Film Review
And now for something completely different - a nightmare wrapped in a dream
inside the maze of a mind in terminal meltdown. As both a work
of cinema and an examination of the human soul,
Brazil stands alone
- a masterfully conceived dystopian fantasy in which the monstrous visions
of Orwell and Kafka collide like ions in a particle accelerator to bring
into being something even darker and profounder. What
Brazil presents
us with is a truly terrifying prospect, a world in which all trace of human
individuality and feeling is being driven to extinction by a self-serving
bureaucracy that has got completely out of control - with the help of an
ever-growing army of petty administrators. This is a world where 'The
Form' rules absolutely - a form that has to be signed in triplicate, submitted
with a receipt, stamped by at least three separate departments, filed, re-filed
and then used to generate at least three more forms. Forget Dante's
Nine Circles of Hell. What
Brazil presents is an infernal vision
of a far more terrifying order - a Ponzi-like
paper chase that has one clear goal, to engulf and devour the whole of humanity.
The director Terry Gilliam was inspired to make the film as a frantic cri
de coeur after his own creative endeavours had been repeatedly frustrated
by bureaucratic processes within his profession and in life generally.
It is a sign of the perversity of our particular branch of the Multiverse
that the same pettifogging, small-minded office mentality that Gilliam railed
against so fiercely in this - his greatest achievement - was to be his principal
adversary in getting the film seen in the form that he had intended.
Life has a tendency to imitate art, but rarely to the unimaginably pathological
extent that Gilliam encountered in his year-long battle with Universal to
get
Brazil released in America without the drastic cuts that would
have ruined it.
By this stage in his career, Gilliam was a highly regarded and commercially
successful filmmaker. It was through his work as an animator on the
popular British television series
Monty Python's Flying Circus in
the late 1960s, early 1970s, that Gilliam became famous, and this led to
him making his directing debut (alongside Terry Jones) on
Monty Python and the
Holy Grail (1975). His first solo offering as a director on
Jabberwocky (1977) was not a great success but the film that came
in its wake -
Time Bandits (1981) - was such a phenomenal box office
hit that Gilliam's future as an A-list filmmaker looked pretty well assured.
His next film,
Brazil, was to stay with the central theme of its predecessor
- the idea of escape through imagination - but adopts a far grimmer tone,
befitting the sepulchrous mood of the UK at a time when, under an increasingly
authoritarian rightwing government, the country was constantly beset with
strikes, social unrest, terrorist attacks and an ever-expanding barrage of
pointless bureaucracy (not to mention some truly dire sitcoms). If
you want a taste of just how relentlessly depressing life was in Thatcher's
Britain of the early 1980s all you have to do is watch Shane Meadows'
This
England (2006). Compare this with
Brazil and you'll see
immediately why Gilliam regarded his film as a documentary of its era.
From Metropolis to retro-tech dystopia
Even though
Brazil is widely classified as a science-fiction movie,
Terry Gilliam refutes this and prefers to promote the film as a political
cartoon. Whatever its intended genre, the film certainly benefited
from the dramatic renaissance in sci-fi cinema in the late 1970s after the
rip-roaring success of George Lucas's
Star
Wars (1977) and it would in turn prove to be massively influential
in the development of science-fiction on the big and small screen for many
decades. Stylistically and thematically,
Brazil fits neatly
within the nascent sub-genre of sci-fi noir, alongside Ridley Scott's
Blade Runner (1982) and James Cameron's
The Terminator (1984) - films that achieved a new gritty realism and
heightened dramatic intensity through the application of expressionistic techniques
employed in classic film noir thrillers of the 1940s and '50s. Robert
Aldrich is often credited as the originator of sci-fi noir with his 1955
genre-crossing oddity
Kiss Me Deadly
(1955), although Jean-Luc Godard's
Alphaville
(1965) did much more to establish the look and feel of the sub-genre.
Brazil is ostensibly set at some time in the 20th century (around
Christmas), yet its specific date and location are kept from us. The
setting is both familiar and alien, implying the story takes place in a parallel
universe in which humanity has totally surrendered to a fetishistic impulse
for needless paperwork and plastic ducting. The design motifs of the
architecture, interior decor and costumes have a striking Art Deco feel,
suggesting that events are taking place in the 1940s, but the technology
on which the society has become so dependent is clearly from a future era.
