The King and the Fool: Robin Williams in “The Fisher King”

Robin Williams’s suicide last August kicked off the latest round of handwringing over the received wisdom that the funniest comedians often suffer from overwhelming depression. But as shocking as the entertainer’s death was, Williams could never really bury his mental-health struggles. Quite the opposite: His manic sense of humor—a frenzied combination of observation, left-field references, impressions, and desperate earnestness—betrayed a man constantly trying to sprint ahead of his demons, to block the path with as much whimsy as possible in the hopes of dissuading the dark force always slouching toward him. Even his smile gave him away, his mouth pulled back in a tight, ingratiating rictus that could be read as a wince, eyes squinting in a nebulous terrain between mirth and pain.

Williams’s acting tended to be split between two impulses: that caterwauling brand of full-body comedy, and a Juilliard-honed flair for the dramatic that placed the man’s real fragility on naked display. But it is his performance in Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King that bridged the chasm between these modes, reconciling the direct evocation of the man’s pain with the humor he used to paper over it. Williams does not appear in the film’s first 20 minutes, during which time the focus instead falls on shock jock Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges), who falls into alcoholic ruin after inadvertently goading a lonely caller into a murderous rampage. One night, a drunken Jack is saved from being killed by a roving pack of punks by a homeless man named Parry (Williams), soon revealed to have lost his wife in the shooting spree of Jack’s jilted fan.

Parry, who displaces his trauma through a fixation on Arthurian legend, allows Williams to use his extreme highs to probe his deepest lows. Parry’s fathomless grief manifests as giddy, deranged humor and flights of imaginative fancy; he enters the frame backlit so that his rags initially have the outline of true armor, an effect instantly spoiled by Parry launching a plunger arrow into a foe’s groin. That immediate visual juxtaposition, as well as Parry’s combination of florid medieval pronouncements and streetwise vulgarity, swiftly defines the character’s parameters, but Williams uses that set foundation to subvert expectations of the character.

By playing an explicitly traumatized character that nonetheless projects his depression as manic joyousness, Williams could temper the most ingratiating elements of both his purely comic and purely dramatic work. Parry’s propensity for volatile movements and octave leaps from normal speech into high-pitched squeals of delight speed up the usually glacial pace of Williams’s serious acting, but just as importantly, that severity slows Williams down enough to allow the viewer to appreciate the nuances in the actor’s physical comedy, the many subtleties usually lost in the sheer onslaught of his light-speed delivery. Secreting Jack to his hideaway, Parry emanates warmth at the thought of company, so happy that he even responds to Jack’s condescending “You are a psychotic man” with an enthusiastic “I know.” But Parry also knows more than he lets on, as when he responds to Jack’s attempts to pay off his guilt and his brusque reactions to Parry’s mad quests with an irony-laced “You care!” It’s rare that characters with mental illness are portrayed as being self-aware, as so many real people with mental illness are, and these minute touches flesh out Parry in ways that most characters like him never are, including the raving figures that populate Gilliam’s other films.

Williams truly comes into his own, however, when attempting to woo Lydia (Amanda Plummer), the mousy accountant with whom he is smitten. When Jack cons Lydia into going out with Parry, the resulting double date is a showcase for Williams’s physical comedy, even though he never leaves his booth. In a static medium long shot of the foursome broken up only by time-eliding wipes, Williams enters into an awkward pas de deux with Plummer as the two spin the Lazy Susan on the table with abandon and reach over everyone to loudly scrape and rearrange dishes. At one point, the two fumble with chopsticks over a loose dumpling, sending the tiny wooden legs splaying out every which way in a Chaplin-esque table dance that turns into an impromptu soccer match. As goofy and uncomfortable as Parry can be in this scene, he also starts to relax around Lydia, putting less emphasis on winning her over with overthought schemes and impassioned speeches than in simply having a good time and goading her into laughing. Though he exists totally in the scene, Williams inadvertently reveals his comic ethos: displacing his own anxieties by alleviating those of others, in the process elevating himself.

Positioned near the end of the second act, the Chinese restaurant scene represents the climax of Williams’s performance and of the involuntary insights he provides into his own life. Admittedly, it is easier to interpret his acting through the prism of retrospect, but the parallels between the actor and the character often vanish entirely. The Fisher King may be Gilliam’s most straightforward film, but Parry is a fantastical creation, even if you omit his Grail fixation and his visions of a wrathful red knight. He is an idealized rendering of the less visible, more complicated mental illness that affected Williams and affects countless other people. In the real world, there are no talismans that can cure catatonia and no desperate romances that can simply fix holes in one’s psyche.

Watching the film now, the most heartwarming aspect of its depiction of Parry is not his redeeming relationship with Lydia but the fact that the man is surrounded by the illness of others. Jack reels from his complicity in a mass murder by retreating into alcoholism and stasis, while Lydia punctures Parry’s idealized vision of her by noting her own capacity to feel “like a piece of dirt.” Even Anne (Mercedes Ruehl), Jack’s girlfriend, struggles with the emotional toll of her relationship, enduring Jack’s lethargy and misery out of a one-sided love she cannot abandon. Parry obsesses over the story of the Fisher King because he wants to be the guileless fool who finds the grail to make things better, only to become the king in need of healing. What Gilliam’s film suggests is that people can be both the king and the fool, eager to help while requiring aid oneself. Seen in light of Robin Williams’s death, the movie offers a kind of fairy-tale variation of true events, but if it allows the viewer to imagine a happier ending for this late, great performer, it also offers up his most honest work, and a reminder of why the world will not be the same without him.