Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985)

As we die-hard Monty Python fans know, Terry Gilliam, the illustrator for the movies and the TV series, is not only the American Python but also a native Minnesotan. Like Bob Dylan and other famous sons, however, we’ve seen little of him for a very long time. Provincial sour grapes aside, Gilliam’s fantastical cartoons for Monty Python offer a telling preview into the visual and narrative extremes of the movie Brazil.

Brazil’s convoluted plot, made more so by a disastrous studio recut, sends a pathetic everyman named Sam Lowry (played by Jonathan Pryce) into the classic and absurdly comic bureaucratic hell. While one recut tacks an abrupt happy ending onto the film (and cuts out numerous scenes in the middle), Gilliam’s director’s cut extends the absurdity in Freudian directions that explore Sam’s love interest in a final dream sequence. Although numerous recuts make plot summary more difficult, the basic plot outline is so convoluted it hardly matters. These recuts of the film, including a UK television version, the studio version, and Gilliam’s ultimate director’s cut (which Film Club is showing tonight), suggest even those responsible for the film don’t quite know what’s supposed to be happening. If you want a carefully crafted plot, you might want to look elsewhere. Enjoy Brazil for the splendid visual chaos, the satire of consumer culture, and it’s newly relevant look at terrorism and torture.

Amidst our current national discussion of torture and its consequences, watching Terry Gilliam’s absurdist dystopia Brazil may feel more chilling than absurd. It envisions a totalitarian state that clearly aims for the brutal efficiencies of Orwell’s 1984. In that grey, bleak novel, the omnipotent Big Brother seeks to extinguish all hope and all love from the world through a culture of paralyzing fear and mind numbing disinformation.

In Gilliam’s version, a similarly grey ideal gets sidetracked by gross incompetence. In this world, terrorism is mostly a common sense response to repeated bureaucratic ineptitude best shown by Robert DeNiro’s maniacal heating/air conditioning repairman who rebels against the system by doing unauthorized and (gasp!) undocumented repairs on HVAC systems. Similarly, Sam Lowry’s love interest in the film, the beautiful terrorist Jill Layton (Kim Greist), ultimately seeks to destroy the central authority through bombings after trying and failing to help her neighbor with government bureaucracy. Most chillingly, however, fellow former Python Michael Palin plays the chief torturer for the regime with a disturbing ability to compartmentalize. Moving from dingy office to domed torture chamber, Palin’s character looks like a slightly deranged dentist who cheerfully follows orders to apply his own “enhanced interrogation techniques” on whoever appears at his office door.

Despite its occasional bleakness, Gilliam’s movie (in whatever version) gleefully satirized plastic surgery, mindless office work, and technology in ways both more relevant and more comic than they were before.

John Wensman
Guest Film Club Commentator
SPA English Dept.