director
Terry Gilliam
screenwriter
Richard
LaGravenese
producers
Debra Hill
Lynda Obst
cinematographer
Roger Pratt
music
George Fenton
editor
Lesley Walker
cast
Jeff Bridges (Jack Lucas)
Robin Williams (Parry)
Mercedes Ruehl (Anne Napolitano)
Amanda Plummer (Lydia)
Michael Jeter (Homeless Cabaret Singer)
David Hyde Pierce (Lou Rosen)
Kathy Najimy (Crazed Video Customer)
Harry Shearer (Sitcom Actor Ben Starr)
Christian Clemenson (Edwin)
Tom Waits (Disabled Veteran)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 137m
u.s.
release: September
20, 1991
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other terry
gilliam films
reviewed on this website:
- the
brothers grimm
- fear
and loathing in las vegas
- 12
monkeys
|
Of all Terry Gilliam's films
-- the great (Brazil), the obscure (Jabberwocky),
the mainstream (12
Monkeys), the difficult (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen),
the fanciful (Time Bandits), the hallucinatory (Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas), the hilarious (any of his Monty
Python work) -- none is as much in need of an image rehab
as The Fisher King. The reason is simple: Otherwise reasonable
Gilliam fans treat it as the red-headed stepchild of his filmography,
the movie wherein, smarting from his back-to-back studio beatings
on Brazil and Munchausen, he sold out and made
a touchy-feely story about love and friendship. Gilliam just
can't seem to catch a break: Other directors (David Lynch with
The
Straight Story, to name one) are lauded for going against
their own grain. But it has become fashionable, especially post-Patch Adams,
to sneer at this earlier film in which Robin Williams harnesses
his manic style into a dramatic performance.
The unabashedly romantic Fisher
King -- which even, for Christ's sake, has not one, not two,
but three happy endings -- may thus be read as Gilliam's
sign of penitence, his assurance to the studios that he can be
a Good Boy. Don't buy it. For this is as much a Gilliam film
as anything that originated in his cynical, paranoid mind. Richard
LaGravenese's script could've been emblazoned "Property
of Terry Gilliam" -- all the themes are there: delusion,
escape from ugly reality into flights of fantasy, redemption,
obsession with the past (specifically, here, the Arthurian legend
of the Fisher King and all the parallels it allows). It's Gilliam's
most relaxed and heartfelt filmmaking, with a new respect for
human frailty and actors' moments; no other Gilliam film offers
such across-the-board fine performances (and yes, Robin-bashers,
that includes Williams). Just watch it again, damn it, will you?
Jeff Bridges, his stringy brown
hair tied back carelessly, is such a ringer for latter-day Gilliam
that we could be excused for taking his character, jaded DJ Jack
Lucas, as a wounded man looking for a path out of cynicism, much
like Gilliam. Not so much a shock-jock as a growling Eric Bogosian
pundit who shits on everything while on-air sycophants provide
sound-effect validation, Jack slouches in the dark studio and
grumbles that yuppies aren't human. He doesn't go so far as to
say they should all be shot, but that's what an unhinged caller
(Christian Clemenson) hears and responds to; the caller goes
on a shotgun spree at a trendy Manhattan restaurant that leaves
seven dead before he turns the gun on himself. The media, of
course, links the murders to Jack's show, complete with a photo
of Jack looking maniacal.
Disgraced and despairing, Jack
falls into alcoholic squalor, which is where we pick him up three
years later. Living uneasily with girlfriend Anne Napolitano
(Mercedes Ruehl) and occasionally working for her at her video
store, Jack gets bitterly drunk in front of the TV watching another
guy (Harry Shearer in an amusing cameo) headline the idiotic
sitcom Jack was in line to star in pre-downfall. One particularly
hard night finds him on the waterfront, his ankles tied to weights
as he contemplates oblivion; two young punks almost make his
decision for him, but he's saved by a homeless crackpot who calls
himself Parry (Williams). Parry is on a medieval trip -- he thinks
the Holy Grail resides in a billionaire's study in New York,
and his "quest" is to recover it.
