movie review the fisher king

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The fisher king.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 2 Reviews
• Kids Say 2 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Intense Gilliam drama has strong violence, mature themes.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Fisher King , the 1991 Terry Gilliam epic, addresses mental health issues brought on by violent trauma -- in this case, the gory gunshot murder of a man's wife in front of his eyes. The man has frightening hallucinations of a giant knight on horseback coming after him, and is…

Why Age 16+?

A woman's brains are blown onto her horrified husband's face when she&#3

"F--k," "s--t," "bitch," "t--ties," &quo

A woman describes former sexual partners as boring. She kisses her boyfriend but

Adults smoke cigarettes and marijuana and drink a lot of whiskey.

Any Positive Content?

Do the best you can with what you've got. Feeling guilty about one's act

Jack is a selfish, callous jerk who feels sorry for himself because a madman was

Violence & Scariness

A woman's brains are blown onto her horrified husband's face when she's shot by a madman in a club. Vigilantes who hate the homeless try to beat up the drunken Jack and pour gasoline over him. The same guys stab Perry and put him in the hospital. Perry runs from a terrifying hallucination of a threatening knight on horseback.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

"F--k," "s--t," "bitch," "t--ties," "a--hole," "scum," "penis."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A woman describes former sexual partners as boring. She kisses her boyfriend but he doesn't want to go further. Perry looks at a woman's ample cleavage. A man is shown naked at night in Central Park; his genitals are briefly glimpsed but mostly obscured by the dark.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Do the best you can with what you've got. Feeling guilty about one's actions means nothing unless you act to redeem yourself.

Positive Role Models

Jack is a selfish, callous jerk who feels sorry for himself because a madman was spurred to a murderous rampage by Jack's words. Jack believes he can redeem himself by throwing money at a street person whose life was upended by the tragic event. Then he believes redemption will come if he finds the street person a girlfriend. Then he believes he will be redeemed if he steals the "Holy Grail" for the street person. When his fortunes improve, he leaves friends from the past behind and reverts to his callous self. Perry is a cheerful, hallucinatory psychotic with a heart of gold.

Parents need to know that The Fisher King , the 1991 Terry Gilliam epic, addresses mental health issues brought on by violent trauma -- in this case, the gory gunshot murder of a man's wife in front of his eyes. The man has frightening hallucinations of a giant knight on horseback coming after him, and is violently attacked by street vigilantes. He's also seen naked at night in Central Park. His genitals are briefly glimpsed but mostly obscured by the dark. Expect to hear "f--k," "s--t," "bitch," and other curse words. Adults smoke cigarettes and marijuana and drink a lot of whiskey. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (2)
• Kids say (2)

Based on 2 parent reviews

One of Terry Gilliam's best

Two stars they gave solid movies like this, "american history x" and "unbreakable" two stars, and trash like "twilight" and "after earth" get three, what's the story.

The casual words of a misanthropic radio shock jock ( Jeff Bridges ) unknowingly spur an unstable listener to kill innocent people in a night club in THE FISHER KING. One victim is the loving wife of a history professor ( Robin Williams ) named Perry, and after her brains are blown into his face, he goes into a catatonic state and then delusional psychosis, including visions of little people and a threatening knight on horseback. His mission is to steal what he thinks is the actual Holy Grail from a zillionaire's home. The radio host blames himself for the massacre and quits, losing his wealth and position. Living above a video store with its owner ( Mercedes Ruehl ), he is engaged in a monumental pity party that includes consumption of lots of whiskey and wallowing in misanthropy. Salvation arrives in the form of Perry, the widower now living mostly on the street. Jack tries to be generous but also distant as Perry gradually breaks down Jack's walls.

Is It Any Good?

While performances by Jeff Bridges and Robin Williams are compelling and much of the script is both ambitious and intelligent, overall The Fisher King leaves one disappointed. Director Gilliam (a former member of the Monty Python comedy group) continues his penchant for grand themes and visual complexity, but the disappearance of Perry's psychosis strains credulity. And over and over, the movie indicates that Jack isn't a good guy, even after he seems to have reformed. For that reason, when he yet again attains a degree of humanity at the end, it just doesn't seem believable. Even more disturbing, for more than two hours, this movie seems headed for an unhappy ending, yet it culminates with a tied-in-a-bow happy Hollywood finish.

Most puzzling of all is the mythical story that gives the film its title. The Fisher King, dying and self-pitying, is given water by a kind court fool. Instead of the kind act logically resulting in the fool being rewarded, the king, who was just lying there feeling sorry for himself, suddenly achieves what he has always wanted. That sounds unrealistically Hollywood, too.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how The Fisher King indicates that Jack is not the nicest person. Does Jack seem sympathetic?

The movie seems to indicate that mental health comes and goes. Do you believe that Perry is back to normal by the end of the film?

The movie gives reasons for every act of violence it shows. The men who beat up Perry and Jack, thinking they're bums, seem to want to purge their neighborhood of unsightly homeless people. The man who shoots up a nightclub believes that the club's patrons look down on him. Do you think having a "reason" can ever justify violence? Why, or why not?

Movie Details

• In theaters : July 27, 1991
• On DVD or streaming : December 7, 2010
• Cast : Robin Williams , Jeff Bridges , Mercedes Ruehl
• Director : Terry Gilliam
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Image Entertainment
• Genre : Drama
• Run time : 138 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : For language and violence
• Last updated : June 8, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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The Fisher King Reviews

Not everyone in the world will be susceptible enough to fall under its surreal magic, but I've seen it three times, and each time I like it even more. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jul 27, 2023

weaves a uniquely intriguing web, balancing emotional realism with highly stylized artifice in a way that Gilliam has been largely unable to reproduce since

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 19, 2023

There are two terrific performances in The Fisher King, and neither belong to Robin Williams.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 16, 2023

"The Fisher King" is an unexpected powerhouse of a film. Given the material the script navigates, one would not expect such a tale of horrible grief to reach such heights of hilarity and still stick the landing.

Full Review | Apr 11, 2023

It's a tenderly optimistic yet unsentimental tall tale, a Hollywood film in the best sense of the term.

Full Review | Dec 7, 2022

A humane, empathetic, and very funny movie about a couple of down-on-their-luck guys, one of whom was a full-on street person. (30th anniversary)

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 1, 2021

Stuffed to the point of emotional, narrative, and logical imbalance, there are as many moments of beauty as inelegance. But Gilliam's ambitious odd-couple outfit, based on a script from Richard LaGravenese, revels in its own unique flavoring.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 27, 2020

The relationship between Jack and Perry feels lived in ... Yet, the movie's relationship to the themes of mental illness, mass shooting and homelessness are clumsier.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 30, 2018

At times loud and brash, at others introvert and delicate, Gilliam has crafted something rather special in this rightfully-beloved film.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Apr 11, 2018

Gilliam is not a director who does things by halves, and The Fisher King is as funny and emotive as the best of his work. Indeed, it's the heightened humanity of this film that resonates the strongest.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 26, 2017

The search for the Holy Grail reaches peak insanity in this wild, redemptive ride through two men's interconnected lives.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 15, 2017

Intense '90s drama has gory violence, mature themes.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 9, 2016

[Numbers] among the director's masterpieces.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jul 8, 2015

Gilliam exaggerates the romanticism, the grotesquerie, and the personal pain that runs through LaGravenese's story, creating a reality where the more preposterous turns make sense.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 22, 2015

Full Review | Original Score: C | Sep 7, 2011

It's sometimes hard to follow the action, but you have a bit of fun trying to figure it all out.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 15, 2011

The Fisher King's problems begin with Richard LaGravenese's screenplay and are amplified by Gilliam's showy direction and an unbearably fey performance by Robin Williams.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 29, 2010

Visually impressive, frequently pretentious, and extremely fluid as narrative (the 137 minutes sail by effortlessly), this mythic comedy-drama presents Gilliam as half seer, half snake-oil salesman and defies you to sort out which is which.

Full Review | Jan 29, 2010

As always, Williams turns romance into slush, but Gilliam reigns it in with his mad and magical design.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 29, 2010

Although there are moments when the mixture of comedy, fantasy and drama don't come off, this is still an original, touching movie that is well worth the price of a ticket.

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

The Fisher King

A former radio DJ, suicidally despondent because of a terrible mistake he made, finds redemption in helping a deranged homeless man who was an unwitting victim of that mistake. A former radio DJ, suicidally despondent because of a terrible mistake he made, finds redemption in helping a deranged homeless man who was an unwitting victim of that mistake. A former radio DJ, suicidally despondent because of a terrible mistake he made, finds redemption in helping a deranged homeless man who was an unwitting victim of that mistake.

