THE FISHER KING

THE FISHER KING

Spoiler Alert

Although I really enjoyed him as a comedian, Robin Williams was also one of my favorite dramatic actors.  He was probably most well-known for serious roles in Good Morning Vietnam and Goodwill Hunting, but my favorite was The Fisher King.  The movie centers around two strangers, Jack (Jeff Bridges) and Parry (Robin Williams) who meet in the aftermath of a tragedy that derailed both of their lives.  With the song “Hit the Road Jack” playing in the background, the story opens on Jack Lucas, a sarcastic radio talk show host in New York City who encourages people to call in with their problems so he can verbally tear them to shreds.  One night Jack gets a call from Edwin Malnick (Christian Clemson), one of his regulars, who whines about a girl that turned him down in a swanky bar named Babbits.  Jack tells Edwin to stay away from the establishment because the patrons are “evil and must be stopped.”  Edwin says ok and Jack hangs up to resume his show.  Later at home in the plush penthouse apartment that he shares with his entitled girlfriend, Jack soaks in the tub and gives himself a facial as he rehearses the line “Well, forgive me” for an upcoming role he will be playing in a TV sitcom.  Just as he walks into the living room a news anchorman comes on the television to announce that a man by the name of Edwin Malnick shot up Babbits bar, killing seven of the patrons and himself.  


Three years later, Jack is living in a small poorly furnished apartment above a video store that he shares with his girlfriend, Anne, the store’s owner.  Unlike the twenty-something debutant he lived with when he was successful, Anne is a thirty-something working class woman with bouffant hair who wears skin-tight skirts and low-cut blouses purchased from a discount store and speaks with a strong Brooklyn accent.  No matter how tough she talks, though, Anne is a warm-hearted person who shows unconditional love for her man by letting him work in the store, insulting the customers with snarky comments, when he is in the mood,  and tolerating his drunken benders when he is not.  One evening when Jack is in a particularly ugly frame of mind, they have a fight and he takes off, roaming the streets while guzzling from the liquor bottle he carries in a brown paper bag. 

He stops in front of a high-rise apartment building to observe the interaction between a rich man (John Ottavino) and his son (Brian Michaels).  When the man turns his back to take care of something, the boy walks up to Jack and gives him a Pinocchio doll.  This kind act reminds Jack just what a piece of garbage he is, and he stumbles down to the river, ties concrete blocks to his ankles, and walks toward the water’s edge.   Just as he is getting ready to jump, two punks (Jayce Bartok and Dan Futterman) armed with baseball bats and cans of gasoline hop out of a hotrod.  One of them cuts Jack with a knife, and when he falls to the ground, they drench him with the gas and attempt to set him afire.  Suddenly a ragged man dressed as a Knight of the Templar attacks the punks and chases them away.  


After they are gone, the stranger, who introduces himself as Parry, helps Jack up, his face displaying a fleeting flash of recognition.  He leads Jack to the boiler room of an apartment building where he explains that the little fat people only he can see have told him that Jack is the one person who can fulfill a quest.  He shows Jack a picture of an architect named Langdon Carmichael in a magazine and points to a golden cup in the background, calling it the holy grail.  Jack tells Parry that the little people are mistaken, gives him the doll, and leaves.  On the way out, he runs into the building’s superintendent (Al Fann who played the janitor in Return to Horror High), who has the small but important role of being Parry’s historian.  He tells Jack that Parry is really Henry Sagan, a former college instructor whose wife was killed in the shooting at Babbits.  He goes on to explain that the event caused Henry to be confined in mental hospital for a year, and upon discharge, he came back to the apartment building calling himself Parry.  The superintendent pulls out the few remnants that are left of Henry’s life and lets Jack look through them.  Among the things are a picture of Henry’s effortlessly beautiful wife and a manuscript he had written entitled “The Fisher King”.  Jack goes home and plays his tape from the night of the shooting and tries to come up with a way to get his life back on track.


From this point on, the plot focuses on the relationship that develops between the two men with Jack striving to regain his former status by helping Parry, and Parry struggling to fulfill his quest by gaining Jack’s help.  The result is that Parry drags Jack through the city, introducing him to sectors the former radio star has never visited.  They start at the  office building where Lydia, the dowdy awkward woman with whom Parry is smitten, works; next they go to the architect’s mansion, a castle-like structure that Parry can’t enter because the Red Knight, a terrifying presence that rides a mighty steed and carries burning lances, won’t allow it; from there they run to Central Park and save a gay homeless cabaret singer who has been run down by horses by carrying him to the emergency room of the public hospital; finally, they end the night on a grassy knoll where Parry teaches Jack about cloud busting (moving clouds with the mind) and tells him the story of The Fisher King.   

