Word: fitzcarraldo
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Quite obviously, there are allegorical implications here. Finding them is akin to walking behind our metaphorical elephant in Herzog circus. All that is needed to pick up on the symbols is a rather large shovel. What Fitzcarraldo lacks is subtlety and grace. Herzog leaves little to the imagination, and the result is a film that numbs us by its stubborn unwieldiness...
...Fitzcarraldo--and through him. Herzog himself--acts out his grand obsession before us, but it remains curiously uninvolving, even alienating. The problem is that rather than drawing us into his vision. Herzog gives us a spectacle of diatribe and gesture...
Much of the dialogue confuses grandiosity with meaning, and often degenerates into pretentiousness and pomposity. "I SHALL MOVE A MOUNTAIN!" Fitzcarraldo shouts exultantly, as the subtitles drain their stock of capital letters. "I want my opera house!" he screams, staggering around the church beltry that overlooks the squalid shantytown where he proposes to build it. Long before the film is over, this sort of rhetoric sounds as tinny, hollow, and mechanical as the old Caruso 78s that constantly blare out of Fitzcarraldo's favorite icon, his gramophone...
Unfortunately, Herzog never goes deeper. We hear nothing but his superficial ranting, and his greedy expression as he listens to his records, all of this has about as much resonance as the picture of the RCA dog cocking an ear for "His Master's Voice." In establishing Fitzcarraldo's motivation so haphazardly. Herzog undermines the rest of the film at the outset: instead of being drawn into a grand quest we are forced to watch an overblown whim...
Klaus Kinski's performance accounts for much of Fitzcarraldo's failure. He overacts ferociously at times to the point of self-parody. He seems stuck in some personal theater, far removed from the film. And for all his furious energy, he is completely cramped by his own style. We can only agree when Fitzcarraldo shouts. "I am the spectacle of the forest!" Though Claudia Cardinale and the rest of the cast try their hardest, they are lost in the overkill of the director and his star. Most ironical of all, Fitzcarraldofack's music. Though supposedly at the heart...