The Fisher King
Director: Terry Gilliam. Cast: Jeff Bridges, Robin Williams, Mercedes Ruehl, Amanda Plummer, Michael
Jeter, David Hyde Pierce. Screenplay: Richard LaGravenese.
Brave in its ambitions but unable to sustain its energy, director Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King
is a good film that could have been, but isn't, a very good one. Certainly Richard LaGravenese's
script earns the tag of "originality" both in its specific conception for the screen and for its own
wild, loopy creativity. Gilliam and LaGravenese have conceived of a picture that is simultaneously an
offbeat romance, a Grail quest, a bleeding-heart yuppie epiphany, and an unbridled comedy of stylistic
excess. Surprisingly, The Fisher King's ultimate problem is not that these divergent goals stumble
awkwardly into one another; almost everyone involved works admirably to negotiate the entire range of
tones suggested in the writing. On the contrary, alternate moments of comedy, tenderness, and mystery
keep arriving but settle disappointingly into a mechanical groove that deflates the buoyant
adventurousness of the first hour and a half.
The film opens with a radio show by Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges), a shock-jock who cannot decide if he
should direct his genial but unmistakable cynicism at his specific listeners or at society in general.
Settling for a regimen of sarcasm and unmodulated flippancy, Jack unwittingly incites one repeat caller
to bring a rifle into a New York City restaurant and shoot seven of the patrons, then himself. The
incident saddens Jack both on the obvious personal level of having possibly incited such a crime and in
the more selfish sense that it transpires just as he planned to audition for a potentially big-money
sitcom role. This mix of noble emotions and self-indulgence emblematize the broad tonal range of The
Fisher King, which bravely opts for uneasy mixes of comedy, drama, and pathos rather than following
the easier route of partitioning all the laughs into some scenes and all the hurt into others.
LaGravenese's script jumps forward three years, and we find Jack living as a barnacle off of his
girlfriend, Anne, played by Mercedes Ruehl in an Oscar-winning performance of such rigor and clever
eccentricity that she makes the no-guff, big-hearted, big-breasted girlfriend seem far less like the
mothballed cliché it actually is. (The fact that Anne owns and runs her own video rental store does
little to move the role out of convention.) "I do not need this," Anne apostrophizes to Jack one evening
when he, typically it seems, has not come home for dinner, and yet Anne keeps "sitting around and cooking
like a jerk."
Her anger is well-warranted, but during that particular week, Jack's nighttime absences are anything but
planned, certainly not the amorous cavorts of which Anne speculates. Rather, one night finds him with
cinderblocks tied to his boots, ready to jump into the Hudson River, when a trio of street thugs mug and
beat him until help arrives in the form of an army of hoboes led by Perry (Robin Williams), a loony bird
in a large brown smock with the good fortune to have the jaunty comic spirit of Robin Williams. The next
night, Jack seeks Perry out to thank him for the rescue and to give him the fifty dollars he hopes will
assuage his liberal guilt at having so long ignored the homeless who just saved his life.
The plot of The Fisher King is too strange to elaborate much further without ruining the momentum
of the film, a misdeed that Gilliam himself commits about twenty minutes before the movie's conclusion.
Even befort that point some aspects of the film, particularly Williams' jolly/sad character, play too
much like a screenwriter's idea of distilled outrageousness for us to really care about; still, the
film's oddball humor, nervous characters, and adventurous set design keep the project rolling on its own
bizarre momentum. Suddenly, though, The Fisher King settles for a mawkish coma subplot and, even
more disappointingly, makes its own characters cursory to the action.
Much of the film's middle hour, for example, is devoted to Jack and Anne's project to play match-maker
for Perry and Lydia (Amanda Plummer), the mousy office-worker he has watched for months from the street.
The courtship between the two is a little too forced, but the actors, like the movie, are charming enough
in their weirdness to pull the scenes off. Then, though, when the romance has been established, Gilliam
seems to lose all interest in it, and we only see Plummer about three more times, two of those in
long-shot. Bigger, more expensive movies typically discard cast members like this, but a film like
The Fisher King whose appeal depends on its characters can hardly afford to neglect them so.
Gilliam and LaGravenese also attempt to find some suspense in a heist sequence involving Bridges'
character, but that particular event has been foreshadowed so deliberately and its outcome is so
predictable that the whole sequence seems expendable and indulgent.
Kudos to Jeff Bridges for keeping Jack Lucas an involving character and negotiating both his appealing
moments and his scabrous ones to create a convincing central character. This is one of those performances
that Bridges fans can cite as worthy evidence that he is a grossly unappreciated talent; that Williams
scored an Oscar nod and a Golden Globe for The Fisher King and Bridges did not is in turn an
unrebukable critique of the scales of showmanship and flamboyance by which the voters for those awards
often appear to weigh their selections. Not that flamboyance is always such a bad thing, and while its
energy level remains high, The Fisher King's florid acting and lavish visuals provide the wild
ride we expect from Gilliam, a former member of the Monty Python troupe. But flamboyance on autopilot is
one of the most dispiriting tones a film can adopt, and by the end of The Fisher King, the picture
is a pretty dry well. Grade: B–
- Academy Award Nominations and *Winners:
- Best Actor: Robin Williams
- *Best Supporting Actress: Mercedes Ruehl
- Best Original Screenplay: Richard LaGravenese
- Best Art Direction: Mel Bourne
- Best Original Score: George Fenton
- Golden Globe *Winners:
- Best Picture (Musical/Comedy)
- Best Director: Terry Gilliam
- Best Actor (Musical/Comedy): Jeff Bridges
- *Best Actor (Musical/Comedy): Robin Williams
- *Best Supporting Actress: Mercedes Ruehl
- Other Awards:
- Los Angeles Film Critics Association—Best Actress: Mercedes Ruehl