Critics reviews

The fusion of maudlin Richard LaGravenese and mad Terry Gilliam produced a rare alchemical miracle. Gilliam could flex his fabulist muscles with abandon, staying pinioned to a popular notion of cinematic reality thanks to LaGravenese's cuddly homeless redemption story.

Gilliam would soon pivot to darker, more transgressive films in America, before ultimately landing in an exile from which we still hope he'll return. But for once, his recurring theme—an idealized battle of fantasy over reality—found a natural if uneasy partner rather than an antagonist in the Hollywood machine. His filmography is all the richer and more joyful for it.

The Fisher King may be Gilliam's most straightforward film, but Parry is a fantastical creation, even if you omit his Grail fixation and his visions of a wrathful red knight. He is an idealized rendering of the less visible, more complicated mental illness that affected Williams and affects countless other people. In the real world, there are no talismans that can cure catatonia and no desperate romances that can simply fix holes in one's psyche.

[Gilliam] created a film that took the textures of contemporary New York and gave them a magical spin, inventively balancing LaGravenese's interest in character and dramatic realism with his own dark visual sensibility and penchant for social satire. With this film, Gilliam's aesthetic entered the real world. And he has never made another movie like it.

A film like The Fisher King represents prestige Hollywood at its best, but also its worst; it's an ungainly 137-minute feature that wishes to be pre-knighted as a misunderstood cult classic rather than be perceived, in the least, as a neutered product of the system that cultivated it.

The film's midsection is an improbably charming portrait of two spastics in love, so unfussy and sincere that those qualities bleed into the previously nondescript relationship between Jack and Anne, whose break-up scene is the most emotionally truthful few minutes of Gilliam's career... It doesn't last, and the whole third act -- Perry's catatonia, Jack's backslide into tooldom, the Grail break-in -- fizzles, mostly because Plummer and Ruehl are both absent until the final few minutes.

The Fisher King is ostensibly a contemporary fairy tale, though its love story I find to be its most uniquely felt aspect. The film's characters are realistically motivated (notably, this is the first of Gilliam's efforts not to include a Monty Python alum) and the feelings and impulses attributed to them are inherently human; this is an unforeseen and innovative aspect in Gilliam's career.

The plot may be wayward, but Gilliam's film is mostly funny and exhilarating: at once nightmarish and deeply romantic, a partly fantastic study in loneliness, lunacy, despair and violence, it's also spectacularly visual (despite the atypical dearth of special effects). Moreover, Gilliam allows his actors unprecedented space, and they respond admirably (Bridges and Plummer especially). Scary, touching, often hilarious, this modern fairytale is surprisingly enchanting.

Terry Gilliam's elephantine yet breezy The Fisher King is a gripping new-age extravaganza, visually splendid and adroitly paced. But some gross conceptual cheating--presumably the fallout of commercial ambitions--makes the film a little hard to swallow.

It's a literate, visually attractive romantic comedy about the difficulty, and necessity, of healing the pains of the past. It's a tenderly optimistic yet unsentimental tall tale, a "Hollywood film" in the best sense of the term – it's a fantasy that makes you feel good without leaving you coated in glucose. If this is what Gilliam means by selling out, selling out should happen a lot more often.