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Brazil (1985)
September 23rd, 2014 10:41This rambly appreciation was written for an odd kind of blog-within-a-blog project, where frequent commenters on The Dissolve started doing a series of Criterion Collection reviews within the comments of unrelated news items. I'm reposting it here because it's almost impossible to link to posts in that format, but it was originally somewhere here.
BRAZIL
As you may have heard, there are a few parallels between Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and 1984: people get arrested and tortured, living conditions are generally lousy, and (despite Gilliam’s stated intention to set the film in a mash-up of the entire 20th century) the cultural trappings are largely based on the 1940s. And they’re both horror stories, but the similarity ends there. Whereas Orwell’s horror comes from taking totalitarianism seriously and imagining that fascists really could control every aspect of life forever, Brazil proposes that this is impossible because fascists are people and people are hopelessly confused— a comic approach that doesn’t make the horror any less. Now you’re being brutalized not for the sake of an all-consuming ideology, but just because there are thousands of other souls all trying to cover their asses in conflicting ways and they don’t care about you. Say what you will about a boot stamping on a human face forever, at least it’s an ethos!
Brazil is organized around a recurring dream and eventually becomes that dream, but there’s a nightmare quality to all the scenes in between too, and it’s specifically a nightmare of loneliness. Our hero Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) isn’t isolated by mass terror like Winston Smith— there’s plenty he should be afraid of, but all that really worries him is having to deal with his mother, and his worst problem is that he hasn’t found anything or anyone he likes. Besides his miserably needy boss (Ian Holm), the only person who seems genuinely happy to see him is his old friend Jack (Michael Palin, playing the only well-adjusted adult in the world, and the worst monster), who’s lost touch with him due to career momentum. When they meet again, they’re passing opposite ways through security gates in the far corner of a cavernous lobby where armed guards are guarding nothing. The gates are rickety little things; the barrier between the men, like all the structures Sam chafes under, is purely social.
Despite the clutter of machinery everywhere, the empty spaces are very empty and the distance between people— at least, people who like each other— is always too great. Even when Lowry dreams of skyscraper monoliths erupting everywhere and cutting off the light, the streets between those buildings are mostly bare except for a tiny band of lost monsters. If you ask anyone who’s seen a few Gilliam movies about his visual tics, they’ll probably mention fisheye lenses; but the cliché use of such an effect is to exaggerate something that’s looming in your face, whereas in Brazil (despite a few such images, including one that’s especially grotesque because it uses a mask that’s already hyper-foreshortened— I’ll do you the favor of not reproducing that one here) it’s mostly used to push things away. Thus, Lowry, arriving at his new job and trying to find anyone he works for, wanders through a dreary grid of pillars that seem to go on for miles; it’s one of several sets that, thanks to the wide-angle lens, appear much larger than anything Gilliam could afford:
The movie isn’t entirely composed of images like that, thank God, but the feeling of lostness and distance— and the fear that, as our other hero Jill (Kim Griest) later says, there’s literally nowhere else to go that isn’t like this— persists even in crowded and colorful scenes. And the punchline to all that excess office space is that when Lowry finally finds his own office, it’s about two feet wide, having been subdivided down the middle of a desk for no reason other than to separate him from the next clerk; but rather than dwell on all this obvious symbolism, Gilliam mines it for visual and physical comedy, a strategy that works throughout the movie to give us reasons to want to see the next bit of the nightmare. Pryce’s performance (which sometimes stays too long on a nervous-mouse note) comes alive whenever he has things to literally struggle against: fighting for control of the furniture, navigating a soggy piece of toast, trying to overload a pneumatic tube, trying to unwrap the cargo of a prison van. On the other hand, my favorite moment of his may be the one time he’s in his element and not struggling at all: when he saves his panicking boss by calmly explaining how to deal with a piece of wayward paperwork from a police raid, turning the pointless knowledge he’s accumulated in years at this awful job into something that briefly makes someone else happy (even if that person is indifferent to the real tragedy that the paperwork represents). It’s the character’s one graceful moment, and that grace briefly lets us believe that this is the kind of guy who dreams of himself as a winged paladin.
