A mix of fantasy and social drama, The Fisher King is not the sort of movie we might have expected from the impish, baroque fabulist who gave us Time Bandits, Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen or that wonderful "insurance pirates" section from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. In its main plot, appropriate for 1991, wealth and fame collapse into squalor as a guilt-ridden radio talk-show host (Jeff Bridges' Jack) -- demoralized by the mass murder incited by his own flippantÊcommentary -- meets one of the murderer's bereaved victims, a seemingly insane bum named Parry (Robin Williams). Almost against his will, Jack slides with him into a better world -- one of knightly quests, friendship and true love. It's a male-bonding story, but women figure into the quests, too: Mercedes Ruehl's tough-savvy Anne and Amanda Plummer's Lydia -- Parry's Dulcinea.

At first, the film appears to be a "simple" drama of redemption, with mythic underpinnings. Yet, on its way to no fewer than three happy endings -- all wildly improbable -- it moves into Gilliam's Quixotic, quicksilver oeuvre. The Fisher King isn't Gilliam's script -- it's an original by a young writer named Richard LaGravanese -- but it's clear that these two were, or became, kindred spirits.

LaGravanese's characters might be dreaming up the fantasies of Gilliam's other pictures, and one of them -- Robin Williams' Parry -- actually retreats into his own Gilliam-land. It fits. If the man who dreamed up Brazil suddenly woke up and looked around, he'd see a world very much like the "reality" here -- the nightmares of modern Manhattan, where murder explodes out of nowhere and the affluent walk past the wretched with complete indifference. Framed by the obscene schism between wealth and poverty that widened during the 1980s, The Fisher King is about people who fall -- and how the fall humanizes some of them, opens their eyes.

The Fisher King has a lot of the old Gilliam tongue-in-cheek splendor: Grand Central Station transformed into a ballroom whirling with waltzers (including two ecstatic Hassidic rabbis); Parry's imaginary jousts; and the elaborate contortions ofÊthe "real-life" scenes, with their dense, deep, Wellesian perspectives.

But people who think that the director of Brazil and Munchausen is a man running away from reality (instead of someone who, like all great fantasists, weaves his dreams from it) will get a shock from one aspect of The Fisher King: the acting. Gilliam's usual talent for brilliant comic excess shines through in many of the things Williams, Ruehl, and Plummer do here; they're all edgy and superb. But how many times, in any movie, have we seen a portrait of a man on the edge -- fallible, desperate, opportunistic, nasty and kind by turns -- as rich and real as the one Jeff Bridges gives as Jack? This is the kind of acting you might expect in a movie directed by Kazan, Scorsese or Cassavetes.

Before the triple bliss of the finale, Gilliam has shown us why we need dreams -- and why we need to wake up. And it's that collision that makes The Fisher King remarkable. Joyous and horrific, sweet and raw, fabulous and earthy, it fits right into Gilliam's brightly fantastic gallery -- with its tale of the wonder you can pluck from your terrors, the Grail that's hidden in trash. And when it asks, wryly, "I like New York in June. . . . How about you?" -- you don't have to share the sentiment to join in the celebration.
-- MICHAEL WILMINGTON

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