Screen
Alleva, Richard
(Continued from page 687) Two singers/readers at stage right provide the narrative for the piece. They deliver the pertinent quotations and comments, and sing the music of Christopher Thall and...
...She uses life-size puppets, animated statues, dancing buildings, mechanical devices...
...Amanda Plummer, as Williams's sweetheart-to-be, accurately and poignantly depicts the sort of person who has become "But, dear, we already saw this picture...
...p aul Zaloom's/143' Civilization, like The Radiant City, begins in the prehistorical past (the creation of the earth in Zaloom's case) and quickly jumps to the present...
...In other words, his function is to stand on the dramatic sidelines, smile wisely and tolerantly at the hilarious doings of his daffy heterosexual friends, and always give good advice...
...It opens with the autobiographical piece which depends for its comic effects on his range of voices and on the toys and cutouts and liquids that gain iconic stature--well, sort of--as he deploys them on the projector...
...One could admire the skill of the men and women who manipulated the puppets, but the piece was finally disappointing...
...Williams occasionally lets us see the history professor who once inhabited the vagrant's body, but what we mostly get is a whirligig of funny voices and funny faces that keeps us from seeing an individual we can care about...
...Robin Williams does not give one of his better performances...
...Furthermore, Williams works so hard to make his madman amusing and self-amusing that you begin to wonder why Bridges should dedicate himself to curing his friend...
...And JeffBridges's work here shocked me into realizing what I should have known a long time ago: with Robert De Niro, he is one of the two best American film actors...
...Beginning his own autobiography with so august an event, he sets in comic perspective the ordinary business of being born, growing up, going to school, discovering sex, making one's way in the world--which, come to think of it, is rather extraordinary business after all...
...If the S&L and the National Endowment commentaries seem to have fallen behind the current headlines, they still refer to two of our perennial problems--greed and aggressive prudery...
...But, from what I did see, I took note of the following: Johnny, an ex-con short-order cook, makes his first romantic approach to the waitress, Frankie, over the body of an epileptic who is having a fit on their restaurant's floor...
...erence McNally has adapted his two-character play, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, to the screen...
...A quarter of a century later, The Fisher King is making a lot of money and being taken seriously by a lot of critics...
...His career goes up like a skyrocket...
...Bridges commits himself to this unfortunate's recovery and thus redeems himself...
...In doing so, he has added, by my precise count, nine hundred and forty-seven characters to interact with the title roles, and three thousand, five hundred and sixty-one episodes to give the one set play a more...uh, shall we say...expansive quality...
...In Phood, the best organized of the pieces, Zaloom plays a lecturer at a food purveyors' convention who enthusiastically recounts the latest inventions while projected texts from industry and government brochures emphasize the startling new artificial ingredients that await the unwary eater...
...Otherwise, all the many conversations in this movie are rendered in the usual shot-reverse shot talking heads format, with the camera, like a good little dog, staring at whoever is talking...
...They deliver the pertinent quotations and comments, and sing the music of Christopher Thall and the relentlessly repetitive lyrics of Andrea Balis...
...Mercedes Ruehl, as Bridges's lady, has a distinct triumph making the sort of woman who is usually called a good broad much too real to be called a good broad...
...Rendering fantasies of Williams and his more demented street cohorts, Gilliam shows us Grand Central turned into a ballroom, Central Park into a medieval forest, a publisher's office into a Broadway stage...
...His madman is less a new creation than a tour of this talented comic's stand-up repertoire...
...Zaloom has been in Philadelphia recently, introducing the Movement Theatre International's new season, with a show that is essentially the one that I saw last year at the Pennsylvania Academy...
...One of the most amusing devices was the ferris wheel to which Moses heads were attached as his titles were announced and from which they were removed one by one as the Rockefellers established their control...
...This is Gary Marshall's idea of the resources of cinema...
...There are numerous shots of New York street life with voiceover dialogue as Johnny courts Frankie on the way home fi'om work...
...It was Bridges's miserable acting instrument that deluded me: his face is blandly handsome, his voice unmemorable, his body that of your average ageing beach bum...
...Thus, La Gravenese taps into that vein of American whimsy best exemplified by Harvey...
...the last and longest of the pieces, is more characteristic Zaloom, using found objects (some rather elaborate: electric mixers as nuclear power plants) to make satiric points...
...But much of the acting is good...
...His bravura keeps The FisherKing twitching, but it's the twitching of a galvanized corpse...
...He needs a script that will bring his gift for subverting and illuminating reality to fruition...
...It was never as much fun nor as frightening as the works of some other practitioners of the art--Julie Taymor, for instance, or to take a more obvious political example, the Bread and Puppet Theater...
...Actually, my count can't be all that precise because, dismayed by the obtuseness of the writing (McNally is fatally torn between his desire to write the kind of bohemian smartass talk he's good at and his self-imposed obligation to write the salt-of-the-working-class dialogue for which he has absolutely no talent whatsoever), the underwater lethargy of Gary Marshall's direction, the sitcom glibness of the acting (exception: the great Kate Nelligan as a brassy waitress), and the insulting ugliness of the photography, I fled the theater about two-thirds of the way through the movie...