• Terry Gilliam
• Richard LaGravenese
• Jeff Bridges
• Robin Williams
• Adam Bryant
• 236 User reviews
• 97 Critic reviews
• 67 Metascore
• 14 wins & 39 nominations total

Top cast 55

• Radio Engineer

• (as David Pierce)

• TV Anchorman
• News Reporter

• Anne Napolitano

• Crazed Video Customer

• Sitcom Actor Ben Starr

• Sitcom Wife
• Bum at Hotel
• Father at Hotel

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia For the "waltzing commuter" scene in Grand Central station, the main hall of the terminal was shut down for the shoot from 8pm until the first commuter trains arrived at 5:30 am the next morning. Lighting effects outside of the large terminal windows made it seem to be 5:00 in the evening the entire night, and over 400 extras waltzed around the mirror-ball topped Information Booth again and again throughout the night. Now, on New Year's, an orchestra plays there and people waltz for real.
• Goofs Parry has a bruise on his forehead for most of the movie. When he is in the hospital, it and his other injuries are gone. In the last scene, in Central Park, the bruise is back.

Parry : Did you ever hear the story of the Fisher King?

Jack Lucas : No.

Parry : It begins with the king as a boy, having to spend the night alone in the forest, to prove his courage so he can become king. Now, while he's spending the night alone, he is visited by a sacred vision. Out of the fire appears the Holy Grail, symbol of God's divine grace. And a voice said to the boy, "You shall be keeper of the Grail, so that it may heal the hearts of men." But the boy was blinded by greater visions of a life filled with power, and glory, and beauty. And in this state of radical amazement, he felt for a brief moment not like a boy, but invincible - like God... so he reached into the fire to take the Grail, and the Grail vanished, leaving him with his hand in the fire, to be terribly wounded. Now as this boy grew older, his wound grew deeper. Until one day, life for him lost its reason. He had no faith in any man - not even himself. He couldn't love, or feel loved. He was sick with experience. He began to die. One day, a fool wandered into the castle, and found the king alone. And being a fool, he was simple-minded; he didn't see a king. He only saw a man alone, and in pain. And he asked the king, "What ails you, friend?" The king replied, "I'm thirsty - I need some water to cool my throat." So the fool took a cup from beside his bed, filled it with water, and handed it to the king. As the king began to drink, he realized his wound was healed! He looked in his hands, and there was the Holy Grail, that which he sought all of his life. And he turned to the fool and said with amazement, "How can you find that which my brightest and bravest could not?" And the fool replied, "I don't know. I only knew that you were thirsty."

• Connections Featured in Siskel & Ebert: Dogfight/Late for Dinner/Rambling Rose/Blood & Concrete (1991)
• Soundtracks How About You? Written by Ralph Freed & Burton Lane Produced by Ray Cooper and George Fenton Whistled & Sung by Harry Nilsson

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 17 minutes
• Dolby Stereo
• Dolby Digital

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The Fisher King Review

02 Oct 1991

137 minutes

Fisher King, The

The camera swoops down from the ceiling to concentrate on the head of chain-smoking, pony-tailed Jack Lucas (Bridges) as he hurls frantic abuse at a caller. He's a mega-successful Manhattan "shock DJ" and in line for his own TV sitcom - until one night his world falls apart when one frustrated listener to his show opens fire in a bar, killing several people.

Three years on, Jack's life has dramatically changed, he's working in a video store with girlfriend (Ruehl) and drinking enough to end up in a sodden heap one night, only to be rescued from a bunch of thugs by Parry (Williams), a homeless knight-in-dirty-clothes with a fascination for the Holy Grail (this is a Terry Gilliam film, after all). In return for saving him, Parry wants Jack to retrieve the Holy Grail for him (it's in the hands of a Fifth Avenue businessman), and although Jack clearly believes Parry is crazy, the two form an uneasy alliance, with Jack helping Parry in his other quest - to finally meet the woman he has been worshipping each day from afar, Lydia (Plummer). But nothing is ever easy, and Parry is haunted by a threatening vision of the Red Knight, a fire-breathing monster that chases him, spectacularly galloping through Central Park.

A mixture of fantasy and everyday melodrama, The Fisher King is certainly, in comparison with Baron Munchausen or Brazil, one of Gilliam's more conventional movies, but it is peppered with some extraordinarily vivid set pieces - a scene in Grand Central Station where Parry spots Lydia and all the commuters suddenly begin to waltz around her is amazing to look at - and boasts four-star performances from both Bridges and Ruehl. Although there are moments when the mixture of comedy, fantasy and drama don't come off - when Williams occasionally reverts to his comedy routine his character becomes less believable - this is still an original, touching movie that is well worth the price of a ticket.

The Criterion Collection

• My Collection

Terry Gilliam

The Fisher King

A fairy tale grounded in poignant reality, Terry Gilliam’s magnificent, Manhattan-set The Fisher King features Jeff Bridges and Robin Williams in two of their most brilliant roles. Bridges plays a former radio shock jock reconstructing his life after a scandal, and Williams a homeless man on a quest for the Holy Grail—which he believes to be hidden somewhere on the Upper East Side. Unknowingly linked by their pasts, the two men aid each other on a fanciful journey toward their own humanity. This singular American odyssey features a witty script by Richard LaGravenese, evocative cinematography by Roger Pratt, and superb supporting performances by Amanda Plummer and an Oscar-winning Mercedes Ruehl, all harnessed by Gilliam into a compassionate, funny modern-day myth.

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• United States
• 138 minutes

DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, approved by director Terry Gilliam, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
• One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
• Audio commentary featuring Gilliam
• Interviews with Gilliam, producer Lynda Obst, screenwriter Richard LaGravenese, and actors Jeff Bridges, Amanda Plummer, and Mercedes Ruehl
• Interviews with artists Keith Greco and Vincent Jefferds on the creation of the film’s Red Knight
• Interview from 2006 with actor Robin Williams
• Video essay featuring Bridges’s on-set photographs
• Footage from 1991 of Bridges training as a radio personality with acting coach Stephen W. Bridgewater
• Deleted scenes, with audio commentary by Gilliam
• Costume tests
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by critic Bilge Ebiri Cover by LA2

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Performances

Michael’s Turn: Michael Jeter in The Fisher King

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Retrieving the Grail: Robin Williams and “The Fisher King”

The Fisher King

Robin Williams ’ recent death opens eyes to the imprisoning weight of mental illness and how it hurts those so capable of bringing us joy. The actor’s passing can’t help but provoke a deep and somber reflection on his work, with several regards for “Oh Captain, My Captain” from “ Dead Poets Society ,” the man-child motif from “ Hook ” to “ Jack ,” and the tough-but-tender award-winning turn from “ Good Will Hunting .” But no Williams film can hit harder—or be so fully consoling in such heartbreaking circumstances—than “ The Fisher King .” 

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.

Jack’s suicidal intimacy is interrupted by two privileged, baseball bat-wielding thugs who mistake him for one of the vagrants they believe taints their neighborhood. They beat him and douse him in gasoline, but before they can light a match, an anachronistic and mad knight errant (Williams) comes to the rescue with his similarly filthy posse of hobos. Jack spends the night with the self-professed knight, “Parry” (a variation on Parzival/Parsifal/Perceval, the world-redeeming fool from grail lore), who explains he’s in the employment of God and trying to retrieve the Holy Grail—which, so the cuddly fat people hallucinated by Parry tell him, is located on the bookshelf of an Upper East Side billionaire’s house. Parry admits that he can’t get the Grail on his own, insisting that the little people sent Jack to help. Overwhelmed and sobered up, Jack thanks Parry and gets the hell out.

But Jack discovers how his fate is tied to his rescuer. It turns out that “Parry” was originally Henry Sagan, a professor specializing in grail literature whose life was disrupted when his beloved wife was killed in front of him—the killer being the Jack Lucas Show caller. Henry lost his mind and remained silent until, Quixote-like, he reinvented himself as a vestige of his literary obsessions. The crisis of interaction has made Jack only more self-absorbed. He examines newspaper clippings of his past and listens to his old shows, on the precipice of weeping in self-disgust. “I really feel cursed…I feel like I’m a magnet, but I attract shit.” Reassurances from Anne are blind to his depressive predicament. “I just wish there was a way I could pay the fine and go home.”

He tries “paying the fine,” literally, giving Parry all the cash he has on him, which Parry accepts graciously before offering to take Jack out to lunch (and then handing the money off to another homeless man, whom Parry believes needs the money more). It’s not that easy. Jack needs to work out his mental wounds with Parry, participating in medieval make-believe by plotting to retrieve the Grail, and then assisting Parry in winning the affections of a shy romance book editor, Lydia ( Amanda Plummer )—a tricky venture, given that she doesn’t know Parry (you could say he’s stalking her) and she’s very uptight and guarded.

