Like a girl from a fairytale or folk story, Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi) wears a red hood as she doggedly pursues her mission: to leave Tokyo and travel to the freezing fields of Minnesota to find the buried briefcase of cash that featured in the Coen Brothers’ 1995 crime drama Fargo. To be sure, David Zellner’s odd and dreamy Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter stretches credibility and borders on infuriating, asking us to believe that any contemporary young woman could possibly read Fargo as a documentary, or a treasure map, and that the cash could still exist, unmolested, years after its location had been captured on film. What crazy naivete and borderline psychosis could lead a person on such a journey? Is Kumiko cuckoo? That is one of the questions posed and never quite answered by the film, which is far too poetic for a concrete answer.
But craziness and treasure hunts go hand in hand in cinema history and the most heroic quests are often quixotic: romantic, absurd and wildly impractical. Like the ‘MacGuffin’ made famous by Hitchcock – an object or plot device that motivates the characters and advances the story but may itself be meaningless – it doesn’t really matter if the treasure is a rare coin, a giant emerald, a piece of film footage or a buried city. The treasure exists as a call to adventure; a need – deep, psychological and impossible to resist – to leave the routine comforts of everyday life and risk everything, even sanity, in search of a dream. Perhaps there’s a reason why filmmakers love stories of quixotic quests: it’s so damned hard to make a film that each project becomes a kind of exhausting, obsessive journey; the filmmakers themselves becoming crazed heroes expressing the triumph of will and tenacity over logic.
Source: Kumiko the Treasure Hunter
In the films themselves, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a literal treasure hunter, swashbuckling and crocodile hunting (Indiana Jones, pursuing the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1984) and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), or Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner Romancing the Stone (1984) and The Jewel of the Nile (1985)), or in search of more ephemeral spiritual treasure – Dave Bowman’s one-way trip to enlightenment in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or the scrambled grasping for eternal life in Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain (2006). The fact remains: there’s something crazy and illogical at work in these kinds of stories. They’re seeking to explore elements essential in the human psyche: the desire to become more than we are, possess more than we now have, and to step into the unknown even if it kills us or changes us beyond recognition. Like the American soldiers searching for a cache of hidden Iraqi gold in David O. Russell’s Three Kings (1999), the treasure unearthed is quite likely to be beyond imagining at the journey’s start. It doesn’t make sense. And yet it does.
Here's 5 interesting examples of quixotic quests on screen.
Lost in La Mancha (2002)
The very word ‘quixotic’ comes from Miguel de Cervantes’ 17th century Spanish novels about a delusional adventurer who has read so many chivalric novels that it drives him crazy and sends him out on an insane quest. He imagines himself a dashing knight and sets out on a journey to revive chivalry, undo wrongs and bring justice to the world – ‘tilting at windmills’, as they say. There have been many film and television adaptations, often doomed (including Orson Welles’ unfinished and apparently indescribable 1955 Don Quixote) but none so inherently quixotic as Terry Gilliam’s attempt to film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in 2000. Lost in La Mancha is the funny, heartbreaking making-of documentary about the besieged production. Floods, injuries to the leading man, Johnny Depp, and jet-fighter noise are just some of the insurmountable obstacles that come into play in a process that Woody Allen has described as “every director’s worst nightmare”. In truly indefatigable quixotic spirit however, Gilliam (a director famed for other ambitious, sometimes brilliant and sometimes deranged films like The Zero Theorem, Tideland and Brazil) is reported to be working on yet another version of this pet project.
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Source: Lost In La Mancha
Fitzcarraldo (1982)
No account of crazy quests on film would be complete without mention of Werner Herzog, a director who calls himself “the conquistador of the useless”. Herzog’s own idiosyncratic philosophy and tendency towards obsession seems to mirror the characters he portrays, whether they’re the gold-seeking conquistadors of Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972) or the obsessed grizzly bear activists who meet their death in the disturbing documentary Grizzly Man (2005). But for the most quixotic quest of all, see Fitzcarraldo, a grand account of a dreamer who tries to build an opera house in the middle of a South American jungle, a task that involves transporting a steamship across land, on foot, with only the help of the natives. Herzog’s real life attempt to transport said ship is now a legend of its own. Check out Herzog’s brilliant 1999 documentary My Best Fiend, about his relationship with erratic leading man, Klaus Kinski, for clues to the insanity.
Feature: The Backstory of Fitzcarraldo
Source: Fitzcarraldo
The Mosquito Coast (1986)
If bringing opera to the South American Indians sounds crazy, try taking an ice machine into the jungle and setting up an alternative society in Central American Belize. Peter Weir’s adaptation of Paul Theroux’s novel stars Harrison Ford as Allie Fox, a brilliant but delusional inventor disillusioned by American consumerism who transports his family to a small village away from civilisation, attempting to set up a utopia of his own creation. Blind to the realities of his family’s needs, he becomes increasingly fascist in his pursuit of a dream. It’s all bound to end in tears, but you can’t help admiring the eccentric genius before it goes wrong.
Source: The Mosquito Coast
The Razor’s Edge (1946)
‘The path to enlightenment is as sharp and narrow as a razor’s edge’ – and perhaps as difficult to capture on film without looking flaky. Nevertheless, there’s enjoyment to be had in this flawed and talky adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s mix of melodrama and metaphysics. The story traces the spiritual journey of Larry Darrell (Tyrone Power), a returned American fighter pilot scarred by survivor guilt after WWI, and unable to slot back into his planned life of stockbroking and socialising with his beautiful and spoilt fiancée (Gene Tierney, who is truly lovely in the cut-glass role). Instead, Larry becomes something like a saint after living in a Parisian garret, working as a coal miner and traveling to the top of a mountain to meditate. (You can also watch the 1984 adaptation, starring Bill Murray in his first serious dramatic role, though he can’t help injecting misplaced irony into the soul-seeking character.)
Source: The Razor's Edge
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2014)
A fantasist struggling to live in the real world, Walter Mitty becomes a real hero and adventurer in Ben Stiller’s adaptation of James Thurber’s famous 1939 short story. In this version, Mitty (Stiller, who stars as well as directs in what was reportedly an arduous passion project) takes on the seemingly pointless quest to recover a mysterious photo negative intended for the final Life magazine cover – apparently the photo is the 'quintessence’ of what Life is about. Walter must track down the mythical freelance photographer (a Zen-like Sean Penn) who lives ‘off-the-grid’ and is eventually located in the Himalayas shooting snow-leopards, of course. The journey involves much shark-punching, mountain-climbing and volcano-escaping. Though the production is sometimes self-aggrandising and looks like an advertisement for mid-life adventure travel, complete with inspirational soundtrack, you can’t begrudge the happy ending given to this oddball dreamer. Not all quixotic quests need end in disaster – at least in the Hollywood version.
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Source: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
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