Words Of One Syllabus

By RICHARD CORLISS

THE FISHER KING Directed by Terry Gilliam; Screenplay by Richard LaGravenese

The school year has just started, and already we're getting tired of the lessons movies have to teach. For most of the summer, a season that should provide a vacation from the heavy hand of pedagogy, moviegoers have been pummeled with do-gooder didacticism. Calves are good (City Slickers). So are dogs (101 Dalmatians). Men, of course, are baaad (Terminator 2, Thelma & Louise), unless they are ghetto fathers (Boyz N the Hood), in which case women are bad. Physicians need remedial courses in niceness (The Doctor, Doc Hollywood). And lawyers, should they care to join the human race, need a shot in the head (Regarding Henry). Some summer! Whether the star was Arnold Schwarzenegger or Harrison Ford, you couldn't tell the players without a report card.

So here comes the fall's first big movie, and now we're in World Literature 101. Cart out all those Holy Grail legends stored in the attic of your memory and apply them to a four-handed love story. But the true lesson is more familiar: psychotic people are holy seers, tour guides into the nine circles of the urban soul.

When he finds his guide, Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges) is in a self-made hell. A New York City talk-show host, Jack told a caller he was among "the bungled and the botched," and the caller promptly gunned down seven people at a yuppie boite. Three years later, a wasted husk in the care of a video-store owner (the ingratiating Mercedes Ruehl), Jack meets the husband of one of those victims, now a daft street creature called Parry (Robin Williams), who leads his fellow homeless in singing "I like New York in June./ How about you?" Parry believes that Jack is a modern Fisher King, a '90s knight searching for the grail of emotional redemption, and Parry knows where it is: in a billionaire's mansion. Parry also has a quest: to win the troth of a frayed damsel (Amanda Plummer, again doing her prom-queen-from-Mars number).

This is all catnip to Terry Gilliam, deviser of the Monty Python animations and co-director of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. On his own he directed one commercial hit (Time Bandits) and one cult smash (Brazil). Critics, this one included, went crazy for Brazil; but not many citizens felt at home amid all the astringent whimsy. And the director's next phantasmagoria, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, was a $50 million flop.

Like all these, The Fisher King is long, dark and handsome -- disorienting comedy in a Boschian fun house. Some big emotional moments are bungled or botched. The narrative scaffolding, all that Grail gathering, is both too elaborate and too gossamer to support what is at heart a buddy movie. And the film's moral is bizarre: for two guys to achieve sanity and humanity, they should get naked together some night in Central Park. What if moviegoers take this advice to heart? They could get a stern lesson, and it wouldn't be applied with a ruler.

But inside the lecture there are pleasures galore: the subplot of Williams and Plummer, sweet losers in love; the delirious intensity of all four stars, as if they were in a psychodrama and not a fairy tale; a terrific turn by Michael Jeter as a deranged chorus boy belting out tunes from Gypsy; a waltz cotillion of a couple hundred commuters at Grand Central Terminal. All this attests to Gilliam's filmmaking glamour, which gives heft to the tale and invests Manhattan with a malefic majesty. A million reservations notwithstanding, I like The Fisher King. How about you?