King of The Jungle

"WHEN YOU SHOOT in elephant, he sometimes stays 10 days on his feet before topping over," a character declures near the begining of Fitzearruldo. With this hit of incident dealogue, the German director Wener Herzog has hit open a sadly apt metaphor forhis new film. Over a 21/2 hour stretch of celluloid, Fitzearruldo lurches and becomes like some Teatonic pachyderm. Drunk on its own significance it dies at our feet collasping under its own weight.

Watching this film fold is in itself an unnerving spectacle. Though Fitzearruldo is almost as overbudgeted, overproduced, overblown as many Hollywood bondanzas, the added symbolic and idenlogical freight produced a particularly land thud when the whole thing falls aprt.

Fitzearruldo (Klaus Kinski) is the Indians name for Brian Sweency Fazgerald, a half-crazed, half-Irish failed enterpreneur who is driven by an extraordinary obsession with opera. He hits upon the grand scheme of building an aperu house in the middle of the Peruviam Amazon jungle--a shrine to his god Caruso. To finance his brainechild, Fitzearruldo attempts to claims a large expanse of unexplored territory and cash in on the huge rubber free crop. In order to reach the area, however, he must unvigute up one river and cross over a ridge of land to another river--drugging one large steamship and host of manacing Indians in his wake.

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.

WITH THE GROUNDWORK thus laid out. Herzog sends Kinski and his crew up the river. They chug in a rickety steamship chiristened the Molly-Aida--a name which contains the symbolic kernel of film. The yoking of Molly (Claudia Cordinate), a brothel madame, and Fitzearruldo's mistress, and Verdi's opera is a neon sign for the Juxtapostio of Prostitution and Art. It's Imperialism and the Musc, strolling in hand up into the old Heart of Darkness. Unfortuantely, this potentialty interesting irony is crushed by the film's mass. P>Early in journey upstream. Herzog achieves one scene of considerable,, if fleeting, power,. As the Molly-Aida slowly slices through the water, a low drumming echoes through the Amazon darkness. For almost 10 munutes, Fitzearruldo and his crew stand silently enthralled by the hypnotic tattoo. But Herzog loosens the straglehold of the dialogue only for a moment. The drums recede, day breaks and Kinski and his cre begin babbling and gesticulating again.

shortly afterward, the film arrives at its intended climax, which proves to be its downfull. Contronted with the ridge separating him from his destination. Fitzearruldo decides to cross it by taking the entire boat along with him. This action tries to capture the madness of the quest. But a symbol requires subtlety, and once again. Herzog stitles, all nuances. The ship is indeed dragged across the land with help him the Indians who, having stepped out from behind their ominuos drumbeat, trurn to be disappointingly sullen rather than mysterious. For at least a half hour they pull the creaking ship through the slimy mud. By the time Molly-Aida gets to the other side. we,ve seen so much sweat and struggle that the achievementseem the inevitable trumph of enough muscle, rather than the culmination of a mythic journey.

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 of the matter, opera and art have very little to do with the journey that is undertaken. Instead a synthesized German pop soundtrack intrudes for much of the film. There is nothing to sustain the meaning, and it is no wonder that Fitzcarraldo falls apart. It's like watching a Wagnerian opera where the sound has been turned off. All that remains are frantically moving lips and hollow gestures.

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.