“The Fisher King” smoothly rides through the foibles of romantic fortuity, as Anne and Jack, along with some of Parry’s hobo chums (most memorably Michael Jeter as a cabaret singer channeling Ethel Merman ), bring the two lonely misfits together, while Anne pines for commitment from Jack. Some scenes veer in the direction of worn rom-com familiarity, such as Anne and Lydia talking about the perils of dating, or Jack cleaning up Parry to make him presentable for courtship. All looks bright: true love conquers all, Jack has the feeling of redemption and accomplishment, carrying Anne up the stairs, and Parry walks Lydia home, sweetly exposing the irrational ardor of his heart—which she accepts, touched by an unspoken but transparent kinship.

But Richard LaGravenese’s excellent screenplay complicates matters, and it hinges on Robin Williams’ performance. Parry could have simply been a clown—”Williams doing Williams,” as he did in “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “Good Morning, Vietnam,” even “Dead Poets Society”—but the character gradually simmers to a boil of bristling insecurities, terror and agonizing internalized pain. The mirthful wise-cracking energy of Parry keeps him afloat above the jagged edges of wasteland lostness and the psychological toll of coping with what he’s lost (it’s an exercise of delusion and self-reinvention to hide torment that Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio more recently pulled off—and are finally being more appreciated for—in “Shutter Island”). Early on, we see his hospitable mania interrupted as he pulls Jack out from a private and ornately decorated medieval “chapel” strewn with trinkets associated with his grail quest and amorous passion. “You can’t be in there,” he says gravely before explaining his calling as a knight, as if he were denying an outsider access to the deeper hollow of his humorous persona as the “Janitor of God.” When Jack takes leave of him, Parry’s loneliness is palpable, as he’s left to shoulder the despair without help.

The horrifying reality of his wife’s death has been resculpted into the figure of the Red Knight, a fearsome presence imposing on Parry through cinematographer Roger Pratt ’s lushly rendered beams of light, seamlessly marrying hallucination to reality and the archaic medieval to messy modern day New York. The fire blowing from the Red Knight’s helmet evokes Henry Sagan’s last memory of his wife, her head exploding before his eyes. Any trace of the past, unguarded by the projection of fantasy and madness, stokes Parry’s wound. In a flash, we see Williams’ robust good nature as a silly hobo transform to a pallor of despairing fear, and then to writhing torment, having a seizure on Fifth Avenue after Jack tries to remind Parry of who he really is.

Parry’s sweet declaration of love to Lydia would seem to be a leap forward, but as with a depression or mental trauma, outward progressive actions don’t guarantee quelling inner demons, and in fact may exacerbate them. Receiving his first kiss from Lydia, Parry peers upward at her door, his visage doubled by the window. His longing finally fulfilled, he’s drawn back in time to what happened at the restaurant three years ago. The diegetic sound goes silent, George Fenton ’s score thuds deeply, and the camera ascends away from Parry, leaving him alone, a guilty survivor in a dense city, before predatorily pushing back in. He wails in anguish, pleading to the Red Knight, as if to the obstructions within his mind, “Please let me have this!”

Parry’s hurt is an insoluble wound, the unrestrained imagination of Gilliam boldly projecting his psychological firestorm and making manifest his loss. It’s not only Williams’ darkest performance (surpassing his more on-the-nose creepy roles in “One Hour Photo” and “Insomnia,” in addition to the morose antisocial cameos in “Dead Again” and “The Secret Agent”), but also Gilliam’s most affecting and deepest turn as a filmmaker. Director and actor weave together perfect discord in madness, audaciously shifting from a moment of soul enlivening sweetness to one of crushing psychological mutilation, Parry deteriorating from the pose of confident wooer to one of hunched-over self-hatred. He screams in unintelligible and drooling fury at the memories that pursue him to the Hudson’s littered shore.

The mesh here between reality and fantasy is Gilliam at his most brazen and plaintive, the radical stylist visually plugging into the crippling condition of basic human suffering. Parry is kneeling in front of the same two thugs he saved Jack from earlier. Behind them, silhouetted, is the Red Knight. The image is a trinity of sorrows in one startling and wrenching gesture: psychological torment, modern social malignancy and the ageless, archetypal adversary. When the thugs slice open Parry’s chest, he has the same heightening of bliss Jack conveyed the moment before his suicide attempt; it’s the enrapt longing for non-being. To be finished with this unholy trinity that surrounds him—personal, social, perennial—would be a relief. This is the power of “The Fisher King,” as a film that canvases the entire wavelength of being alive, from the irrational and affirmative joy to all-too-sensible despair. “Thank you,” Parry tells his accosters and they pummel him out of consciousness.

Histrionic anguish in a performance often feels calculated to garner awards, and Williams’ “Fisher King” work may have been met with such dismissal, especially considering how he was granted an Oscar nomination when Bridges, equally worthy (and with a lot more screen time), was ignored for his more subtle efforts as the film’s straight man. Yet the throbbing concentration of extroverted mental dysfunction, caged up, safely sublimated and compartmentalized, and then having its vengeance when blown up by unseen triggers, kicks so deeply to the gut in Williams’ Parry that, long before Robin Williams committed suicide, I couldn’t help but see a real person clawing away at himself, struggling to run away from what was inside. The comfort of performative mimesis is canceled out by the visceral wallop of a strangled sufferer reaching out beyond the stage. It’s thrilling, frightening—and immeasurably sad.

The would-be rom-com happy ending has Jack as our surrogate, as he flees the grail drama to revert to his self-satisfied, apathetic successful old self, leaving Anne in the process (as we would leave the theater). But he’s compelled back to action by his survivor’s guilt, giving an angry monologue to comatose Parry that’s at nearly “Last Tango in Paris”-levels of love and anger. He re-enters the madness of fiction to recover the “Grail,” returning it to the foolish knight’s bedside. His compassion might seem for naught, but Parry rises from his sleep and remembers, “I had this dream, Jack. I was married to this beautiful woman. And you were there too.” He breathes in deeply, Jack tearfully listening. “I really miss her, Jack. Is that okay? Can I miss her now?” He thanks Jack and goes back to sleep.

The conclusion of “The Fisher King”—Jack, compassionate and with purpose, finally expresses his love to Anne, while Parry, spritely and healed, is betrothed to Lydia—embraces the kind of comedic happy ending only myths (or movies), and severe delusion, can offer. It’s a recurring Gilliam motif, as “Brazil” ended with beleaguered bureaucrat Sam Lowry reaching happiness by going insane, and “Baron Munchausen” had theatrical performers of a battered German town opening the gates to see that the Baron’s fictions somehow defeated the Turks. But while the Baron evaporated into the landscape, as if he was never there, the movie-sham of “The Fisher King” has the characters fulfilled in madness but reconciled to their real-world demons; naked Parry and Jack understanding that it’s the wind breaking the clouds apart, not their minds. Manhattan erupts in fireworks and song, and a spectacular escape through the movie house, in much the same way as a 1,000-year-old story about human decency in a wasteland offers respite from the pain of being alive.

Even if Gilliam never gets around to making his dream revision of Don Quixote, we could argue that “The Fisher King” is close enough in anyone setting out to tackle Cervantes and succeeding, with Williams’ Parry as the mad knight overwhelmed by literature and striving for reinvention. Both characters are introduced as clowns, but as Sancho dubbed Quixote “the Knight of the Sorrowful Face,” we grasp the profound sadness behind the goofy veneer. Himself no stranger to war and poverty, Cervantes comprehended the distempered mind, and his Sierra Moreno episode in the Quixote, when the mad knight empathizes with the suicidal and traumatized Cardenio, is one of the most moving in literature, a stirring acknowledgment of mental illness’ devastating power that points to the importance of listening to those afflicted. “If your misfortune were one that had all doors closed to any sort of consolation, I intended to help you weep and lament to the best of my ability, for it is still a consolation in affliction to find someone who mourns for you,” Quixote gently says to the madman in front of aghast onlookers. 

Such compassion is there between Jack and Parry in “The Fisher King,” a film at once ageless and immediate, tragic and comic. My memory of Robin Williams is that of our own generation’s Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, whose work here reached out through my own quandaries and brought me back to myself and those around me several times. We learn from Cervantes, “The Fisher King” and Robin Williams that storytelling is itself compassion, a means of suffering with others while working through the morass of our own experiences. 

And isn’t that what the Grail really is?

