Review: "The Fisher King" (1991)

This isn't a review so much as an appreciation. The Fisher King is one of those movies that, when you see it, stays with you. You never forget it. It might not be your favorite movie (it's not mine) but it touches something in your soul and remains there.

This movie is about forgiveness. It's an NYC fable. 

It concerns a loud mouth radio shock jock named Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges) who unintentionally inspires one of his callers into deadly violence. We catch up with Jack a couple of years later -- he's lost everything, drunk all the time, living above a video store (remember those?) with his guidette girlfriend (Mercedes Reuhl, who won an Oscar for her performance). Stumbling around the city drunk one night, Jack is attacked by a group of thugs and then saved by an eccentric homeless man named Perry (the late, always brilliant Robin Williams). Perry's mission in life is find the Holy Grail which apparently resides in the home of an Upper East Side billionaire. Jack soon finds out that Perry used to be a college professor but his life was destroyed when his wife was killed in front of him -- by the very same caller Jack inspired. Guilt ridden, clearly seeing that Perry is mentally ill because of him, Jack resolves to help him -- first, to help attract a young lady he has a crush on; second, to retrieve the "Holy Grail." The rest of this movie is a hilarious, often very moving story of friendship, forgiveness, going beyond one's selfishness, and discovering something much more valuable than the Holy Grail -- true human connection.

I remember seeing this movie when I was in high school and enjoying it. But I think, frankly, that I was too young to fully understand or appreciate it -- I hadn't had enough life experience, enough setbacks, enough heartbreak, enough friends. Since then, in the last 28 years since it came out, I've had lots, and this movie has a resonance for me that it didn't back then.

If you haven't seen The Fisher King, you should -- it might just change your life.

And, yes, this is an NYC story -- but it's view of the city from both high and low, it's concentration on the least and most ordinary among us, the surreal world of NYC that director Terry Gilliam creates, is like no other NYC you will see in any other movie. 

See this movie with someone you love -- or someone you want to love better. 

By the way, this movie and his later appearance in The Big Lebowski confirms that nobody in the movies looks cooler lounging around the house in bathrobe than Jeff Bridges.