The Fisher King (1991)

Rated R for sexuality, innuendo, nudity, brutal gun violence, and more.  While I can't say that The Fisher King prides itself on being a visceral movie, it embraces the grittiness of both Terry Gilliam and the '90s.  It's trying to be a bit upsetting at times.  This is also a movie that, while it has noble intentions, paints broad strokes when dealing with mental illness, which includes sexual proclivities.  It's a lot and probably deserves the R.

DIRECTOR: Terry Gilliam

I have this theory.  I've probably talked about this theory in another blog entry, but I wish that this theory wasn't true.  I think that movies that people once considered classics are starting to disappear to time.  Now, maybe this has been true for all generations.  I'm convinced that The Godfather will have only been seen by a select few from Gen Z and beyond.  But the back of my brain tells me that The Fisher King was trending to be one of those modern classics only to be forgotten by the streaming era of film.  I mean, it was a poster on Van's wall in Yellowjackets.  I know I'm not the only one to have heard of this movie.

I'm convinced that my dad liked this movie.  I have no evidence of this really.  Maybe it was just something that lodged itself in my brain and stuck there.  But I know that my dad was all about Arthurian legends.  Now, despite the title of The Fisher King, this movie has little to do with Arthur and the Grail legend.  I mean, it's great that Terry Gilliam is the guy to revisit this storyline in a different form.  But I have to say...I didn't really dig it.  I mean, I didn't dislike it by any stretch of the imagination.  I just thought that this was one of those movies that really encapsualted more of the style of an era than the actual substance of a film.  There's something here that could have been something.  Again, I'm probably in the minority when it comes to criticism of this film.  I think that a lot of people laud this film as something truly special.  I mean, Criterion released it.  (Okay, that's not a tried and true guarantee for a great film, but it also grants the movie a degree of prestige.) But the biggest complaint is that I feel like Terry Gilliam can't get out of his own way.  I remember thinking at one point that Terry Gilliam was one of those untouchable directors. I mean, I loved Time Bandits and I kinda sorta remember loving 12 Monkeys.  But he was just someone who was one of those auteurs.  

He is an auteur.  But he's an auteur who really likes his comfort zone.  This seems lazy on my part, but I can't help but see a little Tim Burton in Terry Gilliam.  (Again, Tim Burton probably owes more to Terry Gilliam than Terry Gilliam to Tim Burton, but I'm splitting hairs.) Like I said, there's a story here.  In fact, it's a story I really like.  I love a redemption tale.  Jack is the Scrooge character.  He has sold his soul and his humanity for ratings and those actions have cost people lives.  When he has nothing left, he has to find what made him a good person by making amends with one of his victims.  That's a great story. But do you know what that story also has to be?  It's my favorite word and I feel like a hack for throwing it around once again.  This is a story that has to be vulnerable.  This story has moments of being vulnerable.  But Terry Gilliam is so obsessed with his early '90s visual feast that he forgets that this is fundamentally a personal and small story.

What do I mean?  Most of this movie is shot in Dutch angles.  Every shot in this is gothic.  I get it.  He's making a movie about an Arthurian legend, so everything kind of has to have a parallel to castles and stuff like that.  But this story doesn't really work in a heightened reality.  Oh, I really love Brazil!  I should have mentioned that earlier.  Brazil works because its bananas story works with its bananas setting.  But Gilliam is trying to overlay Brazil over the real world.  No one really felt human in this movie.  It's funny because this story is probably the most grounded Terry Gilliam story that I can think of.  Even though it deals with Parry seeing a demonic red knight haunting him through the film, we get that it is the halluicination of a deeply traumatized human being.  That's a small story.  From Parry's perspective, it has the weight of ages.  But from the perspective of the audience, we weep for a man who lost his wife and struggles to differentiate between the mundane and the grandiose.

There's a flaw in the movie that is sweet.  Again, this comes from Gilliam's clinginess to his comfort zone.  Gilliam loves to deal with mental illness in his films.  I already cited 12 Monkeys, so I think you know where I'm going with this while I write.  Gilliam likes talking about mental illness, but never in a grounded or nuanced way.  While I can't deny that mental illness can be loud and in your face, all of mental illness isn't loud.  Yet, this is a movie that stuffs the story with the mentally ill and they are all louder than their peers.  Somehow, each mentally ill character shouts louder and lives more troubled than the last.  We're in the early '90s, so we have to be a little understanding of the cultural climate of the time. The homeless cabaret singer is a progressive (for the time character) who we kind of are supposed to laugh at.  He's touching and fun, but we're meant to laugh as he takes over Lydia's office in drag.  That's what's a little bit harsh about the movie as a whole.  We're meant to laugh at mental illness or absolutely fear it.  There's little room for the mental illness that the real world encounters on a regular basis.

