‘The Fisher King’: Robin Williams’ most overlooked performance
There are few performers as truly versatile as Robin Williams, with an approach to his craft that was unparalleled in the way he merged tragedy and humour within his comedic and dramatic roles. Whether it be the devastating truth at the heart of Mrs Doubtfire as one man tries to maintain contact with his kids or the darkness of Dead Poets Society, the actor has always brought a certain sense of playfulness and pain to each role, making each character feel wonderfully complex and human in the tension that lies between both emotional extremes.
It’s an extremity that exists in most of us, with the contradictions of our own emotional depths mirroring the many ups and downs that we encounter throughout our lives, and a quality that Williams channelled into his work through characters that hone in on the light to deal with the dark.
While we perhaps best know him for roles in films like Aladdin, Good Will Hunting and Good Morning, Vietnam, there was one role of his that most beautifully encapsulated this very quality and remains to this day as his most overlooked performance.
During the 1990s, Terry Gilliam was a loose cannon within cinema, creating edgy and surrealist masterpieces that confront audiences with a dark and less easily understood reality. Whether it be the drug-crazed world of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or the disturbing undertone to Brasil, the director has never been one to play it safe, leading to his fascinating collaboration with Robin Williams, another creative who never adhered to the status quo.
The Fisher King, directed in 1991, follows a famous radio star who experiences a huge fall from grace, leading him to cross paths with a homeless man called Perry who reinvigorates his outlook on life. The pair join forces to locate what Perry describes as the Holy Grail, which will supposedly free them of all pain. While both are in very different circumstances, they unite over this shared pain and sense of being lost, finding an unexpected common ground and learning how to move on after experiencing great loss.
While Jeff Bridges was met with critical acclaim for his role as Jack, marking an unexpected turn in his career at the time, it was Williams who stole the show, embodying the effervescent and larger-than-life character of Perry – a man dressed in garbage and fingerless gloves who injects life and wonder into the bleak world around him.
After being discarded and mistreated by harsh New York society, Perry has created a dreamlike escapist reality to cope with his past. He puts on a show and creates a strange tonal juxtaposition between his relentless youthful energy and optimism and the weathered melancholia of everyone around him.
There was no better person than Williams for the job, with a joyful exuberance and sense of innocence that makes you feel for this character in the deepest of ways. His performance touches on the inner child within all of us, reminding us of the magic that can be found in the grownup world and how we can reconnect with this if we only choose to see the fairytales that exist in plain sight.
While tinged with undeniable sadness, Williams brings life to a character that nobody else could realise, approaching the story with full force and allowing every aspect of his emotional toolkit to influence the wonderfully weird character of Perry.
