Review: The Fisher King

I was born the day to the year that Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King was released in thetaters. Which honestly, explains a lot.



The film is basically King Arthur mythology with a modern-day twist. A shock-jock named Jack Lucas(a wonderfully subdued Jeff Bridges) goes so overboard with a mentally unstable caller, the caller goes into a restaurant and kills a bunch of people. Depressed, Lucas  turns to alcoholism, throws away his career and is on the verge of suicide...until he meets Perry(Robin Williams), a mysterious crazy man with a dark past who acquires Bridges to go on an epic quest in search for the "Holy Grail".

While not Gilliam's best movie(his masterpiece clearly being Brazil) it does show how good of a director Gilliam is and he takes someone's script(he usually writes his own movies) that could've easily been turned into a gimmicky romantic-comedy and turns it into something truly special and cinematic. While some could argue Gilliam's films can get discombobulated, thus get crushed by the weight of their own ambition, here he gives us a film that's fairly restrained by its own world yet never goes loses Gilliam's trademarked mad-genius from his lush visuals to his quirky cynicism. It makes you wish he could compromise with the Hollywood studio system more often.

 Going back to being born on the same day of this movie, it is rather fitting seeing how much Fisher King is personally connected to my life, from somehow connecting Pinocchio into this story, to having a big loveletter to a big city(though I'm an LA boy) to the central theme of the movie which is "What does is mean to be 'crazy'?" This movie coincidentally feels tailor-made for me at times, even describing a lot of my feelings and experiences on screen.

The Fisher King is currently streaming on Netflix right now, so in our world where everything has to be streamed there's pretty much no excuse to not being able to access it, and with the world still reeling in Robin Wiliam's unfortunate death at the relatively young age of 63 yesterday, now is as good a time as ever to check this one out(I fortunately managed to rewatch it just a few weeks ago).