Sam’s bright idea for solving his paperwork problem and helping people, of course, leads to events that will destroy his life. The absurdism of Brazil makes it easy to miss how tightly plotted it is (mostly thanks to Tom Stoppard, whose rewrite pulled together Gilliam’s heap of ideas into a very different shape [1]): except for the printing error caused by a dead fly in the beginning, nearly every escalating disaster that follows is directly or indirectly Sam’s fault, except for the ones that are caused by the other white knight, Harry Tuttle. Like Sam, Tuttle (Robert De Niro, having the most fun he had until Stardust) drops in to do a random good deed [2], thinks nothing of the consequences, fails to cover his tracks, and brings down the wrath of the incompetent oppressors. Sam compounds this through his efforts to find and protect Jill, his mysterious object of desire, as his flailing efforts at rebellion accidentally implicate her as a co-conspirator with Tuttle; from his confused perspective it’s possible to imagine she’s part of a secret resistance, but really the film gives us no evidence that any organized resistance to the regime exists at all. It’s possible that Sam is just so desperate for human connection that he’s forged an imaginary one, with fatal results. In a farce as grim as Brazil, with a protagonist whose obliviousness and privilege repeatedly save him from harm in spite of himself, the suspense is mostly in wondering whether the results will be fatal for Sam or just for everyone around him.
The plot machinery is also obscured by the apparent through-line [3] of something that looks like a story but isn’t quite: Sam’s serialized dream of rescuing Jill with his wings, armor, and big fantasy hair. Here Stoppard is nowhere to be seen and Gilliam is in pure Time Bandits mode, but without the comedy; the result could be awkward and sort of is, except that Gilliam is still a strong visual artist and built those scenes around such intense images (an armored giant who bleeds propane flame, and those skyscrapers, and those clouds) that they work on an emotional level. It also helps that Sam’s generic escapism almost immediately devolves into another nightmare. The most unsatisfying thing about this part of Brazil is that it establishes Jill as an archetype and makes you want to get to know her as a real person, and then… you don’t really get to; supposedly Gilliam didn’t like Griest’s performance, but unless he edited out quite a lot, it’s hard to see what anyone else could have done differently with the little she was given in the script. The movie can’t stray far enough from Lowry’s blinkered perspective to give Jill her own life— for better or worse, it’s Sam’s dream and Sam’s world.
I’ve watched Brazil quite a few times— first as a style-struck teenager, then as a horror-craver and a morbid romantic and a political pessimist and a Kafka reader and a devotee of character actors, and so on; a lot of people put a lot of love into this thing (all teenagers are auteurists, so at first I was just a Terry Gilliam fan, but of course like all movies it was very collaborative) and it can be watched in many ways. I’m sure if I were English I’d pick up on all kinds of other things. What many Hollywood people got out of it, thanks to Norman Garwood’s gorgeous production design, was that it would be cool to have lots of cruddy old typewriters in the future; I guess that’s true too. It’s not the most focused work of art ever, but for all its darkness and pain this is a movie with many pleasures, things that ring true because they’re done just so, and it rewards attention.
[1] Detail on the script development and other such things can be found at http://wideanglecloseup.com/tgfilesindex.html - the Criterion DVD materials seem to have used some of the same sources. The interview with Garwood is particularly enjoyable.
[2] However, Tuttle admits he’s largely motivated by thrill-seeking, seeing himself as “a man alone.” In the first still above, he’s aiming a gun at two of the only people in the movie who aren’t alone: the malicious Central Services handyman Spoor (Bob Hoskins) and his brain-damaged ward/colleague, who are also the only characters who seem to enjoy the damage they inflict— understandably, since from their perspective they’re the scrappy rebels and Lowry is the shady bureaucrat.
[3] Speaking of through-lines, I’ve failed to mention the music. Michael Kamen got the most mileage out of a single song in anything I’ve seen besides The Long Goodbye, and it’s a beautifully varied and agile score, equally good at establishing atmosphere, marking the beats of a sight gag, and making an awkward kiss seem like the most romantic thing that’s ever happened in history.
ps. Hey, want to see what a better writer would say about this movie? Read Matthew Dessem's piece on his great Criterion Collection blog. It was very hard to write this one in a way that wasn't just me repeating all my favorite things that he said.