Give LaGravenese's script credit
for avoiding cheesiness in at least one area: he furnishes what
would be a lesser movie's climactic revelation -- that among
the doomed diners massacred by Jack's deranged caller was Parry's
wife -- in the film's first half hour. Thus we understand why
Jack, still more or less a selfish and appalling son of a bitch
even after years of humility, feels obligated to help Parry in
his "quest." Part of the quest involves setting Parry
up with Lydia (Amanda Plummer), a woman he loves from afar. What
could've been sappy -- let's get the crazy, widowed homeless
guy a date! -- comes across instead as spiky and original. Partly
it's because LaGravenese, who also wrote and directed the superb
Living
Out Loud, is the rare male writer who knows how to write
women; the result is that Anne and Lydia are the first real,
living, breathing women in a Gilliam film. When Jack and Anne
take Parry and Lydia out on a double date at a Chinese restaurant,
Parry's awkwardness mirrors Lydia's, and when he starts singing
"Lydia the Tattooed Lady" it's just about the funkiest
romantic riff you've ever seen. So is an earlier sequence in
which Parry spots Lydia in Grand Central Station and the bustling
passengers around him segue into a collective waltz, as if infected
en masse by the intensity of his feelings.
The Fisher King is not all sweetness and light. Gilliam
allows the homeless their dignity without falsely ennobling them
(there's a sharp late scene in which Jack hears an absurd sitcom
pitch involving "wacky, wise homeless people"). He
floats on the romance of New York City while fully acknowledging
its underbelly: when Parry winds up in an institution, we hear
about Parry's bedclothes being dirtied when a doctor was careless
with a hypo, and a dazed man sits on his cot bleeding from the
head and unattended -- this is what happens to the mentally ill
poor of the city. Parry's blissful date with Lydia (which contains
a couple of vintage LaGravenese arias of self-hatred from her
and gentle reassurance from him) is followed quickly by his mind-bending
encounter with the Red Knight, a hulking flame-throwing creature
that symbolizes the excruciating past he's trying to escape.
We see Parry's tragedy in flashback; Gilliam is on his game here,
and the horror is worth escaping from. It is one of the most
devastating visions of sudden, violent loss in any film.
People like to caricature The
Fisher King because it features Robin Williams dancing naked
in Central Park. But this isn't one of his puckish Holy Fool
performances (if anything, it's Jack who plays the fool here).
Parry is crazy, with moments of lucidity. Even when the Red Knight
doesn't manifest itself, Parry always seems to be running from
it in his head, fleeing into the comforts of delusion. And he's
hardly a saint -- he ogles Anne's cleavage (and frantically hits
on her; we can see that it's just his long-suppressed libido
coming back) and admits to Lydia that he has "a hard-on
the size of Florida" for her. Williams refuses to make Parry
cute; he's realistically jagged and smelly. Amanda Plummer, too,
goes beyond what Lydia would've been in a routine film -- a mousy,
nice young woman. Lydia isn't nice; her loneliness has given
her temperament a sharp edge. Jeff Bridges plays the straight
man much of the time, doing his usual remarkable, effortless-looking
bits of business: a twitch when he sees the newscast about the
yuppie massacre, repeated later when he hears the moronic sitcom
proposal; organic shifts in mood from misery to resignation to
decency, signalled with nothing more than a change in posture.
But it's Mercedes Ruehl who
owns the movie, truly. Justifiably awarded an Oscar for her work
here, Ruehl is the soul of the ideal New York: an irritable voice
of sanity. Anne is entirely her own creation, as quirkily individual
as the self-loathing DJ or the homeless madman; this is one woman
who isn't going to take a narrative backseat as The Girlfriend
(and the way LaGravenese writes Anne and the way Ruehl plays
her should serve as templates for anyone trying to get honest,
complicated femalehood onto the screen). You know how you so
seldom believe in love between two characters because you don't
know why they're together other than the dictation of the plot?
Ruehl gives you that understanding just by the way Anne talks
to Jack, how her body is when he's around, how she gets pissed
off at him but still supports him wholeheartedly -- up to a point.
When things are finally going right for Jack and he (idiotically)
tells Anne he doesn't know if he loves her, Ruehl goes through
the five stages of denial in about a minute, starting with a
disbelieving grin and snort. She's a formidable woman, played
by a formidable actress who has deserved much, much better than
the tripe she's been handed since winning the Oscar for this.
If Gilliam had done nothing else right in The Fisher King,
he could at least have patted himself on the back for giving
us Anne Napolitano. If you want to take the emotional temperature
of this odd and challenging movie at any given moment, just look
at Mercedes Ruehl.
|