Terry Gilliam has always worked with the past. In directing for Monty Python and in his first two independent releases "Jabberwocky" and "Time Bandits," Gilliam took us back to the medieval era, when knights battled evil beasts and rode in search of Holy Grails.
Through the Python film "The Meaning of Life," Gilliam was able to make a transition into relative modernity, though certainly not normality. While in "Brazil," Gilliam does not yet (nor does he ever) cross over the line into normality, he does deal with an entirely new view.
Gilliam presents his audience with a view of the future, or perhaps an alternate view of the present, that has been described as Orwellian. The populace is controlled by a faceless state, and the bureaucracy is so powerful that even Franz Kafka might have even been intimidated by it.
The story centers around a civil servant named Sam Lowery (Jonathan Pryce, now known, unfortunately, for his Infinity car ads) whose life is admittedly dull.
Most of the time, he does his job dutifully, but there are times when he and his co-workers break from the routine and relax. His life is not particularly enjoyable or exciting, but he sees it as inescapable, so he does not attempt to break out of this routine.
Instead, Lowery lives through his fantasies, envisioning a time when he can float above the world's concerns, accompanied by a beautiful woman.
One day, as Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times recalled, "[Lowery] gets involved in an intrigue that involves the girl of his dreams, the chief executive of the state and a shadowy band of dissenters."
While sorting through paperwork on his desk, Sam discovers an error. The mistake leads to the imprisonment of Mr. Buttle (Brian Miller), a shoe repairman, instead of Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro), an illegal freelance heating engineer.
In attempting to rectify the situation, Lowery is labeled a terrorist and must scramble for his survival.
The cast assembled by Gilliam and producer Arnon Milchan is quite impressive, including the aforementioned Pryce and De Niro alongside Katherine Helmond (Mona Robinson from television's "Who's the Boss?"), Ian Holm ("The Madness of King George"), and Bob Hoskins (Eddie Valiant in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" and J. Edgar Hoover in "Nixon").
Playing the role of Jill Layton is Kim Greist, who beat out such notable actresses as Jamie Lee Curtis, Rebecca De Mornay, Rosanna Arquette, Kelly McGillis and Ellen Barkin (who was, incidentally, Gilliam's favorite). In the casting of the part, even Madonna got a call.
Ultimately, the film presents a view that is not entirely coherent, but is no less enjoyable or thought-provoking for its ambiguity. Very little is clearly spelled out, leaving the audience with a slight feeling of confusion at the end.
Hopefully, this will inspire many to rent the film and view it a second time rather than pass it off as a poor film.
As Ebert said, "Perhaps it is not supposed to be clear, perhaps the movie's air of confusion is part of its paranoid vision." Perhaps Roger hit the nail on the head.
"Brazil" is a convoluted film with complex character portraits. The film is wrought with symbolic images, not the least of which are many of the characters' names.
"Brazil" may mark a turning point in Gilliam's career (and in the Thursday Loew film series as a result), when his films began to look less at the bizarre, and more at the profound.