The tale is about a prince who is forced to spend a night alone in the forest.  Suddenly he sees a vision of the holy grail engulfed in flames and hears a voice say, “You shall be keeper of the grail so that it may heal the hearts of men”.  Misunderstanding, the boy becomes convinced that he is invincible, reaches into the fire for the chalice, and is horribly burned.  As the prince grows into a man the injury worsens until, by the time he is king, the agony prevents him from feeling love and he begins to die. Desperate, the king offers a rich reward to anyone that can bring him the holy grail to heal his wound, but even his wisest and bravest subjects fail.  One day a young lad stumbles upon the palace and finds the king alone pleading for something to drink.  The boy takes a vessel from the bedside, fills it with water, and hands it to the king.  As the king drinks, he begins to recover and sees that the vessel is the holy grail.  When he asks the boy how he was able to find the one thing that no one else could, the lad explains that he doesn’t know anything about a grail.  His simply wanted to quench the king’s thirst.  

As Parry finishes the story, he starts having flashbacks of his life as Henry and the Red Knight appears, causing him to become upset.  To distract him, Jack, who believes that easing the man’s suffering is the only way to save himself, tells Parry to ask Lydia for a date.  Parry says that he doesn’t know how, so Jack comes up with a plan.   


First, he determines the name of the company Lydia works for, then calls her and announces that she has won a free membership at Anne’s video store; suspicious, she hangs up.  Not to be dissuaded, Jack hires the cabaret singer to go to her office and deliver a singing telegram complete with directions to the store.  While they are waiting for Lydia to show up, Jack and Anne coach Parry on how to approach her, and when she arrives, they send him to help her find a movie.  In contrast to the quiet demeanor she displays in crowds, however, Lydia is very assertive, and refuses to settle for anything other than a musical starring Ethel Merman, something that the store does not carry.  Feeling gipped, she prepares to leave but then notices Anne’s nails; Lydia asks Anne if she is a manicurist, and, if so, how much she charges.  Jack sees this as a perfect opportunity to get Parry and Lydia together and prompts Anne to say that she does, indeed, preform manicures and is available that night.  Mollified, Lydia agrees to come back at seven.  


Later that evening, Anne works on Lydia’s nails and plies her with liquor while in another part of the apartment, Jack gives Parry a facial and dresses him in a suit that is way too big.  After some uncomfortable chatter the four of them agree to go to dinner at Lydia’s favorite Chinese restaurant where she helps herself to most of the food, slurps the lo mein, and burps aloud while the other three look on.  Although Jack and Anne find Lydia’s manners atrocious, Parry finds them endearing, and he serenades her with a rendition of Groucho Marx’s signature song, “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”.  At the end of the evening, the pairs split up and as Jack and Anne congratulate themselves on having done a good deed, Parry walks Lydia home and tells her all the things he knows and loves about her.  If the movie took place today, Lydia probably would accuse him of stalking and call the cops, but the movie takes place in 1991, so, instead, she is deeply touched.  She kisses Parry goodnight, tells him he can call her, and goes inside.  All seems to have ended well until Parry begins to have flashbacks of the shooting and the Red Knight appears.  Filled with terror, he runs to the pier where the same two punks that tried to burn Jack, attack him.  


Back at Anne’s apartment, Jack, believing that he has atoned for his past misdeeds, calls his agent.  When she hears him on the phone, Anne concludes that Jack’s bad days are over and starts talking about moving to a new place, maybe even getting married and having kids.  Instead of agreeing, he  hems and haws, and finally admits that he needs time alone to figure things out.  While they are in the midst of breaking up, the emergency room calls to inform Jack of Parry’s injuries.  He and Anne rush to the hospital where the doctor explains that, although he is seriously injured, Parry’s real problem is in his mind and that he will have to be readmitted to the mental facility for care.   


A few months later, Jack has resumed his radio talk show and found a suitable girlfriend with a wealthy father who can help his career.  One day, as he is going to a meeting about a role in a new television show, he sees policemen harassing the homeless cabaret singer in front of the office building.  When the singer calls to him for help, Jack walks past, ignoring the man.  The show’s developers explain that the plot is about the homeless with characters that are wacky and wise.  Their heartlessness causes Jack to look at himself and realize that he has become the same terrible person he was before; he rushes out of the meeting to look for the cabaret singer, but the man has vanished.  Plagued by guilt, Jack goes to the hospital looking for absolution.  To his surprise, Lydia is there.  He waits for her to leave, then sneaks in to tell the catatonic Parry that getting the grail isn’t his responsibility and walks away.   