...Madness is salvation...
...In Norman Mailer's play, The Deer Park, the hack producer Collie Munshin outlines a sure-fire scenario: MUNSHIN (The hero) goes into television, a bitter kid, he plays the angles...
...Yet, because of Gilliam's direction, there is often something piquant to look at...
...I think I'll retire to Bedlam...
...For Zaloom, it is a joke...
...But that's not all that's moldering in this script...
...There is also a Pygmalion aspect to the story (Bridges helps Williams woo the girl of his dreams) and also one of those situations in which the hero learns to be sensitive enough to look his girlfriend in the eye and tell her that he loves her...
...Thus, Williams's performance undercuts the central action of the movie...
...Six-foot rabbits are real if you think they're real...
...And Zaloom remains one of our sharpest and funniest performance artists...
...The celebrity's conscience plunges him to psychological and economic depths where he meets one of the victims of the slaughter (Robin Williams), a former medieval history professor whose wife's murder turned him into a hallucinating street person...
...This scene is meant to be cute...
...Lane and McNally conspire to give us a Nice Homosexual that is the equivalent of all those Nice Negroes of the films of the fifties and early sixties...
...There are some, if not enough, changes and additions-particularly in Meanwhile..., the section that deals with current events--but the material and the method are the ones that he has been polishing in and out of New York during the last year or so...
...Upward and onward with the arts...
...Gilliam's previous films, Time Bandits', Brazil, and Baron Munchausen, were chaotic, but they were, from first shot to last, dreams of a unique, quirky imagination...
...While a Macbeth and Othello might force these barnstorming geniuses to harness their powers to the freight of subtle characterization and difficult poetry, a crowd-pleasing melodrama or farce simply let them rip into bravura passages of pantomime and rant...
...Nathan Lane plays Michelle Pfeiffer's gay neighbor...
...Williams's madness conjures up visions of knights in Central Park and Holy Grails in town houses, and it's implied that Bridges can only truly redeem himself when he comes to share Williams's delusions...
...Madness is cute...
...We can give Freddie a wanderjahr, stumbling around bums with tears in his eyes, lots of business where he loves everybody...
...It keeps turning into other movies, each more stale than the last...
...The story's protagonist (Jeff Bridges) is the callous but hugely successful host of a radio phone-in show who accidentally taunts a demented caller into committing a mass murder...
...Moses, for instance, appears in many forms, most interestingly as a talking head floating in a bubble over the action, least effectively in the giant head, like a fallen statue of Lenin, that looks good on posters and the Playbill cover but could do nothing but ooze on and off stage slowly and pointlessly...
...Beyond that, The Radiant City was disconcerting about what it seemed to be saying...
...Build him as a heel and then give the switch...
...He moves back and forth among litter-covered card tables, using the titular connective as a bridge, as he intermeshes his accounts of nuclear hazards, art censorship, the S&L scandal, the collapsing real estate market...
...But the artistic point of the work lies in Skipitares's conceptions...
...Meanwhile...
...I don't know what we can find, but I wouldn't even worry 692: Commonweal about it...
...Discriminating moviegoers might have a good time at The Fisher King if they see that its director, Terry Gilliam, is functioning here visually in the same way that those old actors performed histrionically...
...so used to pixilated solitude that she clings to it even in the face of love...
...But, with The Fisher King, Gilliam has gone mainstream in the worst way possible: He has taken a stale but potentially commercial script and lavished his visual gifts on it...
...His plot has many layers and all of them are stale...
...This speech was written more than twenty-five years ago and Mailer intended it to show how idiotic Hollywood could be...
...Terry Gilliam has a lot more to declare than he shows here...
...Some writers are fecund but King's scriptwriter, Richard La Gravenese, is only busy, busy, busy...
...He discovers humility...
...The show consists of three parts...
...RICHARD ALLEVA 22 November 1991:693...
...GERALD WEALES SCREEN TWO TOO CUTE 'FISHER KING' & 'FRANKIE & JOHNNY' hen they weren't doing Shakespeare, great nineteenth-century actors like James Tyrone and Henry Irving performed such potboilers as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Bells, not only for profit but as easy outlets for their spellbinding talents...
...Gilliam delights to work this sort of prestidigitation, and The Fisher King only lives when these flights of fancy take over the screen...
...But he is so accurate and generous in his conception of character, so deft and precise in his execution of details, and so empathetic with his fellow performers (he doesn't merely "share" a scene, he provides the kindling for his fellow actor's match) that he grounds everything he does in reality...
...Like Oscar Wilde, Bridges has nothing to declare but his genius...
...The Albany hacks were initially amusing a s comic caricature, but the limited animation which allowed them only a few movements made them as tiring as the giant come-on dolls outside funhouses...
...The very best and brightest of the New York critics--Terence Rafferty and David Denby among others--are praising this film for its sweetness, superlative acting, justness of observation, and glorious romantic comedy...
...If this is an account of how Moses led us into the wilderness and left us there, does that mean we were better off in Egypt (Riis's tenements...
...So, if you find yourself in an audience watching this movie and don't like what you see, just wait a minute...
Vol. 118 • November 1991 • No. 20
