Brazil
- 132 Min. Rated R.
“Mistakes? We don’t make mistakes.”
In my search for non-traditional Christmas movies, I came across the satirical cult classic, Brazil, written and directed by Terry Gilliam. Gilliam is more well known for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Twelve Monkeys, and Monty Python projects. There is, no doubt, a darkness in his heart, which is conveyed beautifully in this story, one of three imaginative stories beginning with Time Bandits. You have to hand it to a guy who named his company PooPooPictures, just to imagine board execs sitting in a room and having to discuss it.
Sam Lowry (Johnathan Price) is a lowly civil servant in the records department who has a recurring dream of literally flying away from his convoluted bureaucratic life into the arms of a mysterious girl. (think like David Bowie meets Archangel). This is a bleak society, sometime in the twentieth century, full of meaningless jobs, paperwork nightmares, propaganda posters, and mistaken terrorists. A fly falling into a computer mistakenly accuses an innocent man named Henry Buttle, (rather than Henry Tuttle), on Christmas of terrorism. After being ruthlessly tortured by the Ministry of Information Retrieval, the family receives a small check for his accidental death, delivered by Sam Lowry, to push it under the rug. Sam meets their upstairs neighbor, Jill (Kim Greist) who happens to be the girl he’s been dreaming about. He must take his mother’s offer of a promotion to Information Retrieval to find her again, but at what price?
Much like Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic Metropolis, the stark landscape and foreboding buildings only add to the bleak life they all lead. From his mother’s obsession with dangerous plastic surgery methods to making a simple phone call, everything becomes overly complicated and pointless. One of the simplest scenes that describes their lives is the fight over the desk table which is shared through the wall with his next door co-worker (unbeknownst to the other), who constantly tries to get more of his side. Meanwhile a swarm of workers trail the boss like locusts, flashing papers which are arbitrarily decided upon. This is productivity.
Everything in the movie reeks of symbolism. The company Christmas present is a yes/no pendulum paper weight for making decisions much like the real decisions made by the company. A typical take your daughter to work day includes overhearing the screams of an accused terrorist while her father, the interrogator, wears a baby mask and a bloody lab coat. What’s interesting about this film is the pressure Gilliam received for changes to the script and a “happier ending.” The released “Sid Sheinberg’s version,” named after the Universal executive who said the film needed a “radical rethink” cuts over half an hour of the original story. It is a shabby shadow of its former self, another Hollywood disappointment. Why are there so many bad movies released in theaters? Perhaps it is in the hands of the studio who tries to make everything with a wide audience appeal. Luckily, Gilliam stood up to the studio (ironically they missed the whole point of the movie) to keep the original, with the help of L.A. critics to push the director’s cut into theaters. It was even nominated for an Oscar.
Gilliam was no stranger to the studio censoring, as he and several others sued ABC for violating copyright and butchering the work of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The drama is documented in the book, The Battle of Brazil: Terry Gilliam V. Universal in the Fight to the Final Cut by Jack Matthews. This movie is probably one of the most depressing Christmas movies I have ever seen, but I’m glad that it exists in its entirety. With the threats of the “fiscal cliff,” it’s easy to see how Hollywood and Congress might be on the same page. Get it for the exec who has everything.