As in Ridley Scott's
Alien (1979), the
technology is more organic-looking than designed, with paraphernalia cobbled
together in a piecemeal fashion from existing bits and pieces. This
suggests a society where innovation has stagnated to such a degree
(thanks to all the time-wasting regulations and form-filling)
that progress is achieved only through a process of incremental jerryrigging of existing
technology that has exceeded the limits of usefulness. A good example
of this is a computer consisting of a ridiculously small TV screen mounted
on an ancient typewriter. To make the miniscule print on the screen
readable a large lenticular lens has to be placed in front if it.
This 'retro-tech' look has been emulated in many subsequent films and was
to prove highly influential for the French filmmakers Jean-Pierre Jeunet
and Marc Caro. The latter's own dystopian curiosity pieces
Delicatessen (1991) and
La Cité des enfants
perdus (1995) clearly owe a great deal to
Brazil. Another
important design feature for
Brazil is the special effects work, in
particular that required for the extraordinary dream sequences. For
the time (several years before digital effects became widely available) these
model-based effects are remarkably effective and, crafted with meticulous artistry and an incredible
attention to detail, they still look jaw-droppingly impressive. The
film's most iconic image, of Sam as the winged knight flying to the rescue
of his beloved, was achieved using an intricate articulated figurine on wires,
obviating the need for a blue screen live-action shot which could never have
had the same authenticity and poetic impact.
For the film's distinctive noir look, Gilliam and his cinematographer Roger
Pratt took much of their inspiration from German expressionistic masterpieces
of the 1920s - most obviously Fritz Lang's
Metropolis (1927) - as well as American
film noir of the 1940s and a few films by the Soviet master Sergei Eisenstein
(
Battleship Potemkin and
Ivan the Terrible Part 1).
The director's preference for real locations over studio sets serves the
film well, with spacious industrial interiors helping to shape our impression
of the bleakly utilitarian world in which Sam Lowry exists. The interrogation
scene at the end of the film takes place inside one of the cooling towers
at Croydon power station, a cavernous void that, in one stunningly effective
shot, drives home the utter insignificance of Sam's existence with a heart-stopping
jolt. With his customary bravura flair and unwavering eye for visual poetry, Gilliam
combines his trademark use of wide-angled lens and extreme deep focus photography
with the familiar stylistic tropes of classic noir - expressionistic set
designs, slanted camera angles, chiaroscuro lighting and bold menacing shadows.
All of these add to the sense of a hermetic society in the grip of highly
oppressive regime, where everyone is expected to conform and not even the
slightest hint of dissent is tolerated.
Unlicensed heating engineers to the rescue
George Orwell's dystopian novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four would seem to
be the most obvious literary reference, although Gilliam claimed not have
read the novel at the time or seen any of its screen adaptations. In
contrast to Orwell's stark vision of a society governed by a totalitarian
state that is ultimately under the control of one man (the party leader Big
Brother),
Brazil shows us what can happen when the system - namely
a self-serving, self-perpetuating bureaucracy - takes over and everyone is
reduced to nothing more than an insignificant cog in an unimaginably large
administrative machine.
The characters in Gilliam's nightmare dystopia are not the victims of a controlling
elite; they are prisoners of their own making, mindlessly serving the needs
of a system they have created, negating their own needs in the process.
When things go wrong - which is frequently the case - no one is capable of
taking responsibility. Fortunately, the administrative maze is so vast
and complex that there is always someone else to blame, so when mistakes
are made it is always the fault of 'the other guy'. Cock-ups that are
too big to gloss over in this way (because the death count is unacceptably
high) are blamed on terrorists, the best friend of any incompetent authoritarian
regime - even if there's no evidence that they actually exist.
Everyone - including the film's supposed hero Sam Lowry - is complicit in
this hell of grinding inertia, happily informing on their friends and neighbours
as they subliminally ingest the multitude of glib slogans plastered on every
wall. 'We're all in it together!' cries one of these, setting up the
film's most hilarious visual gag. The British Prime Minister David
Cameron used the same phrase whilst promoting his ultimately doomed Big Society
initiative in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. What subsequently
happened to Cameron isn't too far removed from the fate of the two unsuspecting
heating engineers in the film after Robert De Niro sneakily switches the
air supply to their protective suits with the outlet to a raw sewage system.
