The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940) — B+
The Pelican Brief (Alan J. Pakula, 1993) — A-
Unbreakable (M. Night Shyamalan, 2000) — B-
The Rider (Chloe Zhao, 2017) — B+
Jabberwocky (Terry Gilliam, 1977) — B-
Time Bandits (Terry Gilliam, 1981) — A-
Cats (Tom Hooper, 2019) — N/A
Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985) — A
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Terry Gilliam, 1988) — B+
The Fisher King (Terry Gilliam, 1991) — A-
12 Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995) — A
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam, 1998) — C
Hubie Halloween (Steven Brill, 2020) — B
The Brothers Grimm (Terry Gilliam, 2005) — C+
Tideland (Terry Gilliam, 2005) — B+
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Terry Gilliam, 2009) — C+
Back to the Future Part II (Robert Zemeckis, 1989) — A
The Zero Theorem (Terry Gilliam, 2013) — B-
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (Terry Gilliam, 2018) — B-
This week, for no real reason at all, I watched every movie that Terry Gilliam solo directed, only excluding his one co-directing credit, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, because I’ve seen it near a hundred times.
Gilliam began his career as the cartoonist for the British comedy troupe Monty Python. He eventually became a full-fledged member — the only American Python — appearing in sketches and movies, directing their first movie and co-writing the other two, The Meaning of Life and Life of Brian. He would then evolve from there into directing more esoteric films that mix elements of comedy, satire, fantasy, science fiction, and magical realism.
There are a number of elements that run across Gilliam’s filmography, chief among them fantasy. Not just from the fantasy genre, but also the act of fantasizing. The trio of Gilliam’s ’80s movies — Time Bandits, Brazil, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen — all feature a protagonist who lives in a world devoid of creativity and use their imagination in trying to break free. In a Gilliam film, your imagination is the most important commodity you can have, especially in a world that is growing more and more creatively bankrupt. It can be used as an escape from mundanity, from existential dread, or from grief, in very much the same way it’s used in classic stories like The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter and Wendy. Gilliam films are constantly asking, “who is crazy, me or everyone else?”
Both Time Bandits and Tideland are about children who are swept away from neglectful and cruel parents. Brazil and The Zero Theorem feature men whose jobs make them feel like cogs in the machine. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus are about old storytellers and how their stories are received by modern audiences. The Fisher King and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote follow the stories of jaded show business mavericks who meet an elder man who has created an alternate reality in their minds. Elsewhere, the titular brothers in The Brothers Grimm intentionally create a false reality in order to deceive; Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro use drugs to bring them out of reality and into their minds in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; and everyone in the ’90s timelines believe Bruce Willis’ future man has imagined everything he warns them about. These movies use imagination and fantasy to create coherent storylines with varying degrees of success, but they always both encourage and display strong visual and narrative creativity and originality.
The use of myth and storytelling go hand-in-hand with imagination in Gilliam films. Both the Holy Grail and Robin Hood appear more than once throughout. Stories blend fact and fiction because it doesn’t matter the origin of a story if its captivating and well-told. Even when the stories Gilliam himself is telling through his films feel incoherent or aimless, they are always full of life, creativity, and compelling, singular images. Things become weirder and weirder looking as his career goes on, and occasionally, they start to feel weird just for weirdness’ sake. Like Christoph Waltz’s Qohen in The Zero Theorem — a man who is diagnosed as completely healthy yet believes he is dying, refers to himself plurally, lives alone in a humungous, empty, fire-damaged apartment building, and is inexplicably hairless (inexplicable to the viewer but also to Qohen). Three of Gilliam’s last four films, actually, feel like they can take the imagery a little too far beyond what the story calls for from them. It’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote that benefits from Adam Driver’s excellent performance to ground it. He feels less like he’s acting like a character in a Terry Gilliam movie and more like an actual human who’s been thrust into the world of a Gilliam movie, something that Heath Ledger, Waltz, and Depp all get at least slightly wrong in their respective roles.