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The Fisher King

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

A flame-throwing red knight on horseback looms up on Manhattan’s traffic-clogged streets to chase a homeless man (Robin Williams). The image, laced with mirth and menace, is pure Terry Gilliam. In The Fisher King , Gilliam’s latest high-wire act, reality and fantasy collide just as they did in Time Bandits, Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Gilliam makes dark, brutal comedies about the need for dreams in a dismal world sucked dry by bureaucrats. He’s a master of a lost art — the grand gesture. If you’re jazzed by that, as I am, The Fisher King will grab you. If not, you’re apt to squirm.

Gilliam has always been too pushy for some people. Ever since his start in the Sixties as an animator and performer with Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Gilliam (the lone Yank in the batty British comedy troupe) has been conjuring up images of dehumanized societies that he defaces with scatological glee. As a director, Gilliam gained a serious reputation — Brazil remains the most stinging comic indictment yet of the corporate mentality — without losing his coarse vitality.

The Fisher King is a tidier, comfier, less fatalistic brand of Gilliam that betrays a drift toward the mainstream. But don’t panic. Gilliam is too mad-dog ballistic to make peace with convention for long. At its most outrageously entertaining, the film sweeps you up on waves of humor, heartbreak and ravishing romance. It also bloodies itself in Gilliam’s favorite battles: imagination versus logic, love versus lust, art versus commerce. The surprise is that he didn’t write the film. The script is the work of Richard LaGravenese, a former comedian who shares Gilliam’s passion for mythology and his sometimes-unwelcome penchant for moldy comic shtick.

Gilliams plays Parry, a modern Percivale who fancies himself and his fellow street people as chivalrous knights in pursuit of the Holy Grail. Parry thinks he’s spotted it in a magazine photo. It sits in the library of the Fifth Avenue mansion of billionaire Langdon Carmichael, played by the film’s production designer, Mel Bourne, who deserves accolades for transforming New York into Gilliam’s magic kingdom. In truth, Parry the fool is a tragic figure, a former professor of medieval history who has escaped into a dream world rather than face the memory of his wife’s violent death. The red knight is the manifestation of that horror.

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The improbable instrument of Parry’s deliverance is Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges), the king of the radio shock jocks. Bridges, a solid actor who can slip into blandness, seems juiced by playing this arrogant bastard; he’s rarely been better. Lucas finds his career in ruins when a flip on-air remark about wiping out yuppie scum provokes a listener to open fire on the patrons of a chic cafe. Lucas spends the next year wallowing in boozy despair in the apartment of his wildcat girlfriend, video-store owner Anne Napolitano (Mercedes Ruehl), whose love he exploits but won’t return. Anne is trashy and uneducated (she calls the Grail “Jesus’ juice glass”), but her feelings run deep. Ruehl gives a blazing performance that cuts to the nerve, as well as the funnybone. But Anne can’t save Lucas. Mulling suicide by jumping in the East River, the bedraggled Lucas is attacked by vigilantes out to clear homeless bums from their neighborhood.

Peter Parry and three of his super bums, carrying makeshift weapons. The vigilantes are even more stunned when Parry leads his boys in a chorus of “How About You.” Williams is howlingly funny, just as he is onstage. That’s the problem. Parry was a teacher before he shut off reality, not a stand-up comic. Things get worse later when Parry gives Lucas shelter in a boiler room and does a monologue about bowel movements and how the “little people” have told him that Lucas will lead him to the Grail.

In addition to industrial-strength whimsy, the movie is burdened with clanging plot machinery. Parry tells Lucas the myth of the soul-sick Fisher King, whose spirit is reawakened by a fool. Learning that Parry’s wife was one of the victims in the restaurant shooting (the gory scene is chillingly rendered), Lucas tries to ease his guilt by giving Parry money. But romance is Parry’s obsession. The dream girl he is too shy to approach is a mousy, uncoordinated office worker named Lydia (a perfectly cast Amanda Plummer). In a breathtaking scene, lyrically shot by Roger Pratt ( Batman ), Parry follows Lydia to Grand Central Station and watches her in love-struck awe, oblivious to the fact that the rest of the rushhour crowd has broken into a waltz.

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Lucas unites Parry and his damsel by getting Parry a job in Anne’s video store and telling Lydia she’s won a free membership. In a show-stopping turn, Michael Jeter (TV’s Evening Shade ), playing a homeless cabaret singer, goes to Lydia’s office to deliver the prize, which he presents to her while belting out a number from Gypsy in drag.

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Before long, Lydia and Parry are double-dating with Anne and Lucas at a Chinese restaurant. Overcome at being in the presence of his beloved, Parry sings an inappropriate Groucho Marx song, “Lydia the Tattooed Lady.” In an inspired stroke, Williams warbles this ribald ditty as a love ballad. As the camera slowly pans back, we see Lucas and Anne, who are also caught up in Parry’s sweet fervor. In detailing the interlocking stories of these four unlikely lovers, the film finds its heart.

Gilliam, however, correctly lets harsh reality intrude. Lucas goes back to his old ways, the lovers are divided, and the red knight reappears. If the film had ended here, The Fisher King might have achieved a stabbing pathos. Instead, Lucas must try to save Parry by scaling the wall of Carmichael’s fortress and capturing the alleged Holy Grail. Though a happy ending is defensible — it’s a fable, after all — this movie doesn’t know when to stop. It’s littered with implausibly cheery anticlimaxes. But the swoops and dives into compromise don’t affect the rush you get when the film is flying high with Gilliam’s visionary inventiveness. The Fisher King restores our belief in the power of movies to transform reality, even temporarily. So what if it’s not perfect? It’s magic.

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The fisher king.

Directed by Terry Gilliam

A Modern Day Tale About The Search For Love, Sanity, Ethel Merman And The Holy Grail.

Two troubled men face their terrible destinies and events of their past as they join together on a mission to find the Holy Grail and thus to save themselves.

Robin Williams Jeff Bridges Amanda Plummer Mercedes Ruehl Michael Jeter William Jay Marshall Chris Howell Adam Bryant Paul Lombardi David Hyde Pierce Ted Ross Lara Harris Warren Olney Frazer Smith Kathy Najimy Harry Shearer Melinda Culea James Remini Mark Bowden John Ottavino Brian Michaels Jayce Bartok Dan Futterman Bradley Gregg William Preston Al Fann Stephen Bridgewater John Heffernan Richard LaGravenese Show All… Anita Dangler Mark Bringelson Johnny Paganelli Diane Robin Benjamin Redman Lisa Blades Christian Clemenson Carlos Carrasco Joe Jamrog John de Lancie Lou Hancock Caroline Cromelin Kathleen Bridget Kelly Pat Fraley Mel Bourne Kristen Connors Jack Mulcahy Tom Waits

Director Director

Terry Gilliam

Producers Producers

Debra Hill Lynda Obst Stacey Sher Tony Mark

Writer Writer

Richard LaGravenese

Casting Casting

Howard Feuer

Editor Editor

Lesley Walker

Cinematography Cinematography

Roger Pratt

Assistant Directors Asst. Directors

David McGiffert Joe Napolitano Carla Corwin

Lighting Lighting

James Plannette R. Michael De Chellis Johnny Gutierrez Ken Connors

Camera Operator Camera Operator

Craig Haagensen

Production Design Production Design

Art direction art direction.

P. Michael Johnston

Set Decoration Set Decoration

Cindy Carr Jason Weil Rick Heinrichs Kevin McCarthy Joe Bird

Special Effects Special Effects

Daniel Sudick

Title Design Title Design

Chris Allies

Stunts Stunts

Janet Brady Greg Brickman Jophery C. Brown Loyd Catlett Gilbert B. Combs Pete Corby Jeffrey J. Dashnaw Andy Duppin J.B. Getzwiller Bonnie Happy Rikke Kesten Harry Madsen Bennie Moore Julie Stone Chris Howell

Choreography Choreography

Robin Horness

Composer Composer

George Fenton

Sound Sound

Peter Pennell Bob Risk Thomas Causey Paul Carr Robert Farr Dennis Maitland II

Costume Design Costume Design

Beatrix Aruna Pasztor Keith Greco Vincent Jefferds

Makeup Makeup

Zoltan Elek Craig Lyman

Hairstyling Hairstyling

Lisa Meyers

TriStar Pictures

Releases by Date

20 sep 1991, 02 oct 1991, 11 oct 1991, 31 oct 1991, 07 nov 1991, 08 nov 1991, 15 nov 1991, 22 nov 1991, 13 jan 1992, 17 jan 1992, 07 feb 1992, 10 dec 2016, 30 dec 1992, 18 aug 2004, 25 mar 2008, 17 jul 2013, 20 oct 2021, 10 aug 2002, releases by country.

