Overall Rating
  Awesome: 57.61%
Worth A Look: 26.09%
Average: 7.61%
Pretty Bad: 4.35%
Total Crap: 4.35%
4 reviews, 68 user ratings
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| Brazil |
by Robert Flaxman
"A visual feast that's hungry for depth."
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Visually speaking, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil is a masterpiece. The set design is amazing, conveying the sprawl of an overgrown bureaucracy, the claustrophobia of urban isolation, and both the freedom of dreams and the horror of nightmares. For these elements alone, the film deserves to be seen. Once you get past this surface, however, it’s not clear that very much is actually going on. Brazil is like a crazy dream – full of strange, mesmerizing visuals, but hard to follow and ultimately adding up to very little.Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) is a dutiful government employee who claims to enjoy the humdrum nature of his job and life, but regularly indulges in fanciful dreams of flight and a mystery woman he does not know. When he runs into her in real life and finds that she has apparently been targeted by the government for asking questions about one of her neighbors, he risks his job and his life to save her, even though at first she doesn’t want his help.
That’s pretty much the plot as far as it goes. The rest of the film is split between Sam’s dreams (including one painfully long sequence in which he fights a giant samurai robot that bleeds fire) and what seems to be social commentary. Gilliam takes on the modern obsession with halting the aging process, the irony of isolation in a compact urban environment, and, most importantly, the idea of a government that’s inefficient at everything except striking fear into its citizens with kidnappings, torture, and murder.
Some of this works and some of it doesn’t. The attempts by Sam’s mother and her friend to look younger are played almost entirely for laughs, making them more window dressing than legitimate comment. The sections on government are more incisive, but it’s unclear what exactly they’re trying to do. Was Gilliam intending to satirize an actual government, or was he merely trying to present a dystopic vision of the near future? (One might suggest Brazil is eerily prescient regarding 2000s America.)
Still, having ideas and actually doing something with them are two different things, and the point Gilliam is trying to make is unclear. Is he encouraging the attempted destruction of a dystopic state? Suggesting that such attempts are futile? The film’s general plot arc recalls George Orwell’s novel 1984, and in fact the original title of the film was going to be 1984 and ½, a dual nod to Orwell and Fellini (though perhaps too literal a reference to the film’s content of a dystopia and a man’s dreams within it). If Gilliam’s intent was mostly to be depictive, he may have wanted to stray a little farther from ground that was already covered. Brazil and 1984 don’t differ much idea-wise except in their protagonists’ ultimate fates, and even then there’s only a marginal difference, which itself only comes from Gilliam trying to mess with our heads.
Where Gilliam does hit the nail on the head is in the look of the film, which keeps things running even as various ideas whoosh by on their way to nowhere in particular. A scene where Sam finds himself assigned to an office that looks like it used to be a broom closet is particularly effective; the camera placement invites claustrophobia and the fact that the desk goes through the wall to be shared with the room next door allows for a couple of amusing physical gags. The terrifying emptiness of the Department of Information Retrieval and most of the city’s streets and buildings is wonderfully conveyed and full of unspoken meaning.
Visuals can only take you so far, though, and while Gilliam’s eye lifts Brazil out of the realm of the ordinary, it stumbles when called upon to explain itself. Is this the future or the present? What does the isolated aspect of the human condition mean to the film’s characters? The latter, which could have been particularly important, is really never explored, nor is it ever suggested how society might have ended up resembling its appearance here. Which came first – the terrorism or the government oppression? If the former, is it really justified? Is Harry Tuttle (Robert DeNiro) supposed to be a “good guy” in the film or is Gilliam being sarcastic?
None of these things are ever explored, which is a true shame. Brazil is bursting with potential, but the film that got made squanders much of it. Gilliam fought to avoid a “love conquers all” ending the studio wanted, but he still spent too much of his own film focused on the relationship between Sam and his dream girl Jill, one that adds little to the pile of ideas but does all it can to distract from it. In this way, Brazil becomes a political film that doesn’t have that much to say about politics.Beautiful but frustratingly shallow, Brazil may be the least enjoyable film that could have been made from its constituent parts. A more interesting and meaningful film existed in the ideas that remain unexplored; what’s there is very good at times but far too hollow at others. Like its lead character, Brazil’s imagination soars above the earth, but its reality has problems getting off the ground.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=946&reviewer=385
originally posted: 09/03/05 08:12:50
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USA
01-Dec-1985 (R)
DVD: 05-Sep-2006
UK
N/A
Australia
N/A
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