The Fisher King (1991): Robin Williams’s best role in Terry Gilliam’s most accessible film

Even now, at a point when the image of the buccaneering, risk-taking, out-on-a-limb male genius auteur is at a fairly low ebb, it feels taboo to say you like one of those artists’ more commercial works. Terry Gilliam, a man more buccaneering, risk-taking etc. etc. than most, made The Fisher King for a very pragmatic reason. His previous film, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, had gone massively over-budget and flopped at the box office. Gilliam detected, probably rightly, a kind of delayed payback in the gleeful response to his failure. Before Munchausen he’d declared war on Universal Pictures over the final cut of Brazil and won; such people have to be taught who’s boss sooner or later. Regardless, he needed to prove he could make a simple, accessible, and most importantly profitable film within the studio system, and The Fisher King was the vehicle he chose.

That makes it sound like a PR campaign, or a bargaining chip, rather than a masterpiece, so how come the resulting film is in the Criterion Collection? As the movie started, and Roger Pratt’s camera took a typically Gilliamesque winding path down from the heavens to Jeff Bridges’s ranting shock-jock, I suddenly understood why. The Fisher King is phenomenally good, a wholly absorbing film that works as well for a professor of comparative mythology as it does to your gran. No, it doesn’t have the romantic appeal of Brazil or Munchausen or The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, those films that Gilliam completed despite the apparent disapproval of a vengeful god. It doesn’t need it. If ever anyone needed proof that there is real heart under the chaotic clutter of Gilliam’s aesthetic, here it is.

It helps that, in many ways, Gilliam’s style isn’t that diluted. “Accessible Gilliam”, it turns out, means taking his cinema out of its usual environs of the fairytale past or the steampunk future and plonking it down in contemporary New York. It helps that Manhattan might be the nearest thing in reality to Brazil‘s bric-a-brac dystopia; the sudden appearance of a castle with turrets in the middle of a modern city feels like pure whimsy, but it’s actually a real place the crew discovered. All these story-book trimmings aren’t just visual excess. At its heart, The Fisher King is an audacious collision between two apparently incompatible worlds: the brutal inequalities of NYC at the end of the yuppie era, and the high European romance of the Grail mythos.

Gilliam had, of course, previously dealt with the mythology around King Arthur and the Holy Grail during his time with Monty Python. That was pure mockery, albeit enriched by Gilliam’s efforts to capture an authentically grimy Medieval atmosphere. The Fisher King is the opposite – an attempt to restore, rather than puncture, the mystique of the Grail Quest. It begins at a point of pure deflation, with Bridges’s Jack Lucas rendered suicidal after his radio call-in show becomes the motivation for a spree killer. Then, in the lowest place imaginable, he finds something magical in the form of Robin Williams’s homeless knight-errant Parry.

The Fisher King revolves around four superlative performances: Bridges, as ever, is effortlessly natural and charming as a man who’d be a hateful sleazebag in the hands of any other actor. Mercedes Ruehl is little short of a force of nature as Jack’s girlfriend Anne, completely credible as someone who could easily handle this guy at both his narcissistic highs and his suicidal lows. The other female lead, Lydia, skirts being underwritten but is both endearing and surprising when incarnated by Amanda Plummer. Most of all, there is Williams as Parry, a role that might just be his best ever performance. When remembering Williams as a movie star, it’s natural to think back to Aladdin or Good Morning Vietnam; when making the case for him as a great actor it’s equally understandable to point at his disciplined, schtick-free serious turns in films like Insomnia and One Hour Photo. It’s Parry, though, who contains the entire spectrum of what he was capable of. His manic moments have all the relentless forward motion of his best comedy, yet when confronting his feelings for Lydia he’s as vulnerable and quiet as he ever got. It shouldn’t work – it should feel like someone showing off, taking endless runs up and down a piano keyboard without ever arriving at a melody. Yet somehow Williams holds it together.

As does Gilliam. Reflecting on Ruehl’s Oscar-winning performance in the bonus features, Gilliam wonders if she benefitted from having the space to deliver something that would be over-the-top in another context, a little extra headroom earned by the grandiosity of the film’s themes and visuals. The same could easily be said for Williams. There are monologues here which he delivers with as much motormouth panache as his early stand-up, but in the world of The Fisher King it makes perfect sense that a traumatised homeless man would talk like this. And this, ultimately, is why the film works. Toned-down Gilliam is still pretty full-beam in comparison to most directors; few other low-key NY comedy-dramas find the room for a giant fire-breathing spectral knight. Yet this consistently heightened, capital-R Romantic vision is why its treatment of homelessness never tips into the mawkish or offensive, and it’s also why this for-hire work fits so well into Gilliam’s overall filmography. The Fisher King‘s core duo, the wounded man-out-of-time and the motor-mouthed crusader, is an archetype he would return to in his next film, Twelve Monkeys; you can also see it as an early sketch of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Maybe people today won’t be watching The Fisher King through this kind of auteurist lens, but that’s fine. As noted above, whatever level you approach it on, it will meet you there.

Extras are revealing even when they’re not: Gilliam’s insistence in the supplementary interviews that he barely needed to touch Richard LaGravenese’s script is backed up by the deleted scenes, which contain some fun extra Williams riffs and character beats but nothing which would have transformed the film. LaGravenese, Gilliam, Bridges, Ruehl, Williams, Plummer and producer Lynda Obst are interviewed at length with insightful and amusing results. Gilliam and Williams both admit to finding Bridges almost intimidatingly handsome, and after LaGravenese, Gilliam, Ruehl and Bridges discuss taking inspiration from the original Arthurian myth cycle Amanda Plummer cheerfully admits she didn’t research any of it, she just played the role. And boy, did she. The origins and challenges of the film’s famous mass dance number in Grand Central Station are discussed at length, as is the equally notorious Central Park nude scene. Williams, quite rightly, gets the last word on that one in what’s now a hugely moving archive interview from 2006. Keep watching to the end of the credits on that feature for a surprise almost as charming as the film itself.

Graham’s Archive – The Fisher King (1991)