THE FISHER KING
Terry Gilliam’s elephantine yet breezy The Fisher King is a gripping new-age extravaganza, visually splendid and adroitly paced. But some gross conceptual cheating–presumably the fallout of commercial ambitions–makes the film a little hard to swallow. Gilliam’s fifth feature (he also directed Jabberwocky, Time Bandits, Brazil, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) revels in duality–everything comes in twos–so it’s little wonder it indulges in both duplicity and outright doublethink; the film is also littered with internal “rhymes,” both significant and gratuitous. This duality may come partly from the fact that for the first time Gilliam has not written the script himself–it’s by talented newcomer Richard LaGravenese. At any rate the duality echoes Gilliam’s well-advertised desire to make this both an artistic and commercial success–to prove he can turn out a money-maker (after the box-office flop of Baron Munchausen) and yet retain his reputation as an overachiever in the grand style, a director known for his quirky humor and ravishing visual conceits.
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How does this movie’s doubling principle operate? For starters, the film centers on two crushed New Yorkers–a brash former radio talk-show host named Jack (Bridges) and a former medieval-history professor now living as a crazed street bum, Parry (Williams). Their lives are derailed by the same tragedy–a mass murder in a yuppie nightclub triggered by Jack’s idle tirade to a radio listener; Parry’s wife is one of the victims. Though the two men are initially strangers, they wind up saving each other’s souls.
Perfunctory: At two separate times in the movie, Lydia accidentally knocks videos and romance novels off their racks, and twice she’s seen grappling helplessly with Chinese dumplings and chopsticks. Metaphysical: Unless my eyes deceived me, the same actor who plays the millionaire owner of a Fifth Avenue town house–Mel Bourne, who happens to be the film’s production designer–also plays one of Parry’s homeless chums.
The initial premise of The Fisher King recalls the central idea of Talk Radio: the harangues of a vain, nasty-mouthed disc jockey seem not only to uncover but to provoke his listeners’ desperation and hate-filled insanity. But with the introduction of the second hero, Parry, the film broaches the grander and more universal themes of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The death of his wife has so traumatized Parry, we discover, that he’s developed the mad conviction he’s a medieval knight: he quests after the Holy Grail (a chalice he locates in a Fifth Avenue town house), gallantly worships Lydia from afar, and heroically protects the innocent and unprotected (including Jack) from scoundrels. We also discover that he’s currently camping out in the dank basement of the apartment house where he and his wife lived when he was still a history professor at Hunter–an arresting potential visual contrast, but we never see the flat he shared with her. Whenever he begins to recall his former identity, his memories are quickly blocked by infernal visions of a menacing, fire-breathing red knight on horseback–a corny, pretentious conceit that the movie trots out at every opportunity.
Fleetingly–but significantly–this episode acknowledges that Jack’s “redemption” consists mostly of the opportunity to become once again the public scumbag he used to be (when we also saw him blithely ignoring a street person). But having made this point, the movie quickly encourages us to forget it. A far more important part of Jack’s spiritual agenda is finding the ability to tell his girlfriend that he loves her; this noble task makes the issue of whether or not he’s a public scumbag seem secondary. (A hallmark of new-age morality is that personal development is privileged over social conscience: Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ succinctly expresses this philosophy in terms of Jesus’ life.)
