Terry Gilliam (1991)
Jack Lucas is a big-name shock-jock on New York radio. One day he goes too far: he derides a phone-in caller as a sexual no-hoper and the young man concerned walks into a Manhattan bar and shoots several people dead. Three years later, Jack, his career a distant memory and suicidally depressed, goes off one evening from the apartment he shares with his girlfriend Anne Napolitano (she runs a video store) to kill himself. He looks so rough that he’s mistaken for a homeless person and is attacked by a gang. Jack is rescued by a sword-wielding man called Parry, who is homeless and evidently crazy: he’s on a mission to find the Holy Grail and invites Jack to help him. Jack learns, though not from Parry himself, that Parry’s wife was one of the victims and he is one of the survivors of the Manhattan shootings – news that transforms Jack’s feelings of responsibility for his new acquaintance. Parry had been a teacher; when his wife died, he became catatonic and stayed that way for several years before waking with his obsession with the Grail and the legend of the Fisher King. (In Arthurian legend, the Fisher King was charged by God to guard the Grail but, through his overweening pride, failed to do his duty and, in punishment, was physically and spiritually afflicted.)
Jack tries to help Parry find the Grail and to redeem himself. He also engineers a meeting between Parry and Lydia Sinclair, a pathologically shy young woman (she works for a Manhattan publishing house) whom Parry loves at first sight. Parry, Lydia, Jack and Anne go out for a jolly dinner in a Chinese restaurant; later that night, Parry is attacked and badly injured by the same thugs from whom he rescued Jack. He re-enters a catatonic state, from which he’s eventually woken by Jack’s getting hold of the Grail, which turns out to be a trophy kept in an Upper East Side mansion. Parry emerges from the mental hospital to which he’s been sent. He and Lydia are reunited. Anne and Jack, who break up at one stage, also end up together again.
This is a fine example of a director and a star actor, both highly idiosyncratic, finding a project that’s ideally suited to their talents. The Fisher King is a very appealing film – poetic, in the sense that Terry Gilliam makes you feel you follow its inner direction even when you (or I anyway) would be put hard put to explain what exactly is going on. This is true at least until the picture starts to lose momentum in its last quarter. Richard LaGravenese’s screenplay is a terrifically lively farrago, which hits problems only when he starts having to tie things up. The ending is pretty weak – even though it’s salvaged, emotionally anyway, because all ends well for characters whom you’re rooting for. LaGravenese and Gilliam use the legendary framework flexibly. For example, Jack is sometimes Percival to Parry’s Fisher King, sometimes it’s vice versa. (Percival is the good, simple-minded helper of the afflicted Fisher King.) Parry is repeatedly frightened by visions of the fiery, death-dealing ‘Red Knight’, a figure who crops up several times in the Arthurian canon (In one instance, Perceval slays then himself becomes the Red Knight.)
The film’s splendid tagline is ‘A Modern Day Tale About the Search for Love, Sanity, Ethel Merman and the Holy Grail’ but the story of the Fisher King – which at one hushed point of the film is beautifully told by Robin Williams as Parry – seems designed to give a mythical dimension to a message which is, ultimately, more wetly conventional: something to do with human redemption and helping people when they need you. There is, however, plenty more diverting philosophy than that along the way, especially the long-suffering Anne’s theological explanation to the often insufferable Jack:
‘I don’t believe that God made man in his image. ‘Cause most of the shit that happens comes from man. No, I think man was made in the Devil’s image. And women were created out of God. ‘Cause after all, women can have babies, which is kind of like creating. And which also accounts for the fact that women are so attracted to men … ’cause let’s face it … the Devil is a hell of a lot more interesting! Believe me, I’ve slept with some saints in my day, I know what I’m talking about. So the whole point in life is for men and women to get married … so that God and the Devil can get together and work it out. Not that we have to get married. God forbid.’
Gilliam goes in for strong-arming at the start of the film. The city looks darkly malignant and playing ‘The Power’ on the soundtrack during the sequences illustrating Jack Lucas’s heartlessly irresponsible celebrity is too obvious. Yet the exaggerations are oppressively effective: the synergy of the pounding accompaniment, Jack’s spiel and the infernal outlook really does get on your nerves. The apocalyptic ominousness of New York in The Fisher King is, to me, more powerful than in the Batman pictures that I’ve seen – I think because Gilliam’s people are, in spite of their various extremities of character and behaviour, essentially believable and their environment therefore counts for more. The film is also a paean to New York: in the nocturnal scenes in Central Park; in the dream-like waltz sequence, during which Parry sets eyes on Lydia, in Grand Central Station; in the mental ward chorus of ‘How About You?’; and in the illumination of the cityscape at the end of the film. The movement of the story from the hectic hell of the beginning to this conclusion is striking: although it’s forced and anti-climactic, it is a fairytale ending, at least to the extent that the main characters go through trial and tribulation to reach it. Gilliam is well served in this progress by George Fenton’s score and Roger Pratt’s cinematography. (The BFI’s print, though, didn’t seem to be the greatest – a tenebrous look is one thing but the images were sometimes so dark that it was hard to make them out. I can’t believe that was a problem with the original.)
Robin Williams is ideally cast as Parry. At the height of his success, Williams seemed increasingly drawn to nobly suffering roles – in Dead Poets Society, Awakenings, Good Will Hunting – yet he was always more or less reduced in that kind of part (less reduced in Dead Poets Society, where the teacher he plays is at least a star turn in the classroom, than in the other two). Parry, the homeless, psychically chaotic Grail-seeker, is a noble sufferer too but a one-of-a-kind noble sufferer. The role allows Williams to give full expression, in beguiling combination, to his subversiveness and unpredictability and his sweet-natured quality. He’s very funny describing the mystical experience of having a shit (perhaps the defining moment of Robin Williams’s screen career). When he does little dance routines in the street, when his face suddenly looms up close to Jack’s, Williams is drawing both on the ways we expect vagrants to behave (and which make us feel uncomfortable) and on his own individuality as a performer. This works well in reminding you that every one of the street people has a personal history that brought them where they are now. (It works so well that you’re almost prepared to overlook Gilliam’s use of the marginalised – the winos, the mental ward patients – as a corps.)
Jeff Bridges has to work hard to become more interesting and likeable than the selfish bastard Jack Lucas has been presented as at the start but a regular supply of good, funny lines and Bridges’ likeability from earlier roles get him through successfully. Amanda Plummer is genuinely eccentric and affecting as Lydia and Mercedes Ruehl as Anne is amazing: vocally and physically, she is slightly stylised, in a way that makes her characterisation all the wittier and – a piece of acting magic – all the more real. (That’s essential since Anne, although sometimes desperate, is by some way the most grounded of the principals.) Michael Jeter is flamboyant and touching as a diminutive gay singer with a huge voice: his spectacular delivery of ‘Everything’s Comin’ Up Roses’ seems not far off Ethel Merman’s own volume. Tom Waits brings his wry presence to a cameo as a disabled war veteran based at Grand Central.
The Fisher King is uneven. One of the most enjoyable scenes of all (and the competition is strong) is the Chinese meal – which perfectly blends situation comedy with illustration of how relationships are developing within the quartet of diners. One of the crudest bits is Parry’s flashback to the shootings in the bar, particularly the explicit revelation that the look of the Red Knight in his imagination is connected with the spray of blood in which his wife died. One thing that remained unclear to me was whether (and, if so, when) Parry realises who Jack used to be. Reading the plot synopsis at the start of this note brings home to me how gruesome The Fisher King sounds on paper but how good it actually is. The actors and Terry Gilliam’s phantasmagoric flair carry the day.
15 August 2009