Suffocating to death in human excreta is probably not what the originator
of 'We're all in it together!' meant, but it would seem to be an apt metaphor
for a world in which humanity is collectively drowning in a stagnant sea
of bureaucratic effluence.
Brazil is one of three films - along with
Time Bandits (1981)
and
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) - in which Terry Gilliam
shows the importance of imagination in our lives, in defining who we are
and how we are able to free ourselves from the limits that our circumstances
impose on us. It is through his imagination that Sam Lowry ultimately
triumphs over a morbidly oppressive state that makes not the slightest concession
to individual freedom, routinely arresting and torturing anyone suspected
of harbouring seditious thoughts. The film's moral is succinct and
powerful - we can all be free if we allow our thoughts to be guided by our
imagination, rather than submitting to an externally imposed, entirely arbitrary
notion of one-size-fits-all conformity. It is clear from the start
that, in the world in which he is trapped as a lowly pen-pusher, Lowry has
no hope of fulfilling his involuntary night-time dream of thrashing The System
and flying off with The Perfect Woman. But in his imagination, anything
is possible - even being rescued from an administratively sanctioned torture
by an anti-paperwork crusader played by none other than Robert De Niro!
A perfect ensemble
De Niro's presence in the film is all the more wonderful for being totally
unexpected. At the time, the actor had become one of Hollywood's biggest
stars and was only ever considered for leading roles. It was Gilliam's
producer Arnon Milchan who invited De Niro to play a minor role in the film
(having recently worked with him on Martin Scorsese's
The King of Comedy), and
he readily agreed as he had long been an avid
Monty Python fan.
Turned down for the slightly bigger part of the interrogator Jack Lint (which
Gilliam had earmarked for his friend Michael Palin), De Niro gladly accepted
the role of the renegade heating engineer Harry Tuttle - and made it one
of his most memorable turns (even if he is on screen for only a few minutes).
Among the plenitude of high calibre actors cropping up in cameo roles are
such familiar faces as Bob Hoskins, Peter Vaughan, Ian Richardson, Jim Broadbent,
Nigel Planer, Gorden Kaye, Simon Jones and Don Henderson - all immaculately
chosen and remarkably impactful for the limited time they are on screen.
The casting decision that was Gilliam's masterstroke was the choice of Jonathan
Pryce for the leading role of Sam Lowry. Outside the world of British
theatre, the Welsh actor was a virtual unknown at the time, although he had
become highly regarded for his stage work, notably with the Royal Shakespeare
Company, and had received the Olivier Award for his lead performance in
Hamlet
at the Royal Court. Weedy, self-absorbed and somewhat morally ambiguous,
Sam Lowry is far from being the conventional hero, but Pryce's low-key, subtly
humorous portrayal compels us to sympathise with him, to such a degree that
he becomes the one thing of substance in the awful nightmare reality that
Gilliam throws at us. (It's shocking to think that the director's original
choice for Lowry had been Tom Cruise - thankfully the latter ruled himself
out by refusing to supply an audition tape). It is the solid, dependable
bland ordinariness of Sam Lowry that makes virtually every other character
in the film appear so grotesque and unreal - from Palin's suspiciously likeable
Jack Lint (who turns out to be a torturer par excellence) to Ian Holm's outrageously
wimpish Mr Kurtzmann (a man so weak and feckless that he can't write a cheque
without succumbing to a panic attack).
The female characters are even more incredible. As the neighbourly
do-gooder Jill Layton, Kim Greist has an unfortunate love-me-hate-me persona,
one minute kicking the hero Sam out of a moving truck, the next luring him
into bed as the classic femme fatale. Gilliam was sufficiently unimpressed
by Greist's lacklustre performance that he reduced her presence in the film
to the bare minimum, with the result that Jill ends up appearing as vague
and mysterious as the alluring damsel in distress of Sam's recurring dreams.
As Sam's status-obsessed mother Ida, Katherine Helmond (best-known
for her role as Jessica Tate in the 1970s sitcom
Soap) is the ultimate
screen gorgon, so determined to regain her youthful appearance that she seems
to spend her whole life in the cosmetic surgeon's chair. When she is
not being 'nipped and tucked' by a horribly self-adoring Jim Broadbent, Helmond
is flaunting her wealth in the company of other vampiric narcissists at the
city's poshest eating establishments - every culinary feast resembling a
neat dish of what seems to be pureed frog. In the spectacularly surreal
climax to the film, Helmond is ultimately transformed into Greist, implying
some deeply unsettling Oedipal connotations about the true nature of Sam's
relation with his ickily libidinous mother.
