Fitzcarraldo (1982)

FITZCARRALDO  ((1982)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Werner Herzog
    Klaus Kinski, Claudia Cardinale, José Lewgoy,
    Paul Hittscher, Miguel Ángel Fuentes, Grande Othelo,
    Huerequeque Enrique Bohórquez, Peter Berling
At what point does art cross over into madness? At what point does madness become art? And when do the two become indistinguishable? Take "Fitzcarraldo". It stars Klaus Kinski, who was mad as a hatter, or at least knew how to act that way, as a mad-eyed adventurer obsessed with the idea of bringing grand opera to the Amazon jungle. To do that, he buys a gigantic derelict steamboat, fixes it up, sails it upstream, and recruits a tribe of headhunters to haul it up and over a mountain to another river. To get all that in the movie, director Werner Herzog did the same thing. No effects, no models, real tribesmen, a real jungle and a 320-ton boat. The result is both breathtaking and hair-raising. Trees are felled, logs are planed, pulleys strain, cables creak and snap, the boat like some great hulking beast crawls its way up through the mud, and how Herzog accomplished all of that without getting everybody killed is hard to imagine. The danger looks way too real. German engineering, I suppose. So you've got a character who's nuts, played by an actor who's certifiable, and a filmmaker who's gone a little too far up the river himself. It's a movie about the madness of its own making. You can see it right there on the screen. It's insane. It's heroic. It's like nothing else.