Brazil

From AwardAnnals

Reviews

Amazon.com

If Franz Kafka had been an animator and film director—oh, and a member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus—this is the sort of outrageously dystopian satire one could easily imagine him making. However, Brazil was made by Terry Gilliam, who is all of the above except, of course, Franz Kafka. Be that as it may, Gilliam sure captures the paranoid-subversive spirit of Kafka’s The Trial (along with his own Python animation) in this bureaucratic nightmare-comedy about a meek governmental clerk named Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) whose life is destroyed by a simple bug. Not a software bug, a real bug (no doubt related to Kafka’s famous Metamorphosis insect) that gets smooshed in a printer and causes a typographical error unjustly identifying an innocent citizen, one Mr. Buttle, as suspected terrorist Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro). When Sam becomes enmeshed in unraveling this bureaucratic glitch, he himself winds up labeled as a miscreant.

The movie presents such an unrelentingly imaginative and savage vision of 20th-century bureaucracy that it almost became a victim of small-minded studio management itself—until Gilliam surreptitiously screened his cut for the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, who named it the best movie of 1985 and virtually embarrassed Universal into releasing it. This DVD version of Brazil is the special director’s cut that first appeared in Criterion’s comprehensive (and expensive) six-disc laser package in 1996. —Jim Emerson

Barnes and Noble

A satirical masterpiece directed by former Monty Python member Terry Gilliam, this dark, dystopian fantasy dazzled viewers with its delirious camera moves and audacious production design. In an Orwellian future, chaos ensues when a housefly causes a glitch in the bureaucratic machinery, leading to false arrests, terrorism, and Ministry of Information clerk Sam Lowry’s (Jonathan Pryce) rendezvous with his dream girl (Kim Greist). Lanky Pryce makes an unlikely epic hero, which is exactly the point: By day he is a functionary; at night he imagines himself to be a winged warrior battling the forces of evil and rescuing his blonde damsel in distress, who may or may not be in league with an insurgent heating duct engineer (Robert De Niro). Brazil became famous not just for its visionary filmmaking but for the much-publicized “Battle of Brazil” that pitted Gilliam against the real-life bureaucratic forces at Universal, who thought the film was too long and downbeat. Gilliam eventually cut the film down to 131 minutes and slightly altered the ending; after it won multiple awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, Universal was forced to release this landmark celebration of the imagination. Ben Wolf