• Theatrical M
• Theatrical K-12
• Theatrical TP
• Physical VHS
• Physical DVD
• Digital VOD
• Physical Blu-Ray
• Theatrical 16
• Theatrical 15

Netherlands

• Theatrical 12
• TV 12 Net 5
• Physical 12 DVD
• Theatrical M/12
• Physical 15 Blu-ray
• Theatrical R

138 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by Joel Haver ★★★★★ 16

This movie contains my favorite scene of any movie. If you’ve seen it, it’s the one between Parry and Lydia on the sidewalk. Over the last few years I’ve revisited that scene over and over, I’ve probably watched it 50 times if not more. It incapsulates a love I have for somebody special in my life who I’ve missed dearly like nothing else. After many years I reunited with this person and we watched the movie together, they hadn’t seen it. When the scene came up, that made me think of them for years, they turned around and held me. I didn’t tell them about the scene, they just felt it too. We paused the movie and cried for an hour. I missed them so much. I love movies.

Review by SilentDawn ★★★★★ 16

The building blocks for the legend of The Fisher King revolve around the hero. No matter the problem or the issue, no matter how modern or ancient in its magnitude; the hero must go on a quest to heal the wounds of The Fisher King, one who is lost, lonely, and in need of purity to cleanse the dirt within his inflicted damages. The emotional anguish and the heartbreak is too much to bear, for when dark times rain down from the clouds, only a hero can bring light to extinguish the dark.

But what if our hero has scars of his own?

Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King is a masterpiece. Plain and fucking simple. It's been a few years…

Review by Bruno Youn ★★★★ 12

Robin Williams has touched and inspired the lives of many people with his work throughout the ages. Cinema just lost one of its legends, but his legacy will live for eternity! The usual fantastical and supernatural elements that are trademarks from Terry Gilliam are present again in The Fisher King and I felt they were used in a very powerful way here. They represent Parry’s traumatic past that won’t let him go and start over. Robin Williams’ vibrant and joyful presence mesh with moments of complete despair, making it one of his best performances. Jeff Bridges makes an impressive turn as well and shares a couple of touching moments with his co-star. I found very interesting the idea that we…

Review by Jay 👽 ★★★★½ 9

Recommended by Goliwadekar .

I never thought Terry fucking Gilliam would make me want to knock on all my friends' doors and give them a hug.

The Fisher King is a New York fairytale for adults. It might even be the BEST New York fairytale for adults, I'm not sure yet. It's definitely the most I've ever identified with a protagonist in one of these types of stories; from his isolated, disenchanted state, Jeff Bridges trips into what can only be described as destitute Wonderland punctuated by fast-talkers, singers, filth, dirt and wide-angle lenses. Outside of Fear and Loathing , I've never seen Gilliam's wacky craft put to better use.

This is a story that provokes a lot of thinking, and I…

Review by Evan T ★★★★★ 4

Six years on and The Fisher King still seems intent on reminding me how I’ll never be over the death of Robin Williams, his raw talent immortalised amid the hellscape of New York’s homeless crisis. Here, he gives us the warmth of his smile and the intellect of his soul, the internal conflict of the character adding a bitter relevance to Robin as an individual. He plays scenes of hallucinatory hysteria to absolute perfection, emotions comparative to symptoms he likely experienced through his ongoing struggle with both depression and dementia. It’s in these scenes you see closer into the man he really was, reminding us that nothing is ever what it seems, and that you should strive for kindness with every…

Review by theriverjordan ★★★★½ 18

The greatest Robin Williams performances mix the madness of his characters not just with genius, but also a walloping portion of kindness. 

“The Fisher King” is one of these performances. It may actually be among the best Williams ever gave. 

Williams and director Terry Gilliam have a tendency to ride the same rollicking rainbow wave of stylized lunacy. Both - geniuses in their craft - but sometimes so off the wall that they ricochet endlessly around the room. 

Fortunately, in “Fisher King,” they somehow don’t amplify each other’s bonkers bizarreness, but seem to understand one another so well as to focus its usage. 

The film - about a shock jockey DJ (Jeff Bridges) who grapples with the idea that his…

Review by DallasFrance ★★★★ 6

I wanted more Mercedes Ruehl going tiger style in tiger print pants, and less of her taking Jack back when he doesn’t deserve it. 

I wanted more of Jack as a shock jock, and less of him as a manipulative schmuck.

I wanted more of  Robin Williams story-telling in Central Park, and less close-ups of his Wookie-ish body hair. 

I wanted more of Amanda Plummer’s quivering neuroses, and less of her not being in scenes.

I wanted a few less scenes shot in canted angles, and more shots relying on the incredible production design, stunning Red Knight practical effects, and workplace cabaret performances.

There were several beautiful and poignant scenes in this film, such as the waltz in Grand Central Station. Not my favorite Gilliam, but it’s almost impossible to top Brazil.

2021 First Time Watches Ranked

Review by Richard Chandler ★★★★ 11

"Nietzsche says there are two kinds of people in the world, people who are destined for greatness—like Walt Disney or Hitler—and then there's the rest of us."

In the wake of the disastrously unprofitable The Adventures of Baron Munchausen , Terry Gilliam decided for the first time in his career to direct someone else's script, settling on Richard LaGravanese's tale of redemption, The Fisher King . Though often discounted for its non-auteur status within the Gilliam catalog, it retains much of the fantastical spirit that informs his more celebrated works.

Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges) is the king of New York City talk radio, a jaundiced Howard Stern-like figure who cynically indulges in anti-yuppie populism while nonetheless bragging about the size of his…

Review by cuckoochanel ★★★★½ 10

This is entry #12 in a September survey of NYC movies with my beau to redress our foregone yearly trip to the Big Apple with a plethora of city vibes and location shooting—amply embodied by this bold panorama straddling early 90s Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Jeff Bridges stars in Terry Gilliam’s New York-bound odyssey, The Fisher King , chronicling the wildly oscillating fortunes of Jack Lucas—a contemptuous and narcissistic shock jock who suffers a career-ruining, lifestyle-stripping, sanity-shattering fall from grace after his odious influence stirs a particularly pathetic and unbalanced listener to mass murder-suicide. Bridges’ artfully intricate performance in this highly-stylized, modern fantasy seeking reparation and reconciliation is fueled by Jack’s embedded addictions to stature, avarice, and superiority, while his maladaptive alcoholism…

Review by Joel Haver ★★★★★ 1

I want this entire movie wrapped around me like a blanket. With the terror to keep me moving, the fantasy to keep me dreaming and the romance to keep me alive. One of those movies I’ll revisit forever, just to keep its world alive in my brain.

Review by Hamushy ★★★★

The Fisher King is a film that succeeds in reaching its goal, despite being all over the map and actually benefits from the wide variety of ideas and concepts contained within it. Part fairy tale, comedy and romance, while part tragedy, drama and social commentary. The Fisher King is directed by the unique visionary director, Terry Gilliam and is the story of a radio DJ who falls from grace after his harsh statements on air causes a massive tragedy. To find redemption he befriends and tries to help a delusional homeless man.

Terry Gilliam is not your run-of-the-mill director and when you watch a movie of his you are going to have a lot of symbolism and ideas thrown at…

Review by Ben Daniels ★★★★★ 3

What an amazing fucking film.

Terry Gilliam is a genius. His twisted direction births an askew universe, where an almost bleak and utopian New York City provides the backdrop for a melange of romance, drama and fantasy. Sounds weird? It is, most definitely, and it is absolutely amazing.

Mercedes Ruehl impressively steals the show with a part that doesn't take up all the screen time, but certainly grabs all the screen when she's on it. You know someone is really great when you don't give a shit what Jeff Bridges is doing on the other side of the shot. She absolutely deserved that Oscar, her performance is utterly consuming and believable. I really cannot praise it enough.

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The Fisher King Reviews

• 67   Metascore
• 2 hr 20 mins
• Drama, Comedy
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A homeless former university professor comes to the aid of a troubled ex-shock jock, whose inflamatory comments sent a listener on a shooting spree.

