BRAZIL
dir: Terry Gilliam
"There you are, your own number on your very own door. And behind that door, your very own office! Welcome to the team, DZ-015!" - Mr. Warrenn
Brief Synopsis
Attempting to correct a computer error, a government man discovers a woman he sees in his dreams and begins a secret investigation to find her, all while arousing suspicion towards himself.
Why It's Here
Remember that prologue and epilogue to Monty Python's Meaning of Life with the old businessmen doing battle in their ship of an office? Do you remember how it was the best part of the movie and you just wished it had an entire movie to itself? Well Brazil is sort of a wish half-fulfilled. It's not quite a zany as those old, lost boys in Meaning of Life, it's more constructed and fleshed out, but it retains that sense of epic heroism from the most unlikely of sources in the most humourous of fashions.
From the opening credits, Gilliam paints his universe as a dream, we sweep in through the clouds to find Sam Lowry, a low-level government man living in a constant state of comfortable paranoia and deadlines. His bureaucratic lifestyle embodies every cliche in the book, but Gilliam packs these details in so tightly, and often subtly, that is works. Lowry, of course, has dangerous fantasies of himself as a knight gliding through a labyrinth of metaphors in search for a woman far too beautiful for real-world Sam. When Sam discovers this woman in his real life he knows it must mean something, and naturally she is quite his opposite, a rebellious terror suspect who resists the institutionalized system of paperwork and robots. The characters are drawn with wide strokes, but it's really the world that holds the whole picture together. It's the minor details and nuances that Gilliam sprinkles into the background of every scene like "Christians for Consumerism" or a pet dog with it's ass taped over to avoid any socially embarassing dumps out in public. Then there is the more obvious slap-stick that seem to be Gilliam getting the last bit of "Python" out of him. The goofy caricatures that litter Brazil offer a more stable base for the rather generic lead characters, and when viewed through this surprisingly detailed world, they begin to evolve beyond mere stock characters and into compelling individuals.
Despite Brazil being all deadpan and slapstick, it walks a very fine line focusing on a society under the constant threat of terrorist bombings and high class society turning it's head the other way while the poor literally burn. The satire has a lot of room to fail in the most insensitive way, but it somehow doesn't. The success has to do with how the film portrays it's world and whose perspective that comes from. Despite the fact that we see everything from Sam, who is pro-invasive government and believes a proper functional society is held together by a certain amount of paperwork, the film is constantly critical of this mentality, and yet sympathetic to poor, weak, naive Sam. Sam is, for lack of a better word, a buffoonish man-child. This description suits his department in the governemnt as well, every mistake is blamed on some other indistinguisable sector, atrocious mistakes ruin lives but instead act as punchlines to the inefficiency of government institutions with no one ever accepting the blame.
Even to the super-elite in this society, Sam is an outsider who constantly whines and complains to be heard, but rarely is, since he is too wimpy to really make a stand. This results in a rather unique take on the "blind eye" of upper-class culture, where they ignore Sam's pleas for help or assistance, also choosing to ignore the terrorist bombing that happens in the same restaurant they are dining. As the lower-level citizens burn, the waiter politely brings Sam's mothers friends a screen to shield themselves from the unsightly sights they would have ignored anyway. Sam is also preconditioned to ignore such atrocities but as his dreams premeditate, he begins to open his eyes as the story progresses. These sequences act as the extremely rare cases in which a scene can be both down-right hilarious and horrifying all at once, these types of contrasts are one of Brazil's strong suites which is what helps it create a world that is so horribly familiar, yet comically fantasy.
The film begins to lose traction in the third act when Sam's fantasies and reality begin to collide making the plot buckle under it's own weight. Gilliam begins to opt for more set pieces showing the difference between strategic militaristic might versus more spontaneous human rebellion, but it's all a little unnecessary when the film works much better when it relies on it's more subtle nuances in it's background environment without necessarily calling attention to them. Despite the confusing roller coaster that the film ends on, it still stands out as a vivid world that is rich with colorful contradictions. Coming in through the clouds, and then spiraling through a labyrinth of corpses and Japanese samurai-beast-things, the movie can't even decide if it's a dream, or a nightmare, it makes no attempt to even answer which is really is because in the end the film is chalked up to it's tagline, "It's only a state of mind".
From the opening credits, Gilliam paints his universe as a dream, we sweep in through the clouds to find Sam Lowry, a low-level government man living in a constant state of comfortable paranoia and deadlines. His bureaucratic lifestyle embodies every cliche in the book, but Gilliam packs these details in so tightly, and often subtly, that is works. Lowry, of course, has dangerous fantasies of himself as a knight gliding through a labyrinth of metaphors in search for a woman far too beautiful for real-world Sam. When Sam discovers this woman in his real life he knows it must mean something, and naturally she is quite his opposite, a rebellious terror suspect who resists the institutionalized system of paperwork and robots. The characters are drawn with wide strokes, but it's really the world that holds the whole picture together. It's the minor details and nuances that Gilliam sprinkles into the background of every scene like "Christians for Consumerism" or a pet dog with it's ass taped over to avoid any socially embarassing dumps out in public. Then there is the more obvious slap-stick that seem to be Gilliam getting the last bit of "Python" out of him. The goofy caricatures that litter Brazil offer a more stable base for the rather generic lead characters, and when viewed through this surprisingly detailed world, they begin to evolve beyond mere stock characters and into compelling individuals.
Despite Brazil being all deadpan and slapstick, it walks a very fine line focusing on a society under the constant threat of terrorist bombings and high class society turning it's head the other way while the poor literally burn. The satire has a lot of room to fail in the most insensitive way, but it somehow doesn't. The success has to do with how the film portrays it's world and whose perspective that comes from. Despite the fact that we see everything from Sam, who is pro-invasive government and believes a proper functional society is held together by a certain amount of paperwork, the film is constantly critical of this mentality, and yet sympathetic to poor, weak, naive Sam. Sam is, for lack of a better word, a buffoonish man-child. This description suits his department in the governemnt as well, every mistake is blamed on some other indistinguisable sector, atrocious mistakes ruin lives but instead act as punchlines to the inefficiency of government institutions with no one ever accepting the blame.
Even to the super-elite in this society, Sam is an outsider who constantly whines and complains to be heard, but rarely is, since he is too wimpy to really make a stand. This results in a rather unique take on the "blind eye" of upper-class culture, where they ignore Sam's pleas for help or assistance, also choosing to ignore the terrorist bombing that happens in the same restaurant they are dining. As the lower-level citizens burn, the waiter politely brings Sam's mothers friends a screen to shield themselves from the unsightly sights they would have ignored anyway. Sam is also preconditioned to ignore such atrocities but as his dreams premeditate, he begins to open his eyes as the story progresses. These sequences act as the extremely rare cases in which a scene can be both down-right hilarious and horrifying all at once, these types of contrasts are one of Brazil's strong suites which is what helps it create a world that is so horribly familiar, yet comically fantasy.
The film begins to lose traction in the third act when Sam's fantasies and reality begin to collide making the plot buckle under it's own weight. Gilliam begins to opt for more set pieces showing the difference between strategic militaristic might versus more spontaneous human rebellion, but it's all a little unnecessary when the film works much better when it relies on it's more subtle nuances in it's background environment without necessarily calling attention to them. Despite the confusing roller coaster that the film ends on, it still stands out as a vivid world that is rich with colorful contradictions. Coming in through the clouds, and then spiraling through a labyrinth of corpses and Japanese samurai-beast-things, the movie can't even decide if it's a dream, or a nightmare, it makes no attempt to even answer which is really is because in the end the film is chalked up to it's tagline, "It's only a state of mind".