Possibly The Most Successful Grail Quest In Film History

I’m not sure what I was expecting going into The Fisher King. I’d been wanting to watch it since reading at least a couple of career retrospectives on Robin Williams after his suicide last August. They’d mentioned it as an impressive performance, but I’m not sure I’d even heard of it before. I found it in a store the same weekend I found Mother Aegypt, so I grabbed it. Like I said, being in a house with 15 other people was taking a psychic toll, I needed some small success.

                                                              

I wasn’t expecting Jeff Bridges to look so much like Val Kilmer, that’s for sure. It’s probably that he’s mostly clean-shaven, and a bit thinner in the face.  Also, he had long hair almost entirely slicked back, except for one long strand hanging down in his face, which reminded me of Kilmer in, I don’t know, probably Heat or something. Anyway, Bridges plays Jack, a loudmouth radio personality who falls apart after one of his regular callers takes him too seriously and goes on a shooting spree. Three years on, he’s working in a video store, and is in a relationship with Anne (Mercedes Ruehl), the owner, but mostly he’s in a relationship with booze and self-pity. He opts to end it all by jumping in the river with cinder blocks around his feet, only to be interrupted by a couple of yuppie punks who don’t like homeless bums cluttering up their fine neighborhoods. Even though he’s standing among refuse under a bridge at the time. So they’re going to douse him in gasoline and immolate him. Because burning corpses are so pleasant. I didn’t say they were smart yuppies.

It’s at this point Williams enters, behaving like a knight, who is also homeless. He says his name is Parry, and Jack was sent to help him on his quest, which is to recover the Holy Grail from some wealthy guy’s library. The little cherubs told him so. Jack wants nothing to do with it, until he learns he is somewhat responsible for Parry’s fate, at which point he struggles between genuine compassion for the guy, and a desire to find the quickest, easiest route to assuage his guilt, and move on with life. When offering him money fails to solve the moral crisis, and Jack balks at robbery, he instead turns to helping Parry with matters of the heart. I wasn’t sure what to feel there. It’s a little creepy, Parry following Lydia (Amanda Plummer) around and knowing so much about her, and Jack and Anne helping maneuver the two together. But once they are together, they hit it off so well. They both seem to enjoy each other’s company, and Parry doesn’t really try to hide his personality, so I don’t know. I’m going to lean toward sweet.

So it is an interesting performance for Williams. The manic humor and strange tangents are there, and they are a defense mechanism, but it’s not one he’s in control of. His brain made a choice to forget, to go this route instead, but it’s not one he entirely accepts. So it’s mostly sad, because I can’t decide whether he’s better off remembering and trying to deal with the trauma, or if he shouldn’t just do the best he can to forge a happy life as he is now. The presence of the Red Knight argues in favor of the former, I think, because he has to deal with it before he could even try for the latter.

I did like that Jack doesn’t seem to experience any huge personality shift for most of the movie. He’s an egotistical ass at the start of the film, always looking to have more, to date someone he thinks is befitting his stature. And as soon as he feels ready to return to radio, he goes right back to being that guy. It doesn’t fit as well, because he is changed – his radio personality seems less incendiary – but he’s still looking for the quickest, easiest way to discharge any obligations he has. If the easiest solution is to ignore the problem, he’ll jump at it. If he can drag his feet enough the other person gets fed up and leaves, that works, too. Anything so he can have a clear conscience by telling himself he didn’t do anything wrong. They ended things, not him. A lot of his actions are motivated by the fact this increasingly stops working, and he still feels guilty, and takes action out of frustration, and impatience. Why must people make connections with him, so that he feels obligated to help them, or at least not cause them pain, he wails? Maybe that hits a little too close to home.

I also got the feeling Terry Gilliam had a few problems with the social safety net for the mentally ill. It’s not exactly an encouraging picture, the staff being vastly outnumbered, and often indifferent. There was this one shot, when Jack is screaming at an unconscious Parry, and all the other patients are just looking on. There was one with his hand pressed to the side of his head, and he was bleeding. I think he did it to himself, out of a compulsion, maybe, but there was no orderly or nurse, no one treating it or trying to see what was wrong, which seems kind of frightening. I’m already spooked of the idea of ending up in a mental institution just by other people deciding I ought to be there, whether I should be or not. This film did not ease my concerns about what that would be like.