The Fisher King

The chain is tight from the first sentence. Jack Lucas, on the air, tells a caller what he wants to hear about the people in an expensive bar, and everything after is the bill for that sentence: the collapse, the bridge, the youths with the petrol, Parry’s rescue, the revelation that Parry was a professor of medieval history whose wife died in that bar. The legend Parry tells in the park is the key to the plot and is paid in the ending, and every major element is paid. What holds the axis below the bar of 7.5 is the middle: the coaching of the courtship repeats its point, the return to Jack’s career takes a quarter hour to show a relapse, and the theft from the castle is extended as caper.

Score: 7.4 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. Words spoken carelessly into a microphone kill; the man who spoke them cannot buy his way out of the guilt; he is redeemed only by an act of care that serves no purpose of his own, for a man the violence broke. Beneath it lies a second truth, held firmly and given in image as fully as in words: madness can be a shelter that grief builds, and the Red Knight, a figure of fire and horse pursuing Parry through Central Park, is the memory of the bar given a body. The city of 1991 is shown with its homeless under the bridges and in the stations. The limits stand: the homeless are partly made picturesque, a chorus of wise fools, and the cure at the end is a story’s rather than an illness’s.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The film rises often, in both kinds. The dreadful: the Red Knight, a horseman trailing flame and red cloth through the trees of Central Park at night in pursuit of a man on foot, is one of the strongest images of terror in an American film of its years; the attack under the bridge is lit by fire. The ecstatic: the commuters of Grand Central at rush hour turn into a waltz around Parry as he watches Lydia cross the concourse, the crowd and the light becoming his love; and at the end two naked men lie on a lawn in Central Park at night, cloud-busting, as fireworks rise over the city. Parry’s telling of the legend on the grass is a quieter height. Held below the eights: the rises are linked by long comic business, and the score underlines some of them.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The myth is built, not evoked, and it bears the plot. The legend Parry tells, the king wounded by his own vision of the Grail and healed when a fool who does not know him gives him water from the cup he could not see, is the structure of the film, and it runs both ways. Jack is the wounded king, made sick by pride and power, and Parry the fool who saves him under the bridge. Then the roles turn at the midpoint: Parry is the wounded king, and Jack, an unbeliever, becomes the fool who brings him the cup from a billionaire’s castle in Manhattan. The particular stays particular: a video store in a side street, a boiler room, a dumpling dinner, a townhouse with a turret. Held below the gate because the myth is told aloud and named in the title, and the dime-store cup lightens the descent.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The inheritance is double: the Hollywood redemption drama and buddy picture of the late 1980s, with a star comic in a part made for him, and Gilliam’s own fantasy, in which the imagination stands against an administered world, from Time Bandits to Brazil (8.5) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. The turn is real. The film sets the fantasy inside a present-day American city, with no fantastic world to house it, so that the vision becomes a symptom: the Red Knight a hallucination of trauma, the Grail quest a widower’s delusion. A studio romance carrying an Arthurian legend, mass murder, homelessness and psychosis in one body was an unusual wager. What holds it: after the losses of Munchausen its maker took a studio’s script and stars, and the shape of the cynic redeemed by a holy fool and a loving woman was a proven path.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The two halves of the city are given in two styles: Jack’s world of glass, the high apartment and the studio, in cold, ordered compositions; Parry’s world of stone, under bridges and in basements, in wide lenses, tilted frames and low angles that bend the city toward fable. The intrusions of the Red Knight break the realism as the trauma breaks Parry’s mind, so that the viewer sees what he sees and cannot dismiss it. The waltz in Grand Central gives his love as he perceives it. The doubled structure is the instrument of the film’s knowledge that the healer and the healed exchange places. Held below eight because in long stretches the form is container, a romantic comedy shot as such, and the caper borrows the fantastic look without its inward need.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Thirty-five years are the evidence. The film has held a steady place in criticism of its director and of Robin Williams, in writing on the Grail legend in modern film, and in discussion of how cinema pictures homelessness and mental illness. Its questions stay open: whether it romanticises madness and poverty or discloses them; whether Jack’s redemption is earned or bestowed; what the cup is, a cure, a symbol accepted by a mind ready to wake, or a fairy tale’s device; whether its sympathy for the poor is answered by a plot that ends with the rich man saved and the poor man healed by a theft. On return, the visual rhymes between the two worlds and the two kings reward attention. What holds the figure: much of the return is to performance and set piece, and the questions cluster near the surface the film itself names.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The field is the cinema of the 1990s. Intrinsic force: the film showed that a studio picture could carry a medieval legend as its structure without costume, that a director of fantasy could set the fantastic inside a contemporary city as a symptom, and it gave a pattern for the star comedian in a part that holds clowning and grief at once. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Williams’s later dramatic and comic work and a line of urban fables of damaged men in the 1990s are often placed near it, and it fixed LaGravenese as a writer and showed its director able to work inside the American system. What holds this, the lowest axis, is that the film did not reorganise what American film could do; its descendants share a tone more than a form.

Score: 7.2 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across thirty-five years. Form: the film survives as released, in its one version, and later restorations for home release repair rather than revise. Presence has been continuous: television, every home format, a release in a prestige collection, revival screenings, and steady attention through the reputations of its director and its star, which grew again after Williams’s death; it is steady presence rather than the widest a film of its years can have. Fabric: the surface is charged. The shock jock, the bar of young money and the video store fix the film to New York at the turn of the 1990s, and its picture of the homeless belongs to its moment. The form is whole and the presence unbroken; the dated surface is what holds the figure where it is.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The making bears weight in the set pieces. Roger Pratt’s wide lenses and tilted frames give Parry’s city its distortion without leaving the real streets; Mel Bourne’s design makes a boiler room into a chapel of junk and a townhouse into a castle; the Red Knight, staged with horse, fire and streaming cloth in real parkland at night, is achieved by physical means and keeps its terror. The acting carries much. Jeff Bridges plays a man unpleasant from first to last and still loved; Mercedes Ruehl gives Anne a warmth and an anger the script only outlines, and her scenes are among the film’s strongest; Amanda Plummer’s Lydia, clumsy at dinner and suddenly direct at her door, is exact. The charges stand: Williams’s manic passages run past what a scene needs, the cutting lets the middle and the caper go long, and the score presses.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the shooting in the bar, seen on a television screen, and Parry naked on a lawn in Central Park at night, talking to the clouds. One law governs both: the wound and the cure are of one kind, an act done to a stranger. Jack’s words to a stranger caused the first; Parry’s care for a stranger under the bridge, and then Jack’s for Parry, the second. The courtship, the singing telegram and the dumpling dinner obey it, each a small act for someone else that the film treats as grace, and the law holds across a wide range: massacre, madness, romantic comedy, myth. What gives is strain: the caper at the castle, with its alarm and its comic climb, belongs to a lighter film; the billionaire’s overdose, saved by the theft, is convenient; and Williams’s routines at times break the register a scene has set.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Judged on what a film of about 137 minutes holds, and the orders are many. Consciousness: Jack’s guilt from inside, and Parry’s madness through the film’s own eye. The mass media, as the instrument of the first crime and of Jack’s relapse. The city in its classes, from the high apartment and the castle on the Upper East Side to the boiler room, the bridge and the station. Love, in two couples held against each other; grief, mental illness and the care of the mad; the sacred, in the legend made structure. Labour enters as Lydia’s office and Anne’s video store. All are integrated by one chain of cause from the microphone to the cup. What holds the figure: the law and the state hardly enter, history stands outside, the homeless are held mostly as figures in Parry’s world, and the world is held through two men.

Score: 7.3 / 10