Released in 1991, this film from director Terry Gilliam and screenwriter Richard LaGravanese was a modern day Grail Quest that fused New York romantic comedy with timeless fantasy. Gilliam, who came to the project after the trouble-plagued "Brazil" and "The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen," somewhat jokingly referred to it as his “sell-out” picture, but all sell-outs should be so uncompromising. "The Fisher King is a film about trauma, but it's clothed in a theatrical buoyancy, so as to obscure—and flee from—reality’s petrifying disorder. Rarely in large Hollywood films is a chiasmus of tragedy and comedy so successfully drawn; "The Fisher King" has hilarity and romance clinging for survival through the scoriae of aching hopelessness.
The film starts by dancing on the shoulders of urban apathy and cynicism. Shock-jock Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges) rules the airwaves by mocking listeners and exploiting the dirty laundry of celebrities. His world is cold, controlled and beautifully sterile. His studio voice is a far-reaching, disembodied entity—appropriate, considering Jack's disengagement from other human beings glimpsed in taxis surrounding his limo or struggling in their hapless lives down on the street far below his luxurious apartment. He dances to “I Got the Power” while running the tagline for a sitcom that will finally give him a face to match the voice: “Forgive me!” But while Jack strives for disengagement and cultivates an apathetic tone, he's about to find out that his words and thoughts still affect people, and not for the better. Unbeknownst to Jack, a lonely listener took his mockery of yuppies as inbred subhumans to heart ("It's us or them") and shot up a trendy bar, killing several bystanders before committing suicide. Jack crumbles while hearing the news.
Three years later, Jack's withdrawn from the world. He squats at the apartment of his unsatisfied girlfriend Anne (Mercedes Ruehl), a video store owner, drowning in alcohol while not-quite-tolerating the questions of Anne’s customers. “I hate desperate people,” he says. Anne corrects him, “You hate people.” At night, he irritably watches the middle-brow sitcom he was supposed to star in, its mediocrity supposedly comforting him while in fact throwing wood on a self-loathing furnace.
It’s here where we get an acute sense of the numbing, brain-lacerating condition of a depressive. “I don’t know why you torture yourself. You’re too self-absorbed, Jack,” Anne tells him. “Divert yourself. Read a book.” Of course, as anyone with symptoms of depression knows, it’s not that easy. Jack responds by saying injurious things to Anne (“Suicidal paranoiacs will say anything to get laid”) and drunkenly wanders outside, intending to kill himself. As in grail mythology, he wanders through a wasteland of unexamined lives and squalor, a brief glimmer of spontaneous compassion—a child sneaking away from his millionaire dad and gifting Jack with a Pinocchio doll—canceled out by Jack’s Nietzschean contemplations with his new inanimate friend. He’s one of the bungled and botched, close to greatness but never able to get there. Jack holds the doll close and whispers, “Do you ever get the feeling you’re being punished for your sins?” Far beyond any religious sentiment, it’s a line that—in my experience—closely articulates the cage of depression’s nadir, where one is stretched out to a breaking point, unable to seek grace because there’s nothing (God, human, material) to grant it. It’s insinuated that Jack’s decline was self-inflicted, and that he voluntarily walked away from success because of the shooting. He has a conscience and sensitivity to suffering, and he hates himself. The only way is down, and as Jack gets ready to jump into the Hudson his face is one of pleasurable self-obliterating release.
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