UK science fiction
1985
color 142 min.
Director: Terry Gilliam
CAV: $149.95 - available
5 discs, catalog # CC1348l
CLV: $49.95 - available
1 disc, catalog # CC1528L
While researching a book on the making of and the feud over the American release
of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, I read nearly every review published in the U.S., and
saw very few that failed to describe the story as "futuristic" or "Orwellian."
Most called it both. The comparisons are understandable, if inaccurate. There
isn't a futuristic moment or element in Brazil. The story is Orwellian, in the
sense that it is set in a totalitarian state where individuality is smothered by
enforced conformity. But where George Orwell, writing in 1948, was envisioning a
future ruled by fascism and technology, Gilliam was satirizing the bureaucratic,
largely dysfunctional industrial world that had been driving him crazy all his
life.
Gilliam, born in suburban Los Angeles eight years before the publication of
Orwell's 1984, was both an artist and a social rebel when he came of age in the
mid-'60s. And his talent and political irreverence served him well, first as a
cartoonist for Harvey Kurtzman's New YorkÐbased Help! magazine, then as the
illustrator for London-based Monty Python's Flying Circus. As Gilliam's career
expanded, to include a co-directing assignment with Terry Jones on Monty Python
and the Holy Grail, and solos as director of Jabberwocky and Time Bandits, so did
his horizons.
After the success of Time Bandits, a movie rejected by every major
studio, Gilliam declined an offer to direct Fox's big-budget sci-fi adventure
Enemy Mine, determined instead to make an anti-bureaucratic fantasy he called
Brazil. The inspiration for Brazil, as Gilliam explains in the supplement to this
Criterion Special Edition, came from several intersecting ideas inside his head,
all of them having to do with the craziness of our awkwardly ordered society and
the desire to escape it through whatever means. It's the theme that links
Gilliam's Dreams Trilogy. Time Bandits was the story of a boy escaping a troubled
homelife through fantastic trips in time. Brazil is the story of a young man
escaping a totalitarian existence through flights of fancy and, ultimately,
insanity. His subsequent The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is the story of an
old storyteller demonstrating to a young girl the value of magic in a world of
violence.
Brazil is the least optimistic of Gilliam's films, and the most
personal. Sam Lowry, brilliantly portrayed by Jonathan Pryce, is the flipside to
Gilliam's own personality. Sam is an unambitious, mid-level bureaucrat trying to
stay out of trouble while being haunted by recurring dreams of a beautiful woman
beckoning to him, and a metallic, flame-spouting samurai attempting to squash
him. The woman represents hope, and the samurai the system. When Sam sees his
dream girl's likeness in the face of a woman (Kim Greist) he suspects of being a
terrorist, he recklessly pursues her and brings upon himself the wrath of the
system.
Gilliam's busy imagination is not to all tastes and the kaleidoscope of images
melding the real and unreal worlds of "Brazil" was seen as an assault on the
senses by viewers who complained that the movie didn't know where to end. In
fairness to them, Brazil is a movie, like Orson Welles' Citizen Kane and Fritz
Lang's Metropolis, that needs to be seen over and over to be fully appreciated.
Hollywood is not geared to marketing movies that demanding, and it was his
determination to make Brazil more "accessible" that led MCA-Universal CEO Sidney
J. Sheinberg to insist on major changes. The months-long battle that ensued
between the executive and the filmmakers over the release version of Brazil ended
in December, 1985, when the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, whose members
had seen Gilliam's final cut at a series of clandestine screenings, chose it as
the year's best picture, Gilliam as best director, and Gilliam, Charles McKeown,
and Tom Stoppard as authors of the year's best screenplay. Universal released the
film two weeks later, and it received Oscar nominations for both its script and
Norman Garwood's stunning production design.
A decade later, Brazil is regarded by
many critics, historians, filmmakers, and film buffs as one of the most original
and influential movies of the past 50 years. "'Brazil' is the most potent piece
of satiric political cinema since
Dr. Strangelove," wrote the critic
Kenneth Turan in California magazine. Best-selling fantasy author Harlan Ellison,
writing in Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, declared Brazil "the finest SF
movie ever made." In a Time magazine piece celebrating Gilliam's victory, critic
Richard Corliss wrote: "A terrific movie has escaped the asylum without a
lobotomy. The good guys, the few directors itching to make films away from the
assembly line, won one for a change."
This special edition of Brazil includes
Gilliam's final "final cut," which restores some of the scenes cut from the
two-hour, 22-minute European version, plus the director's scene-by-scene
narration, the complete "studio cut," which was released for TV syndication, a
detailed production history, with illustrations and storyboards, an award-winning
documentary on the making of the movie, and my own essay--with interviews--on the
battle over its release.
--Jack Mathews