Kafka, Freud and Stoppard
Terry Gilliam's original conception for the film was a loose reworking of
George Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four in which rampant bureaucracy
was the villain of the piece rather than a ruthlessly totalitarian governing
party. He intended adopting the wildly flamboyant narrative style of
Federico Fellini's
8½, a film
in which the imagination of its protagonist (a famous director wrestling
with a crippling mid-life crisis) plays a central part.
1984½
seemed to be a neat title - until Gilliam discovered that another filmmaker
(Michael Radford) was working on an adaptation of Orwell's novel, to be released
in 1984. Gilliam claims he came up with the alternative title
Brazil
after recalling seeing a man peacefully sitting on a coal-dust covered beach
in South Wales whilst listening to Ary Barroso's classic 1939 song
Aquarela
do Brasil on the radio. The image of a man escaping the grim reality
of his daily existence through Barroso's exotic ballad gave Gilliam not only
the central idea for his film but also its enigmatic title. Reworked
by the guitarist-composer Geoff Muldaur, Barroso's famous theme recurs throughout
the film (even hummed by the protagonist) and becomes an uplifting leitmotif
for Lowry's repressed yearning for freedom.
Whilst Orwell's novel clearly had some impact on
Brazil, a more striking
literary influence is the work of the Czech writer Franz Kafka. Sam
Lowry, the easily cowed underdog forever trapped at the heart of a bureaucratic
web, is Josef K. in all but name (albeit with a fair amount of
Winston Smith and Walter Mitty).
Not only that, the film is resoundingly kafkaesque to its very core, not
just in its unremitting aura of paranoia and oppression, but also in its
eerily deranging dreamlike composition and bountiful supply of black humour.
The film's obvious absurdist slant is readily attributable to Gilliam's co-screenwriter
Tom Stoppard, a greatly respected British playwright best known for his groundbreaking
philosophical plays
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966),
Jumpers (1972) and
Arcadia (1993).
Stoppard's working relationship with Gilliam was by all accounts fraught
but it proved to be immensely fruitful, three re-writes yielding a revised
screenplay that was far richer and far more intelligently structured than
the inchoate mass of ideas which the director had originally knocked together
with Charles Alverson. It was Stoppard who introduced the 'bug in the
machine' gag, with the Buttle-Tuttle mix-up providing a way to connect Sam
with the real-life object of his desire. Stoppard is also responsible
for the samurai robot warrior that appears in Sam's dreams. The warrior's
significance becomes apparent after Sam has slain it in battle and removes
its mask to find that his adversary is himself. The word 'samurai'
is a Freudian pun, an attempt by Sam's subconscious mind to tell him that
by fighting the bureaucratic system he is merely fighting himself, as he
is inevitably a part of the system.
Sam's real enemy is revealed to him as soon as he appears in the guise of
a samurai warrior - 'Sam, you're I' being the message his subconscious is
trying to get through to him. Several times in the film, Sam is seen
reflected in mirrors, a nod perhaps to the incipient personality disorder
that will ultimately lead to his total mental breakdown under interrogation.
In the scene in a busy department store, a large mirror is positioned in
such a way that Sam resembles Siamese twins and appears to be wrestling with
himself - another clue perhaps that the film is far more about Sam's inner
conflict than a notional tussle with a greater external power. Further
signs of Sam's encroaching insanity are noticeable in the second half of
the film, as elements of his dreams intrude increasingly in his everyday
life. In the end, fantasy and reality become so perfectly intertwined
that we can no longer tell where the boundary lies. By this point,
Sam is literally in a world of his own - as we suspect he may have been right
from the outset.