Later than night, Jack goes to Langdon Carmichael’s castle wearing Parry’s Knight of the Templar get-up.  Rather than just knocking on the door and asking the architect if he can borrow the chalice, Jack scales the building and breaks in through a window.  He tiptoes down a flight of stairs to the room where the cup is kept and takes it from the shelf, noting that it is merely a cheap trophy that the architect received in 1932 for his work.  As he starts to leave, Jack hears the sound of a glass dropping to the floor.  Turning around, he sees the architect lying in a chair, unconscious from an overdose of sleeping pills.  Rather than going out the way he came in, Jack uses the front door, intentionally setting off the burglar alarm.  He returns to the hospital, places the trophy in Parry’s hands, and falls asleep.  During the night, Parry wakes up and tells Jack that he had a dream about a beautiful girl.  He asks if it’s okay for him to finally acknowledge that he misses her and falls back to sleep.  When Lydia comes to visit the next day, she finds Parry awake and out of bed.  Delighted to see her, he asks whether she’s still his girl because, even though Henry will always love his wife, this isn’t Henry.  This is Parry, and his heart belongs to Lydia.  Jack, whose better self has also been reawakened by Parry’s quest, returns to the video store, and good woman that she is, Anne takes him back.
     

I particularly enjoyed this movie because it addressed social problems like homelessness, poverty, and perceptions of the mentally ill while posing questions regarding our fascination with beauty, the responsibility of the “haves” for the “have nots”, and law enforcement’s treatment of people of all colors and gender identifications.  Even Anne and Parry, who are unarguably the best characters in the film, display prejudices against those they consider beneath them.  When Jack brings Parry home, Anne shows her mistrust of the strange man by complaining that he is trying to start a conversation with her; and while Jack and Parry watch Lydia at a kiosk buy a romance novel, Parry makes a critical comment about the woman he loves reading trash.


A second topic in the film that interested me was the use of fire.  The punks tried to burn Jack, the Red Knight’s lances spewed flames, and the Fisher King’s wound was caused when he reached for a blazing chalice.  Granted some of these images recalled the sparks that emanated from Edwin’s gun, but Henry’s story was written before the shooting took place.  The best explanation I could come up with was that fire, like so many other images present in the movie, represented the dangers of modern-day America.  In contrast, I thought the grail implied, if not organized religion, at least a call for understanding and kindness toward others, a mantra that appealed to me on many levels.  (See Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for more information on the holy grail.)


A third subject that intrigued me was the purpose of the story “The Fisher King” within the boundaries of the film.  My original interpretation was that Parry was the king because Jack risked his life to get the chalice for him.  But after considering the details more carefully and re-examining the roles of both the King, who was injured due to his own arrogance, and the Boy whose only motive was to relieve a stranger’s suffering, I changed my mind.  While Parry’s wound resulted from what happened on the night of the shooting, he was injured through no fault of his own. There was no arrogance there.  It was Jack, who lost everything because he casually suggested that innocent people sitting in a bar and minding their own business should be destroyed, that was arrogant.  And while the grail helped Parry to move forward, it literally saved Jack’s sense of humanity.


This led me to wonder if Parry insisted that Jack perform the quest because he knew Jack was broken and that a selfless act was the only thing that could heal him.  It was clear early on that Parry knew who Jack was.  He recognized him on sight, and when Jack gave Parry his name, Parry said he already knew it.  Parry was empathetic.  He easily grasped the effect that Jack’s sarcasm had on people and quickly realized by the way Jack treated Anne, that he didn’t appreciate her.  Parry was also observant. He followed Lydia every day at lunch time, watched her eat Chinese dumplings, buy romance novels, and enjoy a piece of hard candy before going back to the office.  He even had a candlelit alter stocked with packets of soy sauce and cellophane wrapped jaw breakers dedicated to her in the boiler room.  Thus, given Parry’s propensity for studying people, it was not a stretch to think that he also shadowed Jack, following him into the city’s dark garbage-strewn alleys and providing him with protection, just like he did the night they met.


The final image that captured my attention was the Pinocchio doll.  Pinocchio was a tale about a wooden puppet that desperately wanted to become a real boy and, at the beginning of the movie, a real boy gives the toy to Jack.  Then, in the boiler room, Jack hands it to Parry with whom it remains until the end of the film when the two friends are lying naked in Central Park looking at the midnight sky with the doll lying between them.  So, what did this mean?  It suggested to me that the boy gifted the Pinocchio to Jack to help him.  Jack could have gotten better if he, in turn, had obtained the grail for Parry, but instead, he handed Parry the toy.  Parry, however, was unable to help himself, so Jack’s gift was useless.  It wasn’t until after the men aided each other that they understood what the doll was, a symbol of their salvation.     


That’s all for now.  I am not in the mood to turn this into a novella.  Unlike some of the other films I have discussed, The Fisher King is easy to find.  It can be rented on several streaming services or, at least for now, can be watched for free on Pluto and Crackle.  I will be back in two weeks to share the movie Reign Over Me which stars Adam Sandler as a man whose wife was killed on 9/11 when her plane was hijacked and crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.  In the meantime, you can check out The Fisher King or enjoy something else…even lots of something elses.