BRAZIL
As you may have heard, there are a few parallels between Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and 1984: people get arrested and tortured, living conditions are generally lousy, and (despite Gilliam’s stated intention to set the film in a mash-up of the entire 20th century) the cultural trappings are largely based on the 1940s. And they’re both horror stories, but the similarity ends there. Whereas Orwell’s horror comes from taking totalitarianism seriously and imagining that fascists really could control every aspect of life forever, Brazil proposes that this is impossible because fascists are people and people are hopelessly confused— a comic approach that doesn’t make the horror any less. Now you’re being brutalized not for the sake of an all-consuming ideology, but just because there are thousands of other souls all trying to cover their asses in conflicting ways and they don’t care about you. Say what you will about a boot stamping on a human face forever, at least it’s an ethos!
Brazil is organized around a recurring dream and eventually becomes that dream, but there’s a nightmare quality to all the scenes in between too, and it’s specifically a nightmare of loneliness. Our hero Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) isn’t isolated by mass terror like Winston Smith— there’s plenty he should be afraid of, but all that really worries him is having to deal with his mother, and his worst problem is that he hasn’t found anything or anyone he likes. Besides his miserably needy boss (Ian Holm), the only person who seems genuinely happy to see him is his old friend Jack (Michael Palin, playing the only well-adjusted adult in the world, and the worst monster), who’s lost touch with him due to career momentum. When they meet again, they’re passing opposite ways through security gates in the far corner of a cavernous lobby where armed guards are guarding nothing. The gates are rickety little things; the barrier between the men, like all the structures Sam chafes under, is purely social.
Despite the clutter of machinery everywhere, the empty spaces are very empty and the distance between people— at least, people who like each other— is always too great. Even when Lowry dreams of skyscraper monoliths erupting everywhere and cutting off the light, the streets between those buildings are mostly bare except for a tiny band of lost monsters. If you ask anyone who’s seen a few Gilliam movies about his visual tics, they’ll probably mention fisheye lenses; but the cliché use of such an effect is to exaggerate something that’s looming in your face, whereas in Brazil (despite a few such images, including one that’s especially grotesque because it uses a mask that’s already hyper-foreshortened— I’ll do you the favor of not reproducing that one here) it’s mostly used to push things away. Thus, Lowry, arriving at his new job and trying to find anyone he works for, wanders through a dreary grid of pillars that seem to go on for miles; it’s one of several sets that, thanks to the wide-angle lens, appear much larger than anything Gilliam could afford:
The movie isn’t entirely composed of images like that, thank God, but the feeling of lostness and distance— and the fear that, as our other hero Jill (Kim Griest) later says, there’s literally nowhere else to go that isn’t like this— persists even in crowded and colorful scenes. And the punchline to all that excess office space is that when Lowry finally finds his own office, it’s about two feet wide, having been subdivided down the middle of a desk for no reason other than to separate him from the next clerk; but rather than dwell on all this obvious symbolism, Gilliam mines it for visual and physical comedy, a strategy that works throughout the movie to give us reasons to want to see the next bit of the nightmare. Pryce’s performance (which sometimes stays too long on a nervous-mouse note) comes alive whenever he has things to literally struggle against: fighting for control of the furniture, navigating a soggy piece of toast, trying to overload a pneumatic tube, trying to unwrap the cargo of a prison van. On the other hand, my favorite moment of his may be the one time he’s in his element and not struggling at all: when he saves his panicking boss by calmly explaining how to deal with a piece of wayward paperwork from a police raid, turning the pointless knowledge he’s accumulated in years at this awful job into something that briefly makes someone else happy (even if that person is indifferent to the real tragedy that the paperwork represents). It’s the character’s one graceful moment, and that grace briefly lets us believe that this is the kind of guy who dreams of himself as a winged paladin.