Terry Gilliam's first project as a directorial "hired gun" is a grandiose, overblown attempt to fuse the medieval myth of the Fisher King with a story of alienation and redemption in contemporary Manhattan. Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges) is a cynical disc jockey whose radio talk show attracts the lonely and frustrated. When one of his frequent callers, Edwin (Christian Clemenson), confides he's just met a beautiful girl at Babbitts, a trendy bar, Jack goes off on a vitriolic tirade against the yuppies who frequent the place. He ends by saying: "Edwin, they have to be stopped before it's too late. It's us or them." Taking Jack's words at face value, Edwin goes on a shooting spree inside the restaurant, slaughtering several patrons. Three years later Jack has reached a nadir of despair and self-loathing. Although involved in a relationship with Anne (Mercedes Ruehl), the supportive owner of a video store, he has lost his will to live. Drunk, he decides to end it all by jumping off a pier into the river. Before he can do this, though, he is attacked by two homicidal teenagers, and then rescued by Parry (Robin Williams), who appears to be some kind of vagrant with a mystical turn of phrase. It turns out that Parry is a former professor of medieval history who is now engaged on a quest for the Holy Grail. Parry is convinced he's spotted the Grail in a magazine (it's actually a silver trophy belonging to a billionaire), and that Jack is the ideal candidate to retrieve it from its owner's castellated Fifth Avenue apartment building. THE FISHER KING's problems begin with Richard LaGravenese's screenplay and are amplified by Gilliam's showy direction and an unbearably fey performance by Robin Williams. The idea, apparently, was to give an explicitly mythical dimensional to a modern-day story of sin and redemption. Unfortunately, though, the script never resolves the different levels on which it tries to operate, and also throws in too many loose ends which never get cleared up. The tone of the film, largely set by Williams's "Please feel sorry for me" performance, is unremittingly cloying, with an impossibly cute, feel-good ending that adds insult to injury. There are redeeming factors; a scene in which bustling commuters in Grand Central Station are suddenly transformed into waltzing couples has undeniable magic, and Bridges and Ruehl give gritty, unaffected performances that sometimes threaten to make the whole thing believable. For the most part, though, THE FISHER KING is awash in the kind of neo-mythical whimsy that Gilliam helped to puncture in the far more enjoyable MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL.

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The Fisher King

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• Duration: 137 mins

Cast and crew

• Director: Terry Gilliam
• Screenwriter: Richard LaGravenese
• Robin Williams
• Jeff Bridges
• Amanda Plummer
• Mercedes Ruehl
• Michael Jeter
• Harry Shearer

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‘The Fisher King’: A Modern Quest for the Holy Grail

“Did you ever hear the story of the Fisher King?”

We are all familiar with myths and legends, the kinds of stories that filled our childhoods with awe and wonder, with adventure and delight, with conclusions of morality and conscience. Among these vast myths and legends, we may even be familiar with certain Arthurian tales, medieval literature and mythology revolving around the character of King Arthur and other kings and heroes of Great Britain. For American-born British filmmaker Terry Gilliam, the Arthurian legend of The Fisher King is the basis for his 1991 film of the same name.

A modern quest for the Holy Grail set in New York City, Gilliam’s film follows an uncongenial shock jock radio DJ, Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges), who meets a homeless man, Parry (Robin Williams). After learning he is unwittingly responsible for a tragic event in Parry’s life, Jack embarks on a journey of redemption by helping Parry reshape his fate.

The Arthurian legend of the Fisher King follows a King, incapable of standing due to an injury, tasked with taking care of the Holy Grail. The myth says that the King’s fate rests in the path of a noble knight who will ask him a certain question. As a young boy, the King is assigned a test of courage to stay alone in the woods at night. There he sees a vision of the Holy Grail, a symbol of God’s divine grace. A voice speaks out to him: “You shall be keeper of the Grail so that it may heal the hearts of men.” Blinded by visions of a greater, godly life brimming with honor and glory, the King reaches into the fire to take the grail. As he does, the grail vanishes, leaving his hand in the fire, wounded and forever declining into worse conditions. Eventually, life loses its reason for him. One day, a Fool wanders into the castle to find the King alone. Seeing the King only as a desolate man in pain, he asks him, “What ails you, friend?” Upon replying that he is thirsty, the Fool takes a cup from beside the King’s bed and fills it with water. Drinking the water, the King’s wounds begin to heal, and he realises the cup is the Grail. Asking him how he found the Grail, which even his own men could not find, the Fool simply replies, “I don’t know. I only knew that you were thirsty.”

The legend can be interpreted in various ways, but Gilliam uses it to tell a story about healing. The Arthurian legend is used as a base for constructing a personal, emotionally charged quest for Parry and Jack in the film, framing their respective journeys of recovery from trauma and grief around the tale.

Like the Fisher King, we find Parry in a similar situation of hopelessness; where the King was wounded physically, Parry was wounded mentally. Parry, whose real name is Henry Sagan, lost his wife in a mass shooting, which Jack had unintentionally provoked due to his mean-spirited and malicious on-air remarks towards an unstable caller when he was a DJ. The death of his wife and the trauma of losing her right before his eyes pushed Sagan into a catatonic state, from which he woke up and assumed the persona of Parry, a man obsessed with the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King. 

Aligning with this persona, he is continually haunted by a hallucination of a Red Knight, a tormenting distortion on his memory of his wife’s head exploding from a shotgun blast right in front of him. Sinking further into delusion to cope with the loss of wife, Parry seeks to find the Holy Grail, a symbol of recovery from his grief and trauma; to him, the easiest way to represent the unintelligible state he is in and the seemingly impossible path to recovery is to envision a quest and a prize waiting at the very end of this journey.

The beauty of Gilliam’s film is that there’s an altered sense of duality in how Gilliam adapts the tale for a contemporary setting. He twists the very nature and flow of the myth to accommodate the narrative and developmental arc of his story by switching up the dynamic between the King and the Fool to fit his two lead characters. Although Parry is a conspicuous parallel to the Fisher King in his personal wounds, delusions, and quest to find the Grail, Gilliam also uses the tale to subtly frame Jack’s journey through the film and his road towards his own personal redemption.

Jack starts off as a radio DJ, and his involvement in unwittingly prompting an unstable caller to commit a mass murder-suicide leads him into a melancholic, intoxicated, and guilt-ridden state. Jack’s journey begins in a place of power and security: a stable job where he has access to a wide-reaching audience as a DJ. Similar to how the king is offered to be the keeper of the Grail “so it may heal the hearts of men,” Jack was in a similar position where he had the ready ability and access to heal others. Stripped of his position of power and sunken into a depressed state, Jack is only brought out of it once he meets his own noble knight, Parry, who rescues him after he is attacked and nearly set on fire by thugs who mistake him for a homeless person.

Similarly, Parry is wounded unremittingly until he finds his own noble knight to save him from his wounds. Parry rescues Jack, but the same could be said in how Jack, upon learning of his unintentional part in the death of Parry’s wife, tries to assist Parry in finding love again — what he believes is the key to Parry’s quest for the Holy Grail. Parry does not just rescue Jack from the attack, but also from his hopelessness, in unknowingly providing Jack with a new path towards redemption.

By inviting Parry and Lydia (Amanda Plummer) — a woman Parry is smitten with — to join him and his girlfriend Anne (Mercedes Ruehl) for dinner, Jack believes he will bring a sense of serenity and catharsis to Parry’s life, like the Fool did to the King’s by making the presence of the Holy Grail apparent to him. Motivated by his own guilt, Jack assumes that this act will redeem his misdoings. Although, like the King’s delusions of glory and honor, Jack later learns that this isn’t the correct answer to Parry’s personal quest.

All seems to go well for Jack’s redemption-driven plan to bring Parry back to reality again — Parry confesses his love for Lydia, and she reciprocates his declaration — but once Parry is brought back to reality with this moment of love and intimacy, his road to recovery fades into a mirage, as he is once again visited by the tormenting hallucination of the Red Knight. Like the King, Parry’s false impression of what would heal him drives him further away from reality.

The deceptive illusion of the Red Knight causes him to run away from this encounter with Lydia, and he is ambushed by the same thugs who he rescued Jack from and then ruthlessly beaten and menaced back into his previous catatonic state. At this point, unaware of Parry’s regression, Jack is given the impression that his path to redemption is complete due to his belief that Parry’s path to recovery is also complete and that he has saved him from his grief. Recharged with an artificial sense of purpose, he breaks up with his girlfriend and rebuilds his career as a radio host, turning back to where he started, diving further into his own misleading vision of his journey.

Only later, unbound from this false sense of completion by a crisis of conscience, does Jack realize the fallacious path he has traversed onto and learn about what happened to Parry. Once realizing that helping him find love again is not the solution to his trauma and grief, Jack gives into Parry’s quest of retrieving the Holy Grail from a renowned architect — who Parry believes owns the real Grail. Infiltrating the Upper East Side castle of the architect, he steals the Grail.

Unbeknownst to Jack, this retrieval of the Holy Grail does not only mark the completion of Parry’s quest, but also of his own. Whilst stealing the Grail, Jack accidentally finds the architect unconscious after a suicide attempt; on his way out, he triggers the alarm to alert the authorities, saving the architect’s life in the process.

