MOVIE REVIEW : Finding Funky Magic in Rot : Gilliam’s Gritty N.Y. Fairy Tale

The Manhattan of “The Fisher King,” starring Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges, is a monumentally grungy den of inequity peopled with scurvy ragamuffins and soulsick slicksters. It’s a vision of New York as medieval fortress, and that’s appropriate to the story, which is a modern variant on the mythological search for the Holy Grail. The vision is also appropriate to the way many people experience New York--as a forbidding fleshpot under glowering skies.

As a panorama of an infernal cityscape, “The Fisher King,” directed by Terry Gilliam and scripted by Richard LaGravenese, is almost as startling as Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner.” But Scott was interested in the futuristic voodoo of urban blight.

Gilliam has a funkier approach to rot. His tone may be condemnatory but, as he also demonstrated in such previous visionscapes as “Brazil” and “The Adventures of Baron von Munchausen,” he’s turned on by the awfulness. Gilliam’s imagination is primarily visual, and the garbagey massiveness of Manhattan gets his juices flowing. What makes this movie (at selected theaters) different from his others is that he’s also trying to give it a human core.

Jack Lucas (Bridges) is New York’s leading shock deejay. With his hooded glower and his earring and his shiny hair tied back into a ponytail, Jack has the requisite pirate hippie look. His sodden, taunting rant on the airwaves is like the city’s soulsick mantra. When he goads a disturbed caller to lay waste to a yuppie bar, the weirdo takes him literally, and the publicity surrounding the carnage catapults Jack into disheveled, guilt-ridden obscurity.

Three years later, staggering through New York’s lower depths, he’s rescued from muggers by a troupe of ragtag wastrels led by the half-mad Parry (Williams), who tends to Jack in his boiler-room hideaway.

The friendship between Jack and Parry is freighted with mythological baggage, not just Arthurian mythology but “Don Quixote” and just about every other odd-couple buddy twosome in literature and film. Parry, as we soon discover, was a medieval history professor who was in the yuppie bar the night of the shooting and flipped out when he saw his wife gunned down. He’s been living in his own wild twilight zone ever since, complete with thundering fantasies of a knight on horseback bearing down on him in Central Park, and a mousy damsel, Lydia (Amanda Plummer), whom he worships from afar. Jack rouses himself out of his self-hating stupor long enough to recognize a shot at redemption: He schemes to bring Parry and Lydia together.

The subtext of “The Fisher King” (rated R for language and violence) is that love conquers all. It’s the simple human gestures in this film that pull the deranged back from the brink. But the Chaplinesque sentimentality doesn’t connect with the film’s full-blown weirdness or its spasms of knockabout lunacy. (Michael Jeter’s nutso transvestite crooner belting out numbers from “Gypsy” is a show-stopper.) Gilliam is too tickled by grand-scale grunge to allow the sweetness of these lovers to predominate. He doesn’t press home any possibilities for transcendence because he’s too busy cavorting in the rubble. “The Fisher King” is all about magic, but maybe you need a more simplified soul than Gilliam’s to really do it up right. He throws so much into the stew that it loses its savor.

What Robin Williams does in this film is, in a sense, perfect for a Terry Gilliam movie, and that’s what’s wrong with it. He’s like an actor’s equivalent to Gilliam: a flibbertigibbet cyclone of demented inspiration. Williams does so much with his character that he’s bafflingly off-putting; you want to get away from all this “inspiration.”

He’s much better when he’s not playing at fever pitch, as in his scenes with Lydia. During their courtship, Parry and Lydia have a tender sympathy for each other’s sorrows; they have a silly, moony entrancement together, like a pair of Shakespearean lovers.

Jeff Bridges, like Jack Nicholson, is at his best when he’s playing a species of heel, and as long as Jack is on the edge of nastiness, Bridges soars. He’s so convincingly cynical in his early scenes that his ache for redemption seems a bit phony, as if Jack had been engineered to provide a happy ending that he didn’t really believe in. Bridges fits so comfortably into this peoplescape of urban despair that he never quite earns his angel’s wings.

The tension in his performance seems more in line with realistic modern conflicts, and so it’s fortunate that he’s paired with Mercedes Ruehl, who plays the woman he shacks up with and can’t get himself to love. Ruehl’s Anne is a full-scale creation. Her brassy directness has a beseeching urgency; she knows she’s probably wasting her life on this guy but she also knows there’s more to him than his callous heel act. The scene where they tear at each other and break apart is first-rate. For a brief moment, the film’s mythic folderol burns away and you’re left staring at two people in harrowing and recognizable pain.

When Jack tells Parry, “It’s easy being nuts. Try being me ,” he’s speaking of the agony of trying to survive the modern maelstrom without going crazy. And clearly, in his Grail-like quest, he’s intended as a heroic stand-in for all of us. But Gilliam doesn’t give enough weight to Jack’s fight for sanity in “The Fisher King.” He respects Jack, but he’s in love with his crazies. Their misery, which is the misery we see every day in the faces of the homeless, is turned into a carnival. The Holy Grail in this film turns out to be the old cuckooland sentimentality that the poor and the suffering and the insane are more alive, more visionary than we are.

‘The Fisher King’

Jeff Bridges: Jack Lucas

Robin Williams: Parry

Amanda Plummer: Lydia

Mercedes Ruehl: Anne

A TriStar release of a Hill/Obst production. Director Terry Gilliam. Producer Debra Hill, Linda Obst. Screenplay by Richard LaGravenese. Cinematographer Roger Pratt. Editor Lesley Walker. Costumes Beatrice Pasztor. Music George Fenton. Production design Mel Bourne. Art director P. Michael Johnston. Set design Jason R. Weil, Rick Heinrichs. Set decorator Kevin McCarthy, Joseph L. Bird. Running time: 2 hours, 17 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (language and violence).