Word: fitzcarraldo
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...charismatic dreamer with inexhaustible curiosity and a mile-wide stubborn streak, Herzog, 64, might be a character from one of his own classic movies--Fitzcarraldo, or Aguirre, the Wrath of God--in which a man is seized by some outsize ambition and just about kills himself trying to realize it. But those were fiction films, which constitute less than half of Herzog's output. In his documentaries he is just as driven to make film heroes out of real men with their own crazy dreams...
...seized by some magnificent idea or ideal, and his pursuit often drives himself toward madness and those around him near despair. That is the grand theme that Herzog has examined, and embodied, for more than three decades, in fiction films like Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, and in such documentaries as My Best Fiend (about his frequent leading man Klaus Kinski) and La Soufri?re (about his own journey toward an active Guadaloupe volcano from which all others were fleeing). Recently he found two other suitable subjects, made two extraordinary films. One is Timothy Treadwell, the very engaging...
...made great films (Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo) about men who follow their obsessions into the South American jungle. Now Werner Herzog has a real-life visionary in his viewfinder. Graham Dorrington, seated behind Herzog, above, is an English scientist who dreams of building and flying an airship--not a giant Zeppelin but a small vessel shaped like a white diamond. Handsome and haunted, Dorrington has traveled to Guyana to make the damn thing...
...that great films can’t come out of this tradition. Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, Stroheim’s Greed, and Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo are good examples. But it’s still problematic to me that, especially in America, our auteurs have increasingly come to be judged by the extent of their excess. We seem to be constantly grasping at straws to rescue excessive mistakes of the past as well, like with Heaven’s Gate...
Especially disappointing is the lack of atmosphere throughout most of the film. Herzog spent years laboring in the Amazon, but for all that, Fitzcarraldo might just as well have been filmed on some Berlin soundstage, or even in a bathtub. There are some nice shots of the boat gliding along, framed by rosy-gray sunsets, but nothing that Marlo Perkins couldn't have shown us. Fitzcarraldo's guest is acted out in such grandiloquently theatrical terms that even the mighty Amazon gets relegated to the status of a cardboard backdrop...