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Terry Gilliam started his career as an animator and performer on Monty Python's Flying Circus. the only american in the legendary comedy troup. He'll be remembered primarily for his animations on that show. The foot stomping and the "spppt" sound are iconclastic images in TV comedy history.

When Python started doing feature films, Gilliam co-directed, along with troup member Terry Jones (my least favorite Python, which still makes him one of the funniest people on the planet). That began the career of one of my favorite motion picture directors.

Gilliam's first major solo directorial effort, 1981's Time Bandits was Python-esque, a pure, if absolutely bizzare, comedy.

It was in his next non-Python release, 1985's Brazil, that Gilliam really made his mark. Not really a comedy (no matter how the trailer portrays it), Brazil has become the model, the standard by which all other Gilliam films are judged. And it's one of my favorite films.

Brazil is the story of Sam Lowry, trapped in a super-bureaucratic world of the near future. Sam works for the government in a tedious job. He's dreams are anything but tedious, though. He dreams fantastic dreams. In one of these dreams he meets and falls in love with a woman. Later, he meets the woman of his dreams driving a truck.

Sam gets a transfer to Information Retrieval in order to track down his dream woman. In the course of his job he comes across the strange case of Harry Buttle, a man who died while being mistakenly arrested for not paying his information retrieval charges.

Shortly afterward, he meets Harry Tuttle (amazingly and quite unexpectedly portrayed by Robert DeNiro), a renegade heating and cooling engineer who was the actual suspect in the fatal arrest.

In trouble with the government over the unauthorized heating repairs, Sam finally hooks up with his dream girl and they plan their escape from their dark environment. They make it and settle in a little house in the country.

It's just another one of Sam's dreams.

The end of Brazil is disturbing, an ending Gilliam refused to change even though the studio threatened to never release the movie unless he provided a "happy ending."

I've often considered how different Brazil would have been with a happy ending, how I would have felt had the movie ended with Sam living happily ever after in the country. It's a nice thought, but the world Sam Lowry lived in simply wouldn't allow that. An ending of that sort would have been monumentally unfullfilling. Showing that ending just before everything turns to shit, though, that was brilliant.

I find myself identifying with Sam Lowry. I first saw Brazil when I was in college, years before I worked for the world's largest corporation. Brazil would occasional be mentioned by other employees in that bureaucratic quagmire and I realized that I was living in a much less humorous version of this movie.

Watch the trailer. It gives a glimpse of some of the spectacular effects in this movie. You'll see some of the sets, the real stars of this movie, creating a dark environment these characters are forced to exist in. Mostly you'll see some of the humor, which exists in the movie, but isn't at all what the movie is about.

Watch the trailer, but see the movie. Terry Gilliam has gone on to have an amazing career (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Brothers Grimm), but Brazil may have been his finest work, ambitious given the state of cinema technology in 1985, but pulled off brilliantly.

BOJ

Labels: Positive Tuesday