Brazil (1985)

 

Brazil

It is possible to see a trend in the production of Terry Gilliam from his work with Monty Python to his movies in the eighties. What starts out as silly, anarchistic sketches, takes on an increasingly acerbic character in the Monty Python movies until by the time of Brazil there is a bitterness that is oddly at conflict with the comedy and makes for an uneasy combo. As a long time Python fan, it hurts saying it, but I was not greatly pleased with Gilliam’s “Brazil”.

“Brazil” takes place in a strange nightmarish world and more than anything, it is this world which is the main character of the movie. It is the unholy love child of a threesome of runaway bureaucracy, totalitarianism and consumerism. A system where everybody is a slave to forms, procedures and files, where the individual influence and power is zero and where the only thing anybody cares about is buying and credit ratings. This is a highly technical world where nothing, least of all the technology, works. It was likely all the things Gilliam hated, ramped up to eleven.

This world is both wildly scary and comically stupid. This is the Crimson Permanent Assurance setting sail on the high seas of finance as a pirate ship absurdity, but without the gleam in the eye. The elite are wearing shoes for hats and killing themselves with unnecessary plastic surgery, but it is not funny. Robert De Niro has a small role as the pirate heating engineer, Tuttle, who fears for his life when fixes the mess of the Central Services clowns. The Innocent Mr. Buttle is arrested instead of Tuttle because a bug messed with the printer and now he is tortured to death while the system is concerned that Mrs. Buttle was overcharged for the arrest. On paper hilarious but actually frightening in its inhuman brutality.

Through all this we follow Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), a lowly office worker with a well-connected mother who wants him to advance, mostly to make her look good. Lowry is quite good at his work, but with no ambition of his own. That change when he recognizes a woman from his dreams, the truck driver Jill Layton (Kim Greist). In his dream, he is a winged, angel-like hero, rescuing a damsel in distress from her demonic captors. A dream which is throughout recognized by various renditions of the classic theme of “Brazil”.

The dream and Sam’s reality starts to merge when he learns that Jill is now hunted by the authorities, simply for embarrassing them. It becomes Sam’s real-life mission to save Jill as he saves the girl in his dream and soon they are on the run from the stormtroopers of the bureaucracy.

Everything in “Brazil” extends into the surreal, even Sam’s chase. There is a clear indication that eventually he turns mad and in this dream state his life starts making more sense than the reality he left.

I want to like all the dark humor, all the absurd notions and curious references, such as the Stairs of Odessa, but the bitterness is so overwhelming that the absurdity becomes scary rather than fun. The cleaner who keeps on cleaning in the middle of a shootout, the torturer playing with his little girl, the bureaucrat asking the wife of the arrested man for signatures in triplicates for the receipt of the arrest. It is all so brutal that it is just not that fun anymore.

Apparently, the audience at the time was also rather confused about the movie and it did not do that well. I can see that. While it is long, it has nothing to do with that. Even the confusing plot cannot entirely be blamed. I think it rests with the level of bitterness projected here. This is the helpless feeling of being a dehumanized victim of an uncaring bureaucracy. Not fun, just absurd and maddening.

I wonder what the system had done to Terry Gilliam.