Gilliam compassionately frames the climax of Jack’s journey towards redemption around this moment; in all his focus on redeeming himself and absolving his guilt through initially helping Parry fall in love, and later stealing the Grail for him, he fails to see that the solution to his redemption cannot be achieved by self-motivated intentions. His redemption isn’t achieved through saving someone who he has unintentionally hurt, but rather through becoming a better and much more empathetic person. By saving the architect, he redeems himself and his past actions through a pure act of empathy and humanity, completing the quest for his Grail. Once Jack brings him the Grail, Parry regains consciousness and tells him that now, having completed his quest by receiving the Grail, he can trust himself fully in being able to properly accept and mourn his wife’s death, without being further haunted by his delusions.

The end of both Jack and Parry’s individual quests sees them finding purpose and love in life again. Jack later reconciles with Anne, whilst Lydia reunites and embraces Parry as he is in the hospital singing a rendition of Burton Lane and Ralph Freed’s “How About You?” with Jack and other patients in the ward. “I like New York in June, how about you?” the song delightfully starts — a cheerful and amusing celebration and embrace of life, highlighting the leading pair’s newfound enthusiasm for living. Bringing their roads to recovery to a finale, we see Jack now joining Parry in his eccentricities; previously, when lying on the grass in Central Park recounting the story of the Fisher King, only Parry was naked, but now Jack joins him in embracing this liberation as they lie nude in Central Park, gazing at the sky as the film closes.

Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King wonderfully balances light and dark, playing with humor, absurdity, fantasy, and adventure, whilst tackling darker themes of trauma, grief, and recovery. It also represents one of the most creative ways of adapting an age-old tale. Gilliam contorts the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King by adapting the myth to a contemporary New York setting and fitting it into the friendship dynamic of Bridges’ and Williams’ characters, intertwining the roles of the King and the Fool into both of their thematic and narrative journeys. The Fisher King is a passionate story about the power of friendship and how a new friend can often lend us a fresh eye in viewing our journeys from a new perspective. In helping each other through their respective paths towards healing, Jack and Parry find unseen perspectives in recognizing that the solutions to their problems do not lie in the straightforward actions of self-motivated concerns — like the King learns from the Fool — but rather in the humble embracing of vulnerability, empathy, and humanity.

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Movie Review

The fisher king.

US Release Date: 09-20-1991

Directed by: Terry Gilliam

Starring ▸ ▾

• Robin Williams ,  as
• Jeff Bridges ,  as
• Mercedes Ruehl ,  as
• Amanda Plummer ,  as
• Michael Jeter ,  as
• Homeless Cabaret Singer
• Al Fann ,  as
• Superintendent
• David Hyde Pierce ,  as
• Lara Harris ,  as
• John de Lancie ,  as
• TV Executive
• Kathy Najimy ,  as
• Crazed Video Customer
• Harry Shearer ,  as
• Sitcom Actor Ben Starr
• Ted Ross ,  as
• Carlos Carrasco ,  as
• Tom Waits as
• Disabled Veteran

Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges in The Fisher King .

In many ways, Fisher King represents director Terry Gilliam's most mature work. For once it's the actors who are the main attraction and his unique visual style only serves the story rather than dominating it. Although it contains elements of the fantastical, at its heart, it remains grounded in reality. It remains the only film of his to receive an acting Oscar, with Mercedes Ruehl winning for Best Supporting Actress. Williams was also nominated for an Oscar and won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy. The script by Richard LaGravenese, which was also Oscar nominated, combines humor and drama to great effect.

Although Ruehl and Williams both received more attention for their acting than Bridges, watching it for the first time in many years, it was his performance that stood out the most to me. Williams and Ruehl are both playing large characters and they do good work, but Bridges is much more subtle and nuanced. Williams tries to steal his scenes with humor, but this is Bridges's film and he holds it together. It's the story of his character's journey toward redemption. Perhaps it's because his character isn't very likable through much of the film that kept audiences from sympathizing with him.

Bridges plays Jack, a successful radio shock jock in New York City in the early 1990s. When during one of his rants he tells a mentally disturbed caller that yuppies at a certain fashionable bar need to be stopped, that caller takes a gun to that bar and goes on a killing spree. We then cut to some time later with Jack's career gone and he is living with Anne (Ruehl) above the video rental store that she owns. Wracked with guilt and depression, Jack is now a drunk. During one night spent wandering drunkenly around the streets of the city, he is rescued from an attack by a couple of teenagers by Perry (Williams). Perry is mentally unbalanced, believing himself to be a knight errant. He speaks to people who aren't there and thinks that the Holy Grail is located in a mansion on the Upper East Side. When Jack wakes up in the basement that Perry calls home, Perry tells him that he thinks Jack was sent to help him retrieve the grail. Later Jack finds out that Perry used to be a professor, but he went a little crazy when his wife was killed during the attack in that bar that Jack blames himself for. With that in mind, Jack decides that if he can somehow save Perry, or make it up to Perry, that he will be able to find peace for himself.

Despite the heavy concept, the script contains plenty of humor. Perry's manic personality, played as only Robin Williams could, provides much of the humor. His interactions with Jack's much more repressed persona is the source of many jokes, such as when Perry goes naked in Central Park at night, while Jack looks on in horror. Michael Jeter is also quite funny as the homeless cabaret singer who lends Jack a hand by singing a version of "Everything's Coming up Roses" in a crowded office. Amanda Plummer also generates a few laughs as the quirky object of Perry's affections. But there are plenty of smaller funny moments throughout the film, like Jack's video recommendation to an energized video customer played by Kathy Najimy.

Gilliam's decision to make this film came as a result of his experience on The Adventures of Baron Muncheusin , which was a nightmare production that ran long and far over-budget. He decided to make a lower budget film set in the modern world. The setting forces him to restrain his usual visual flair, but he still manages to make his mark. Perry's madness is represented by the Red Knight who appears before him when the border between sanity and fantasy becomes too thin. Seeing the large knight, galloping through the streets of Manhattan, breathing fire, in full armor, is an arresting vision. Gilliam also makes good use of angles and perspective, often turning the camera askew. Although he originally intended to simply shoot the script as is, one scene on a crowded subway car just wasn't working and so Gilliam created the film's most memorable visual scene where Perry follows Lydia through Grand Central station, which is magically transformed into a room filled with waltzing couples, complete with disco ball atop the central clock. It's a perfectly filmed scene and a magical movie moment.

The film's only real flaw is that it runs a bit long. It's the relationship between Jack and Perry that is at the film's heart and too much time is spent away from that relationship. There are some sweet moments between Perry and Lydia and some dramatic ones between Jack and Anne, but neither of the romantic relationships is as strong as the one between the two male leads. The resolution of their relationship and the quest for the Holy Grail is what matters, rather than if either of the couples will live happily ever after together.

It was the success of this film that brought Gilliam as close to the mainstream as his career has yet taken him. He proved that he could take someone else's script and make it look better through the prism of his vision. However, given the trajectory of his career in the years since, it's obvious that wasn't the path he wanted to take. His subsequent films may have been more satisfying to him personally, but I for one lament the film's that might have been. Reportedly he was J.K. Rowling's first choice to direct the Harry Potter films, but the studio rejected the idea. He was also linked for many years to The Watchmen film, but that too was not meant to be. He has always made interesting, but mostly unsuccessful films, but with a little more flexibility his career could have been very different.

Robin Williams, Mercedes Ruehl, Jeff Bridges, and Amanda Plummer in The Fisher King .

This is probably my favorite Terry Gilliam movie. It bears repeat viewing. It has dark, adult subject matter but with an ending that leaves you smiling. It combines a unique blend of the disturbing and the funny with some romance tossed in for flavoring. At one point in the movie Robin Williams as Perry says, “There's three things in this world that you need: respect for all kinds of life, a nice bowel movement on a regular basis, and a navy blazer.” Allow me to loosely paraphrase Perry by saying, “The Fisher King possesses the three most important ingredients required to make a great motion picture: inspired direction, talented actors, and a compelling script.”

First the direction. Terry Gilliam keeps his overt cinematic flourishes to a minimum. He trusts the screenplay and stays out of the way of the story being told. Too many modern directors can't -or simply aren't willing- to do this. With their intrusive camera movements they must constantly remind the viewer they are watching a movie. The few visual flairs Gilliam did incorporate, like the waltzing couples in Grand Central Station (including a few same sex couples - a rare move for 1991) and the Red Knight who looks like a splattering blood stain burning from within, compliment the plot without slowing it down. It's a job well done.

