Brazil, dir by T. Gilliam

[novella]

I saw Brazil the other night. I saw it maybe ten years or more ago, but it's been haunting me lately and I thought it needed reviewing. Boy, was I right.

This movie is directed by Terry Gilliam, and has Jonathan Pryce, Robert DeNiro, Michael Palin, Bob Hoskins, and loads of other interesting actors. The futuristic premise is a nightmarish city with huge disparity between rich and poor, and there are distinct refs to film noir, SF, Dickens, Indiana Jones, Brave New World . . . I won't describe it, but will just say that the jokes about plastic surgery, once clearly satire, are horribly close to Hollywood/Michael Jackson reality. There's so much more . . . it's really unpleasant at times, but as bizarre as it seemed in the 1980s, the movie's influence has been--to my eye--subtly pervasive.

 

[angerball]

Yus, I've seen this a while ago. Can't remember too much about it, except that it was a bit wierd. I remember the plastic surgery parts, and also the wierd fashion (did Jill's mum wear these hats shaped like shoes, or am I thinking of another movie??) The ending is the part that really stuck with me, while the rest of it is just a blur. Did you prefer the Gilliam ending, or the Hollywood ending?

 

[Doug Johnson]

I saw it in a theater. I remember being the only one laughing at times because I saw something hilarious in the background. Other times, I heard one or two people laughing, and I desperately searched through the background trying to figure out what was so darn funny.

It was very intricate and detailed.

 

[lenny nero]

I think it's Gilliam's best and it's one of my fave movies of the 80's. I love it.

 

[novella]

I thought a lot of it was very funny.

Ian Richardson charging through the halls of power, so prescient of his role in House of Cards in the 90s.

Bob Hoskins and sidekick as the evil plumbers.

The restaurant manager apologising as the place gets blow up, while dinner goes on and the food looks like mashed soylent green.

The desk shared through the wall . . .

The Rube-Goldberg-ness of all the contraptions, especially in Jonathan Pryce's flat . . .

DeNiro's spiderman-with-cigars persona . . .

The little snippets of awful conversation in every scene . . .

The fascist architecture and dumkopf militia . . .

The movie is just so wacky, with little sparks of truth.

 

[beer good]

Having recently read The Battle of Brazil, I felt I had the perfect excuse to exchange my old budget DVD for the Criterion set and watch Gilliam's arguable masterpiece in all its glory. First time around: the European cut still holds up marvellously (the US theatrical cut isn't on the DVD, funnily enough). Sure, it could probably have been trimmed by a few minutes here and there, but Gilliam is one of those directors where I'm happy to watch a 5-minute shot of nothing in particular since it all looks good and it all somehow ties into the main theme. Brazil is still a dark, fucked-up comedy where kids play torture and spray-paint "REALITY" on the walls of an obviously fake world. Beautiful.

Then, there's the version cut by Universal, AKA Sid Sheinberg's Brazil. Hmmm. The question here, of course, is how much of my antipathy towards this is because of what it does to the original, and how much is because it's a genuinely poor movie. Well, thing is, it's not really awful. It can't be, of course; the studio cut that Gilliam fought still has much of the original dialogue, even if it's out of order, bowdlerised and occasionally overdubbed with new lines; it still has the same design, even if many of the most striking images are cut out or reduced to brief flashes; it still has the same actors, in some cases even more of them since they put in a bunch of scenes Gilliam cut (usually for good reason). They even keep the necrophilia joke, which surprised me. But if we focus on what is there... it's still a mess. It's the sort of movie that you watch and think that there must have been a good movie in there at some time. As it is, at best it's a decent dystopia story, even at times paced slightly better than the original if all you're looking for is a straight-laced story where everyone is either good and clear-sighted or genuinely evil and manipulative. It says absolutely nothing original, but it's still got some good jokes and nice set pieces. But the worst thing is that it's so obviously a patchwork; poorly edited, jump cuts all over the place, scenes that only lead into each other if you really want them to... No, it's not a very good movie. Only to be watched if you've watched the real thing recently.

Gilliam's cut:
Sheinberg's cut: