FITZCARRALDO Movie Review

Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo is the story of an obsessive, perhaps maniacal, self-styled entrepreneur (Klaus Kinski at his most possessed) whose dream it is to build a full-scale opera house in one of the deepest jungles of the Amazon's rain forest. Since the story is set at the end of the last century, it's only logical that Fitzcarraldo's dream will be complete only if Caruso sings there. (As someone who's worked in a museum most of his life, seeing this movie cured me of ever again carping about “community outreach” programs.) To get the money to build the opera house, Fitzcarraldo believes that he must find a way to get a huge steamship into an uncharted and inaccessible river in order to open up new trade routes. The only way to do it—and the reason for the movie's existence—is for Fitzcarraldo to drag the massive ship over the top of a huge mountain and gently lower it into the waiting river on the other side. His life boils down to this single feat, and so does Herzog's film. The startling sight of Fitzcarraldo in his white suit and tie, supervising this clearly impossible task for the sake of importing “culture” to the Peruvian jungles is an obvious but undeniably compelling sysiphian metaphor for much about western society, and much about many of our lives. As a cohesive film, however, Fitzcarraldo's got a bit of a limp; much of it feels sluggish and padded, as if there were too much plot concocted to justify Fitzcarraldo's stunt. Yet every time that we want to tell Herzog to cut to the chase, an unexpectedly lyrical image or note of music delights and astonishes us, and we settle back into the spectacle. The making of this movie was as difficult as the task that Fitzcarraldo sets for himself; the nightmare of filming it was captured in a superb documentary called Burden of Dreams by Herzog's friend Les Blank. One tip: see Fitzcarraldo before seeing Burden of Dreams, otherwise the more astounding journey won't be saved for last.

NEXT STOP … Burden of Dreams, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Apocalypse Now

1982 (PG) 157m/C GE Klaus Kinski, Claudia Cardinale, Jose Lewgoy, Miguel Angel Fuentes, Paul Hittscher; D: Werner Herzog; W: Werner Herzog; C: Thomas Mauch; M: Popul Vuh. Cannes Film Festival '82: Best Director (Herzog). VHS WAR