Just because Gilliam’s films are often set in fictional worlds full of magic and wonder does not mean that they have nothing to say about the real world that we live in; in fact it’s quite the opposite. The reason that almost every single one of his movies are so devoted to imagination is because they have a grim view of the world in which they are made. As Jack Mathews put it in the opening of his essay for Brazil’s Criterion release, “The story is Orwellian, in the sense that it is set in a totalitarian state where individuality is smothered by enforced conformity…but where George Orwell, writing in 1948, was envisioning a future ruled by fascism and technology, Gilliam was satirizing the bureaucratic, largely dysfunctional industrial world that had been driving him crazy all his life.” Brazil isn’t set in the future, it’s set in an alternate 1980s, where humans rely on a series of machines that never seem to work as intended and submit themselves to the security theater that someone has told them will actually keep them safe. The same can be said for what I would call Gilliam’s other masterpiece, 12 Monkeys. Though the movie is futuristic, it spends most of its time in the 1990s (as Bruce Willis tries to find the source of a, ahem, deadly, contagious, airborne virus). The movie doesn’t just create a fictional future for the sake of it, it uses that imaginary world to comment on the lack of imagination in the time period of its release. It isn’t just important to use your imagination because its good for you, but because its becoming increasingly rare as the world around us tries harder and harder to stamp it out.
The effects in his early films were delightfully practical. They were never poor, but they never went out of their way to fully convince you, either. Gilliam seemed to have no problem letting the strings show. It almost feels like a stage show: when you’re seeing something created live right in front of you, it can feel silly for the people behind the show to try and convince you that it’s really happening and not just a show. It relies more on the audience’s own imagination. I hand you a stick and tell you it’s a sword, we both know that it’s not a stick but have no problem forging ahead pretending its a sword. The lack of big budget special effects are charming and just as effective based on this notion. Don’t get me wrong, though, there is a complete attention to detail. In The Holy Grail, they couldn’t afford horses, so the squire simply claps two coconuts together. It works there, because it’s an absurd comedy full of sketch humor and world-breaking jokes. It works later on because Gilliam is preaching to us the importance of imagination and forcing us to use our own. It finds a way to feel DIY and still look wondrous and captivating. When Baron Munchausen goes to the moon, Gilliam isn’t trying to trick us into thinking they filmed it on the moon; instead he’s presenting a wonderfully weird and fantastic portrayal of what he might imagine the moon would look like in this world.
The one time the effects and set design falls flat is in The Brothers Grimm. In the first of two Gilliam efforts from 2005, Ledger and Matt Damon play medieval con-men who travel from town to town creating a panic from their own stories and special effects and then saving the day themselves who eventually run into some real-life fairytale creatures. At this point, everything becomes CGI, and we’re no longer watching a movie dedicated to the power of myth and story-telling that’s visually interesting to look at, but instead one that is two handsome men surrounded by lifeless blobs.
Another recurring theme is a celebration of filth — not in any kind of moral sense, but literal filth. His films are full of trash people; covered in grime, missing teeth, living on the street. His first two directorial credits, Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Jabberwocky, and his fifth, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, are there by nature of the setting — everyone in the Middle Ages seem to be bathed in muck. Characters have mud smeared across their faces and their outfits are tattered rags hanging off their bone-thin bodies.
This continues even as Gilliam leaves the time period behind. The dwarves in Time Bandits feel like their entire wardrobe has been trash-picked from different time periods. There’s an underworld to Brazil‘s mechanical future full of vagrancy seen in the apartments of the poor and the children on the street; the same can be said for 12 Monkeys, both in the future jail cell that Bruce Willis begins the movie in, and the 1990s of the past. The Fisher King and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas are both set in a much more realistic backdrop, but delve completely into a similar unseen world, the former via Robin Williams’ homeless vigilante and the latter via the drug-infused haze of a Hunter S. Thompson adaptation. Tideland takes it to a whole new level, as Jeliza-Rose’s entire universe is abandoned properties and long-forgotten things — doll heads and rusted out cars, flattened pennies and graffitied walls, slap-dash makeup and the farting corpse of her father. The theatre troupe of Doctor Parnassus are a rag-tag group of performers who sleep in their make-shift stage on wheels.
To be ugly, in a Terry Gilliam film at least, is to be beautiful. Society’s castoffs — those with disabilities, the unattractive, the homeless — find a home as the heroes of Gilliam’s many wild worlds. Not only are the six dwarf actors of Time Bandits at the center of that movie, given time to shine as characters and actors, but some appear randomly throughout the rest of his oeuvre, whether as side characters or literally just walking through the background.
Which makes every artificiality that we value in a proper civilization the enemy. Gilliam’s attack on the “normal” of our society, the mundane and the bland, goes so far as to criticize the very aesthetic of normal. We value good looks and charm; the prim and proper and straight. But why? Why is a fresh three-piece suit inherently better than anything else?
