Word: herzog
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...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...
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...
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...
...Conquistador of the useless," a rival calls Fitzcarraldo. Fitz says: "I am the spectacle in the forest." This is Herzog talking, of course, not Kinski or Fitzcarraldo. Or rather, Herzog is all his characters, all his actors. He is the dreamer, the savage, the engulfing river. This time, Herzog steered his craft through rapids and longueurs, outside dangers and his own follies. A madman and a survivor: a moviemaking Ahab who lived to tell his fabulous tale. -By Richard Corliss