The Fisher King

Can a movie's strength also be its weakness? I considered this as I watched The Fisher King. I felt like I was listening to a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo in an ABBA song. The Fisher King is about Jack (Jeff Bridges), a shock-jock in New York City. His curt dismissal of and choice of words with a caller that has mental health issues inspires the caller to commit a mass shooting at a restaurant. Three years later, Jack meets Perry (Robin Williams), a homeless man with mental illness, who was in the restaurant that night. His wife was one of the victims, and since then, Perry has come to the belief that he's a knight on a quest for the Holy Grail. Jack decides the only way to assuage his guilt-ridden conscience and get his life back on track is to fix Perry. In the hands of any other director, this would be a maudlin, syrupy mess of a movie, jamming the emotional beats down the viewers' throats with all the delicacy of a jackhammer. If Spielberg did this, his tendency to squeeze every last drop of sentimentality out of a moment like a janitor's mop would make The Fisher King a slog. But with Monty Python's Terry Gilliam at the helm, the movie is allowed to be something more. Of course, you get Gilliam's signature directorial style; odd angles, wide lenses used for extreme close-ups, and general shot composition that is designed to keep the viewer off-kilter. But he also lets some fantastical elements creep in, and has them serve a purpose. Perry's inchoate rage and survivor's guilt manifests as a massive red knight on horseback, wearing the most decorative and least practical armor you will ever see, but it makes sense. There's a beautiful sequence in a train station where Perry is looking for a woman he's fallen in love with. She comes by at the same time every day. When he finally sees her, the crowd in the train station stops bustling to and fro; everyone pairs off and the lobby becomes a massive ballroom, with everybody dancing except him and her. These flights of fancy are a delightful way to use the fantasy elements Gilliam loves so much in an otherwise grounded story, and keep the sentimentality from overwhelming the viewer. It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, that the acting here is superb. It's Jeff Bridges and Robin Williams in the lead. Beyond that, though, you have Mercedes Ruehl, who won the Oscar for this for Best Supporting. Amanda Plummer plays the object of Perry's affection, and if you're familiar with her work, she's not acting outside of her wheelhouse here, but it's still sweet and fits within the movie's framework. This is where I have to bring back my opening question, though. As much as Gilliam's style and storytelling keep the movie from teetering into emotional overload, it might do its job a little too well. Jack's battle with guilt and grief over his connection to the shooting, and his subsequent journey to redeem himself, never feel connected. He doesn't have an arc so much as he shifts gears, robbing his development of a sense of progression. He seems to fight himself for much of the movie, despite being in this bottomless well of sorrow, and it feels more driven by plot than character. All the pieces are there for an intelligent emotional journey and exploration of themes of moral responsibility, self-forgiveness, and processing grief, but the movie's whimsical identity keeps the more mature aspects at arm's length. It is also rather cavalier about mental illness, as Jack seems to think he can "fix" Perry by propping him up with money, a job at his girlfriend's video rental place, and fixing him up with Amanda Plummer's character. Perry has psychotic delusions and breaks with reality; I'm no psychiatrist, but I don't think a part-time job and getting laid is going to fix that. And the ending is so goopy and happily-ever-after, and it feels SO unearned. I get that they didn't want to end this on a down note, or even a mildly somber one, but there was an opportunity for Jack to learn how he needed to fix himself directly and not through fixing others, and instead, it goes for the solution that's straight out of a TV-movie-of-the-week. All of these leaves me conflicted about how I feel about The Fisher King. I admire the effort put into it. Unlike some other directors who will remain nameless, Gilliam actually puts his fanciful weirdness to use within the story. Without Gilliam's unique style, this would be a bland, one-note, feel-good drama that would be entirely forgotten. It's because of Gilliam that The Fisher King has a memorable identity. But it's also because of that memorable identity that I feel the movie never quite treats its subject matter as seriously as it should, thereby coming up just a little short of what it sets out to do. I love the performances and the direction, and I do recommend it for that. But I can't overlook that, at the end, I don't feel like the path taken did the journey any justice.