Sam’s bright idea for solving his paperwork problem and helping people, of course, leads to events that will destroy his life. The absurdism of Brazil makes it easy to miss how tightly plotted it is (mostly thanks to Tom Stoppard, whose rewrite pulled together Gilliam’s heap of ideas into a very different shape [1]): except for the printing error caused by a dead fly in the beginning, nearly every escalating disaster that follows is directly or indirectly Sam’s fault, except for the ones that are caused by the other white knight, Harry Tuttle. Like Sam, Tuttle (Robert De Niro, having the most fun he had until Stardust) drops in to do a random good deed [2], thinks nothing of the consequences, fails to cover his tracks, and brings down the wrath of the incompetent oppressors. Sam compounds this through his efforts to find and protect Jill, his mysterious object of desire, as his flailing efforts at rebellion accidentally implicate her as a co-conspirator with Tuttle; from his confused perspective it’s possible to imagine she’s part of a secret resistance, but really the film gives us no evidence that any organized resistance to the regime exists at all. It’s possible that Sam is just so desperate for human connection that he’s forged an imaginary one, with fatal results. In a farce as grim as Brazil, with a protagonist whose obliviousness and privilege repeatedly save him from harm in spite of himself, the suspense is mostly in wondering whether the results will be fatal for Sam or just for everyone around him.
The plot machinery is also obscured by the apparent through-line [3] of something that looks like a story but isn’t quite: Sam’s serialized dream of rescuing Jill with his wings, armor, and big fantasy hair. Here Stoppard is nowhere to be seen and Gilliam is in pure Time Bandits mode, but without the comedy; the result could be awkward and sort of is, except that Gilliam is still a strong visual artist and built those scenes around such intense images (an armored giant who bleeds propane flame, and those skyscrapers, and those clouds) that they work on an emotional level. It also helps that Sam’s generic escapism almost immediately devolves into another nightmare. The most unsatisfying thing about this part of Brazil is that it establishes Jill as an archetype and makes you want to get to know her as a real person, and then… you don’t really get to; supposedly Gilliam didn’t like Griest’s performance, but unless he edited out quite a lot, it’s hard to see what anyone else could have done differently with the little she was given in the script. The movie can’t stray far enough from Lowry’s blinkered perspective to give Jill her own life— for better or worse, it’s Sam’s dream and Sam’s world.
I’ve watched Brazil quite a few times— first as a style-struck teenager, then as a horror-craver and a morbid romantic and a political pessimist and a Kafka reader and a devotee of character actors, and so on; a lot of people put a lot of love into this thing (all teenagers are auteurists, so at first I was just a Terry Gilliam fan, but of course like all movies it was very collaborative) and it can be watched in many ways. I’m sure if I were English I’d pick up on all kinds of other things. What many Hollywood people got out of it, thanks to Norman Garwood’s gorgeous production design, was that it would be cool to have lots of cruddy old typewriters in the future; I guess that’s true too. It’s not the most focused work of art ever, but for all its darkness and pain this is a movie with many pleasures, things that ring true because they’re done just so, and it rewards attention.
[1] Detail on the script development and other such things can be found at http://wideanglecloseup.com/tgfilesindex.html - the Criterion DVD materials seem to have used some of the same sources. The interview with Garwood is particularly enjoyable.
[2] However, Tuttle admits he’s largely motivated by thrill-seeking, seeing himself as “a man alone.” In the first still above, he’s aiming a gun at two of the only people in the movie who aren’t alone: the malicious Central Services handyman Spoor (Bob Hoskins) and his brain-damaged ward/colleague, who are also the only characters who seem to enjoy the damage they inflict— understandably, since from their perspective they’re the scrappy rebels and Lowry is the shady bureaucrat.
[3] Speaking of through-lines, I’ve failed to mention the music. Michael Kamen got the most mileage out of a single song in anything I’ve seen besides The Long Goodbye, and it’s a beautifully varied and agile score, equally good at establishing atmosphere, marking the beats of a sight gag, and making an awkward kiss seem like the most romantic thing that’s ever happened in history.
ps. Hey, want to see what a better writer would say about this movie? Read Matthew Dessem's piece on his great Criterion Collection blog. It was very hard to write this one in a way that wasn't just me repeating all my favorite things that he said.
