice Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern) share a touching farewell scene when Holdo stays behind as the Resistance escapes to planet Crait. And Leia ultimately gets a powerful reunion scene of sorts with her long-reclusive sibling Luke (Mark Hamill), as the characters’ joint theme song swells.
Lucasfilm had planned for the next episode, J.J. Abrams’s 2019 release, to be Leia’s film. But through the power of visual and story and performance, Episode VIII will stand largely as Leia’s film — and Fisher’s.
“She was amazing,” Last Jedi cinematographer Steve Yedlin says of working with Fisher. “She is such an expressive person, as much off camera as on. She’s a pleasure to light and to interact with.”
So what was his secret to creating such an emotionally moving luminosity around Fisher’s Leia? “I just tried,” he says simply, “to put that love (of hers) in the light.”
Lucasfilm has said Fisher will not appear in the saga’s next episode. And Last Jedi producer Ram Bergman says no CGI creation of Leia was needed for Last Jedi, adding about Fisher: “We got what we needed from her.”
Bergman notes that the bond Johnson built with Fisher, as he spent long hours at her home, helped elevate Fisher’s farewell as Leia.
“They loved each other,” says Bergman. “They truly built trust. She felt really safe and confident (that he would) get the best out of her.
“We all adored her.”