|
Kurosawa's Dodes'ka-den is the antecedent, so is Harvey's They Might Be Giants. Manhattan dissonances and harmonies, up in the glass tower and down in the grotty gutter, a profusion of canted angles to crack open "this jaded motherfucking city." Fall of the big-shot shock-jock (Jeff Bridges), slumming at a video store after his misanthropic rants trigger a yuppie-killer. The brassy grit of his girlfriend (Mercedes Ruehl) goes unappreciated, he's more at home in his cups quoting Nietzsche on "the bungled the botched" to a Pinocchio doll. "The janitor of God" to the rescue, a vagabond (Robin Williams) wielding hood-ornament Excalibur and show tunes, a widowed professor pushed by grief into deranged mythology. A medieval quester in his own mind, whose Holy Grail is a trophy sitting on a billionaire's bookshelf on Fifth Avenue. "Who'd think you'd find anything divine there?" Terry Gilliam goes home, lending welcome hard edges to the quirk and uplift of Richard LaGravenese's screenplay. The metropolis of garbage (cf. Fellini's Ginger and Fred) has its bright spots, Grand Central Station turns into a ballroom of waltzing commuters as the broken jester locates the klutz of his dreams (Amanda Plummer). "Where would King Arthur be without Guinevere?" "Happily married, probably." Pain and shtick, baleful frenzies and life lessons, baroque architecture for that New Age redemption. The traumatic memory is a dead wife's splatter taking the shape of a fire-breathing knight, the calm center is a double date at a Chinese restaurant serenaded to "Lydia the Tattooed Lady." The crowd-pleasing canvas is perhaps too cuddly for the demons of Gilliam's imagination, a "state of radical amazement" is achieved all the same. "Besides, you can find some wonderful things in the trash." Carax's concurrent Les Amants du Pont-Neuf gets the alchemy right. Cinematography by Roger Pratt. With Michael Jeter, Christian Clemenson, David Hyde Pierce, Lara Harris, Kathy Najimy, John de Lancie, and Tom Waits.
--- Fernando F. Croce |