Now for the actors. The four central characters were all brilliantly cast. Robin Williams as a schizophrenic is a natural fit. As Perry he handles the showy stuff as well as expected but he also reveals a layer of vulnerability that is heartbreaking to behold. Amanda Plummer as Lydia matches him quirk for quirk and tic for tic. Together they share a relationship that seems both true to life and movie magical at the same time. Mercedes Ruehl has a couple of juicy scenes that won the Oscar for her. But I agree with Scott that Jeff Bridges is the best thing in the movie. It is Jack's story after all. He starts the movie as a man without a soul, preaching his own particular brand of nihilism to the masses. By the final scene he's a completely changed man, and for once it doesn't seem either corny or contrived.

The script is smart and dramatic with a few unexpected moments of hilarity. Scott mentioned the funniest scene. The homeless cabaret singer -in drag- stopping the show -in an office- by doing a medley from Gypsy at the top of his lungs, is roll on the floor funny. Now I'd also like to take this opportunity to bring up Barbra Streisand. She has nothing to do with this movie but VHS copies of Funny Girl and Funny Lady are clearly visible on a shelf in one of the video store scenes. I get excited by any Babs sighting on film.

The character of acerbic talk radio host Jack Lucas was clearly based on Howard Stern. The famous shock jock was originally planning on donating some tapes from his show but declined participation once he learned he wasn't getting paid. Richard LaGravenese wrote some of the best dialogue for this cynical DJ whose words incite a tragedy. In one scene he gets drunk and discusses philosophy with a Pinocchio doll. “You ever read any Nietzsche? Nietzsche says there's two kinds of people in the world: people who are destined for greatness like Walt Disney... and Hitler. Then there's the rest of us, he called us "The bungled and the botched." We get teased. We sometimes get close to greatness, but we never get there. We're the expendable masses. We get pushed in front of trains, take poison aspirin... get gunned down in Dairy Queens.”

I agree that a tighter edit would have been welcome. The Fisher King does run about 20 minutes too long. Still this movie from 1991 remains eminently watchable with its potent mix of the deranged and the absurd.

Robin Williams in The Fisher King

When I first saw this film I recall being excited by the prospect of Robin Williams working with a member of Monty Python. With these two, the possibilities for laughs seemed endless. My expectations were high. Too high in fact, as I was disappointed and a little bored by the lack of humor and the presence of such heavy drama. I remembered liking some of Williams’ bits and only truly laughed at the scene with the homeless person doing a medley from Gypsy , which Patrick described.

Watching it now, without any preconceived anticipation, I found a hard hitting psycho drama with some wonderfully light moments. This time around, I focused on the character of Jack. As Scott wrote, It's his journey toward redemption. Where I messed up, and so did Gilliam, was in focusing too much on Perry and Lydia. Granted, Williams has such an extraordinary entertaining presence that I understand the desire to leave the camera on him.  As Patrick noted, the story arc is Jack’s not Perry’s.

Jack, with a conscience packed with guilt, decides to try and save Perry, hoping in the process to save himself. He thinks the answer lies in Lydia, and if he can only set them up together, both Perry and he will be in a happier place.  What Jack does not understand is that he truly does not know Perry. We are given no back story on him. Maybe Perry was a little off before the tragic death of his wife?

Sanity is a relative term. Anyone in this film at one time or another could be considered a little off. Besides Perry, we have Lydia who is wracked with social awkwardness and anxieties. Anne is obviously being used by Jack, but her desperation for love, however sincere, causes her to excuse his bad behavior. Jack even starts to see the killer, much as Perry sees the Red Knight.

I also noted this time around some details that Gilliam is known for. At one point Perry expresses his desires to Lydia by saying, “I have a hard-on for you the size of Florida.” Early in the movie, when Jack is in his apartment, his apparent girlfriend is sketching a picture of a naked man behind a map of the United States, in which Florida is in place of his penis. Later in his apartment, he practices his lines for an upcoming sitcom audition, where he recites the line, “Excuse me.” over and over again. Three years later his life depends on Perry excusing him.

I agree with my brothers, although The Fisher King contains many entertainingly funny moments, it runs a bit long. Lydia’s part should have been drastically cut. All we need to know is that Perry is in love with her. Leave in the gloriously romantic walk through Grand Central station and the drag queens invitation. The big date scene should have been trimmed way back. Lydia’s part is more of a distraction than a destination. The relationships between Jack and Perry, as well as Jack and Anne, are the film's heart. Jack must help Perry find his sanity in order for him to save his soul while Anne represents Jack’s growth.

The Fisher King has so much to offer. It can be brilliantly funny and darkly dramatic. It is also nicely romantic. One of my favorite scenes this time around is when Jack and Anne kiss passionately at the end. They back up against a wall of porn videos, causing them to fall onto them mid embrace. 

Photos © Copyright Columbia Pictures Corporation (1991)

© 2000 - 2017 Three Movie Buffs. All Rights Reserved.

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Review/Film; A Cynic's Quest for Forgiveness

By Janet Maslin

• Sept. 20, 1991

The cry of contrition that is sounded in "The Fisher King" can be heard long after the film is over. In bringing a jaded late-1980's celebrity to the brink of destruction and then allowing him to do penance for his cynicism, this film strikes at the heart of something disturbingly real. That, apparently, was not enough for the film makers, who have feverishly piled on elements of whimsy, mythology and romance to what was never a simple concept in the first place. The likelihood of creating an unholy mess is further heightened by the throwing in of the Holy Grail.

Yet "The Fisher King," directed by the ever-fanciful Terry Gilliam from an ingenious if loose-knit screenplay by Richard LaGravenese, is capable of great charm whenever its taste for chaos is kept in check. For every wild ride through Manhattan by an imaginary Red Knight trailing billows of flame, there is a small, comic encounter in a more down-to-earth mode.

The source of much of this appeal is obvious: the film's stars, particularly Jeff Bridges as a fallen radio star and Mercedes Ruehl as the sweetly flamboyant video-store owner who loves him, bring an emotional authenticity to material that could easily have had none. Only Robin Williams, as a gentle soul who has been left homeless and driven half-mad by grief, is allowed to chatter aimlessly, cavort naked in Central Park and generally go overboard.

"The Fisher King" begins stunningly well with a few glimpses of Jack Lucas (Mr. Bridges), a sleek, mean-spirited radio bully who is quite literally on top of the world. Seen in his fashionably dehumanized high-rise apartment, or in his limousine, sneering at a pandhandler from behind dark glasses, Jack is instantly emblematic of the cold-hearted excesses of his time. As the deejay sits in his bathtub, Mr. Gilliam, working with rare restraint, and Mr. Bridges, abandoning all traces of his usually ingratiating manner, create a chillingly indelible image of Jack's spiritual emptiness. His face caked eerily with a rejuvenating cosmetic mask, Jack tries repeatedly to master the line "Hey, forgive me!" for a possible role in a television show.

Moments later, Jack's career has ended and his quest for real forgiveness has begun. A deranged caller on Jack's radio show, taking his cue from the host's insults, has committed mass murder in a yuppie bar. When Jack is next seen, three years later, he is as demoralized and barren as the mythical figure for whom the film is named. He now looks disheveled and lives listlessly with Anne Napolitano (Ms. Ruehl), who has clearly not been successful in rekindling his spirits. The only things that attract Jack's notice are unfortunate ones, like the fact that the television series that treated "Hey, forgive me!" as a comic punch line has gone on to become a hit without him.

Jack is at the end of his rope, almost literally, when he meets Parry (Mr. Williams), the colorful derelict who takes many of his cues from visions of "hundreds of the cutest little fat people floating right in front of me." Parry, who lives in a drab, industrial boiler-room setting that recalls the look of Mr. Gilliam's earlier "Brazil," turns out to be a casualty of the yuppie-bar tragedy, and as such he holds forth the possibility of Jack's redemption.

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The Fisher King

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• "The Fisher King has two actors at the top of their form, and a compelling, well-directed and well-produced story"  Variety
• "'The Fisher King' is a disorganized, rambling and eccentric movie that contains some moments of truth, some moments of humor, and many moments of digression (...) Rating: ★★ (out of 4)"  Roger Ebert : rogerebert.com
• "A modern epic that fuses myth with hard-edged reality, it's a one-of-a-kind, thoroughly engaging experience"  Desson Thomson : The Washington Post
• "Restores our belief in the power of movies to transform reality, even temporarily. So what if it's not perfect? It's magic"  Peter Travers : Rolling Stone
• "A big, messy, exuberant movie that is better scene-for-scene than it is as a whole."  Caryn James : The New York Times

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Stephen King is a legend in his own right, but he has some strong opinions about recent movies that aren't adaptations of his work.