And then there's Lydia.  My favorite part of the film is the relationship between Parry and Lydia.  It's a little unfair.  The movie has given us a character that does not act with any degree of verisimilitude.  Lydia is a mess.  She's a bit too much of a mess. (I don't like the wipes over the Chinese restaurant, by the way.) I do like that she's a mess.  It is touching that Parry falls in love with a woman not for her perfection, but for the way she is too human.  I like that he falls in love with her for not being able to eat with chopsticks or the fact that she reads trashy novels.  That's touching. That's real.  But when we meet Lydia in real life, she is too much of a character.  In fact, I'll go as far as to say that I don't like the real Lydia because she's borderline rude.  (The movie addresses it, I know.) 

But I also feel the need to stand up for Lydia as well.  Lydia is being manipulated all through this movie.  She is on a date with mentally unstable homeless man.  I don't know what Jack's long-term plan was for Lydia and Parry, but he certainly tricked her into going on a date with him.  They go on one date and Lydia does this great speech about how Parry is going to hurt her.  Parry gets this great retort about how he loves her and I love that. But he also confesses that he's been watching her and the events of the past 48 hours, where Jack tries to get her to go on a date with Parry, is actually kind of a lie.  He tells her that he's been stalking her.  Now, I know that this is the '90s, but I think we're actually a little late for considering that truly romantic.  Everything that she knows about Parry is a lie and that's not even a yellow flag.  Sure, the movie establishes that Lydia has a pretty low bar for men because no one has ever shown interest in her.  But that seems to be a bit extreme.

When Parry is then nearly killed in the park, Lydia somehow makes the connection that Parry was homeless and that she should wait for him to stop being catatonic.  Now, part of me honestly loves that.  But a lot of the movie is also still waiting to solve the grail problem of the film.  After all, a good chunk of the movie has nothing to do with Lydia.  A lot of the movie is Parry trying to convince Jack to steal the Holy Grail.  Now, I'm going to be the English teacher again and say that Lydia represents the Grail for Parry.  After all, the real Grail is not in this movie anyway.  It's an award that a random dude got for being in a play.  But Parry's big quest is to get over his craziness and to make Lydia find him; Jack's quest is to get the trophy for Parry.  But both stories kind of get watered down because I don't believe that Parry would put his Grail quest on hold for Jack's sweepstakes hijinks.

I also want to talk about Jack and Anne.  I love Jack and Anne.  If you are looking for the most grounded thing that this movie has to say, it isn't with Jack deciding to get past his phobia of mental illness.  It's the idea that Anne just kind of puts up with Jack's garbage.  I'm not happy that she does, but it is good storytelling to see the lengths that Anne goes through, despite the fact that her entire character is based around the notion of not putting up with people's shannanigans.  There's one beat that I'm still coming to grips with.  Jack helps Parry get Lydia.  From Jack's perspective, he completed his quest.  He put Parry on the right track towards happily ever after. After all, Parry is Lydia's problem.  He pulls his head out of his butt, calls his agent, and gets his job back.  (I realistically don't see that happening, but I'm not a celebrity.  Who am I to say how these things work?) It seems like everything is coming up Jack and Anne until Jack decides to dump Anne in that moment.  There's this conscious decision to start Jack back at Square One now that Parry went on a date and I don't really understand that character at that moment.  The easy read on the scene is that he knows that Anne is part of his old life and he wants to forget every part of that life, but he still is riding the high of doing a good deed for someone else.  I don't understand that intense switch.  I can get dumping her and then leaving, having done the most painful thing in his life.  But he seems so cold in that moment that it doesn't really match with where the character arc was going.

Gosh, the script on this movie is so good that the execution just bothers me so.  I wish I was the guy saying I rediscovered an early '90s modern classic.  But despite my love for Terry Gilliam, I don't love the final product of The Fisher King.  Elements of the movie are absolute moments of genius.  But the final product kind of explains why this movie might be forgotten to history.