Gilliam’s final film (so far) took over 29 years to come to fruition. He began working on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in 1989, went into pre-production in 1998, and began filming in 2000 with Jean Rochefort, Johnny Depp, and Vanessa Paradis in lead roles. Thanks to a combination of financial difficulties, illness, and a flood, the production was eventually shut down. Gilliam then failed to relaunch the production over the next 16 years, with various actors — Ewan MacGregor, Robin Williams, Jack O’Connell, Michael Palin, Robert Duvall, and John Hurt — attached to star, until finally re-entering production with Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce as its stars.
Driver plays a wunderkind commercial director who wants to recast the role of Don Quixote in his current production with the same old Spanish shoemaker, played by Pryce, that he used in his student film a decade earlier. Once he finds him, he realizes that the man has come to believe that he is the true Don Quixote. As the two characters dip in and out of the past — from present day Spain to the 1600s — Gilliam once again asks us to consider just who is the “crazy” one here. It was always easy to see why Gilliam, a filmmaker who has examined men in average settings using imagination and fantasy to engage in Quixotic quests despite the scorn they receive from those around them, was attracted to the story of Don Quixote, one of the very first novels and the single archetype for this kind of story.
The movie is no masterpiece; nothing you’d expect would take 30 years to make. It’s interesting and at-times entertaining. It has some of the same issues that some other Gilliam movies have, especially the later ones: it takes a long time to get set up, it’s female characters are more mysterious than real people with a tangible point of view, and it’s exact plot can feel a little muddled at times. But Gilliam has made a career outside of the usual system, refused to take for-hire jobs or make a franchise film, and dedicated decades to the power of creativity. It’s hard to see The Man Who Killed Don Quixote as anything but a win for artistic individuality, imagination, and fantasy and another blow, no matter how insignificant it may seem, to the big budget Hollywood machine that cranks out unique films with the effectiveness of Jonathan Pryce’s toaster in Brazil.
1. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
2. Brazil (1985)
3. 12 Monkeys (1995)
4. The Fisher King (1991)
5. Time Bandits (1981)
6. Tideland (2005)
7. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)
8. Jabberwocky (1977)
9. The Zero Theorem (2013)
10. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018)
11. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)
12. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)
13. The Brothers Grimm (2005)
- The Philadelphia Story is a fairly insightful look into human nature and personal relationships. Katherine Hepburn is luminous — she was at somewhat of a crossroads of her career at this point, dealing with somewhat of a public backlash, mostly due to what today we would call sexism. Executives didn’t like her because she wore pants instead of dresses and other shit like that. But Hepburn plays on her public persona here as well as anyone ever has.
- I think I liked The Pelican Brief a lot more than the general consensus. The “big thing” at stake is high while also feeling really unique for this kind of movie. There’s a whole bunch of fun legal mystery stuff before it becomes a fun legal thriller and at the center we’ve got literally two of the greatest actors of the past 40 years giving great performances.
- Rewatching Unbreakable after watching a bunch of Zemeckis movies made me realize how little Shyamalan does to cover up the seems of his screenplays. Often in Unbreakable — and his others, as well — there’s little explanation for something happening the way that it does other than because it has to get the movie towards where its writer wants it to. That’s fine for some things. Like, why does Elijah wear so much purple? Because he’s a supervillain with a specific and recurring aesthetic. That’s cool. But why does David lift weights by having his son set them up without looking at what he’s doing and then just cold-lifting them? Because the movie wants to reveal how much he’s lifting in a dramatic fashion. It feels like a small nitpick, but when it happens so often and the only reason behind it is to manipulate the viewer in some way — it’s essentially about the way the story is told rather than the actual story being told — it starts to feel a little exhausting and cheap. I still like Unbreakable a good amount, but not as much as I did the last time I watched it.
- The Rider is a heartbreaking elegy to a cowboy who can’t ride anymore. A slow burn that evokes the search for purpose as beautifully as any movie about artistic drive from a confident and sure-handed director.
- It feels impossible to give a traditional grade to Cats. I’ve seen it on Broadway, so I do know that the play is pretty gonzo to begin with. Is this a good adaptation? Literally impossible to say. It’s wildly entertaining in how many of its choices are completely off the wall. Will I watch it again? Almost certainly. Will it be the first movie I watch once its warm out again and I set up my backyard projector? Probably.
- Netflix really has been the best thing for Adam Sandler’s movie career. Hubie Halloween still isn’t anything exceptional, but its funny and warm and surprisingly lacking in world-breaking humor that so many Happy Madison productions fell prey to in the post-Click pre-Netflix era. This is a Halloween movie about being nice, and that’s a nice thing.
- If Biff bringing back the sports almanac to 1955 changes the timeline so much, how do the same sports teams keep winning the same games for the next 45 years?