Terry Gilliam’s urban fairytale is funny and moving, with Jeff Bridges and Mercedes Ruehl keeping its sentiment honest. The plotting wanders, but the actors and the flashes of romance make the detours worth taking.
Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King is funny, touching and untidy enough to try our patience, but we recommend it warmly. It puts Jack and Parry into a Manhattan where a search for the Holy Grail can coexist with loneliness and hardship, and expects us to take both seriously. Richard LaGravenese’s screenplay gives Gilliam a redemption story with plenty of opportunities for comedy. The trouble comes when it keeps finding another complication after a scene has already made its point.
Jeff Bridges gives the film a steadiness that matters as much as Robin Williams’s energy. As Jack, Bridges can hold our interest without making every moment an appeal for affection; Williams’s Parry is more exposed, with the risk that the performance will become exhausting. What makes their scenes work is the sense that neither man can simply tidy the other one’s life. The actors make that dependence convincing even when the route taken by the story looks arbitrary.
Mercedes Ruehl, as Anne, gives the film some needed resistance to its own sentiment. There is enough force in her performance to stop tenderness becoming a foregone conclusion, and her scenes deserve the time that some of the plot’s complications receive. Amanda Plummer’s Lydia is equally important to the romance: her awkwardness feels individual rather than supplied to make a scene endearingly odd. Both performances repay the space Gilliam gives them.
The waltz in Grand Central Station is the clearest example of the film getting its scale right. Commuters begin dancing, and an impersonal public space becomes somewhere people might notice one another. We were moved by it, because Gilliam makes that small wish visible without stopping to explain it. Roger Pratt’s cinematography makes the collective movement the attraction; the people hold our attention throughout the spectacle. Mel Bourne’s production design keeps the city feeling lived in, which matters when Gilliam asks it to turn into a dance floor.
George Fenton’s score supports the romance, although we sometimes wanted less encouragement to feel what the performances had already made clear. That is a problem with Gilliam’s approach more broadly: a good scene can be asked to do too much. Humour, fear and tenderness arrive so close together that there is little time to recover between them. The shifts are often exciting, but the quieter exchanges would benefit from a little more breathing room.
Lesley Walker’s editing gives individual sequences a shape that the film as a whole lacks. At 138 minutes, the wandering becomes a substantial demand on our goodwill. LaGravenese’s plotting is the chief weakness: too many turns seem arranged to keep the search going, and the later passages can feel mechanically steered. Several strong scenes would have survived a shorter, firmer version, with more attention left over for the people in them.
Even so, this is a redemption drama that earns much of its warmth through the actors and the jokes. Gilliam’s willingness to make the fairytale frightening keeps it from becoming merely consoling, and the performances remain worth following when the plot falters. The humour also makes room for people who are allowed to be difficult company. Give it an evening when a few detours will not spoil the pleasure of spending time with these actors.