When life parodies art
The story of
Brazil's American release is every bit as fantastic as
that of the film itself. Indeed, Sam Lowry's hopeless struggle against
a faceless bureaucratic state had an almost exact parallel in Terry Gilliam's
real-life struggle against the studio executives who seemed determined to
prevent him from delivering his artistic vision to the world. At first,
none of the major Hollywood studios had any interest in the project, which
was considered far too intellectual for the mainstream. Gilliam's luck
changed suddenly after he rejected an invitation from Twentieth Century Fox
to direct the sci-fi blockbuster
Enemy Mine, as several other prestigious
directors had already turned down the offer. The boldness of this move
elevated Gilliam's standing and he was almost immediately in receipt of a
15 million dollar budget to direct
Brazil for rival studios Fox and
Universal. In addition, he was granted final cut (an extremely rare
privilege) and a runtime of 135 minutes for any US release.
As it turned out, the film ran to 142 minutes and Gilliam's refusal to cut
the film when asked to do so by its distributor Universal led to an acrimonious
falling out with the company's president, Sidney Sheinberg. Having received
poor feedback after a preview screening, Sheinberg was convinced that the
film's pessimistic tone and convoluted plot would limit its box office appeal
massively. What he wanted was for the film to be vastly reduced in
length and to have a happy ending in which the hero rides off into the sunset
with his paramour - the exact antithesis of what Gilliam had intended.
(This truncated 'love conquers all' version was subsequently made and syndicated
for American television, with a runtime of 90 minutes.)
With help from a usually publicity-shy De Niro, Gilliam immediately went
on the offensive with a series of TV interviews. He then committed
what he subsequently considered an act of grand folly by taking out a full-size
ad in the trade paper
Daily Variety simply asking Sheinberg when he
was going to release his film. By this time (the early spring of 1985),
Fox had successfully distributed
Brazil in Europe, garnering rave
reviews and healthy box office returns. In spite of this, Sheinberg
insisted that Gilliam's film was far too highbrow for a US mainstream cinema
audience and continued to block Universal's release in North America.
Only by arranging clandestine viewings of his film to cinema critics in Los
Angeles was Gilliam able to make any headway. In the face of positive
reviews from a select cohort of Californian critics, Sheinberg gave in and
sanctioned
Brazil's US release, on condition that it was trimmed to
132 minutes. As it turned out, Sheinberg's concerns were justified
- the New York critics were quick to pan the film and it struggled at the
American box office. Overall, however,
Brazil proved to be a
critical and commercial success. It was nominated for two Oscars, in
the categories of Best Original Screenplay and Best Art Direction, and received
BAFTAs for its production design and special effects.
Pure genius
Brazil has often been criticised for its confusing labyrinthine narrative,
but this perceived flaw is actually one of the film's main strengths, making
it not just compelling but totally and irresistibly submersive - if you are
willing to go along with it. An attempt to make sense of everything
on a single viewing is doomed to fail. You have to watch the film at
least three times for it to make complete sense - which is no great chore
as it actually gets better (and funnier) on every re-watching. Scenes,
ideas and gags are thrown at us in quick succession in a cinematic form of
free association and it is left to the spectator to piece it all together.
It's more fun than it sounds.
Once it has begun to coalesce in your mind,
Brazil delivers an incredibly
powerful story. It is the most harrowing vision of a man who is capable
of imagining a better life for himself but tragically has no chance of achieving
this, so deeply entrenched is he in the soulless Machine that governs his
life. Along with Orson Welles'
The
Trial (1962) and Roman Polanski's
The Tenant (1976) - two similarly
disturbing depictions of an ordinary man's descent into insanity - Terry
Gilliam's
Brazil stands as possibly cinema's most inspired re-working
of Kafka's core existential themes. If you have a compulsion for reading
Kafka's novels over and over, this film will most likely have the same effect
- you will not be able to stop yourself from watching it repeatedly.
One of the most influential films of the 1980s,
Brazil continues to
inspire filmmakers, most recently Rian Johnson on his 2017 film
Star Wars:
The Last Jedi. Breathtakingly original in its time,
Brazil
still has a chilling resonance - particularly in its grimly realist portrayal
of a society that is blithely allowing itself to be tied up in red tape whilst
becoming hopelessly dependent on flawed technologies that hasten the process
of dehumanisation. A landmark in British cinema,
Brazil is seen
by some as a defining cult classic in the dystopian sci-fi genre, by others
as a devastatingly pertinent piece of social commentary. It was stunning
when it was first released in 1985 and remains so to this day - a startling
piece of cinema that is as intellectually profound as it is visually enthralling.
It might even make you laugh.
© James Travers 2023
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