Brazil (1985)
Directed by Terry Gilliam

Film Review

And now for something completely different - a nightmare wrapped in a dream inside the maze of a mind in terminal meltdown.  As both a work of cinema and an examination of the human soul, Brazil stands alone - a masterfully conceived dystopian fantasy in which the monstrous visions of Orwell and Kafka collide like ions in a particle accelerator to bring into being something even darker and profounder.  What Brazil presents us with is a truly terrifying prospect, a world in which all trace of human individuality and feeling is being driven to extinction by a self-serving bureaucracy that has got completely out of control - with the help of an ever-growing army of petty administrators.  This is a world where 'The Form' rules absolutely - a form that has to be signed in triplicate, submitted with a receipt, stamped by at least three separate departments, filed, re-filed and then used to generate at least three more forms.  Forget Dante's Nine Circles of Hell.  What Brazil presents is an infernal vision of a far more terrifying order - a Ponzi-like paper chase that has one clear goal, to engulf and devour the whole of humanity.

The director Terry Gilliam was inspired to make the film as a frantic cri de coeur after his own creative endeavours had been repeatedly frustrated by bureaucratic processes within his profession and in life generally.  It is a sign of the perversity of our particular branch of the Multiverse that the same pettifogging, small-minded office mentality that Gilliam railed against so fiercely in this - his greatest achievement - was to be his principal adversary in getting the film seen in the form that he had intended.  Life has a tendency to imitate art, but rarely to the unimaginably pathological extent that Gilliam encountered in his year-long battle with Universal to get Brazil released in America without the drastic cuts that would have ruined it.

By this stage in his career, Gilliam was a highly regarded and commercially successful filmmaker.  It was through his work as an animator on the popular British television series Monty Python's Flying Circus in the late 1960s, early 1970s, that Gilliam became famous, and this led to him making his directing debut (alongside Terry Jones) on Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975).  His first solo offering as a director on Jabberwocky (1977) was not a great success but the film that came in its wake - Time Bandits (1981) - was such a phenomenal box office hit that Gilliam's future as an A-list filmmaker looked pretty well assured.  His next film, Brazil, was to stay with the central theme of its predecessor - the idea of escape through imagination - but adopts a far grimmer tone,  befitting the sepulchrous mood of the UK at a time when, under an  increasingly authoritarian rightwing government, the country was constantly beset with strikes, social unrest, terrorist attacks and an ever-expanding barrage of pointless bureaucracy (not to mention some truly dire sitcoms).  If you want a taste of just how relentlessly depressing life was in Thatcher's Britain of the early 1980s all you have to do is watch Shane Meadows' This England (2006).  Compare this with Brazil and you'll see immediately why Gilliam regarded his film as a documentary of its era.

From Metropolis to retro-tech dystopia

Even though Brazil is widely classified as a science-fiction movie, Terry Gilliam refutes this and prefers to promote the film as a political cartoon.  Whatever its intended genre, the film certainly benefited from the dramatic renaissance in sci-fi cinema in the late 1970s after the rip-roaring success of George Lucas's Star Wars (1977) and it would in turn prove to be massively influential in the development of science-fiction on the big and small screen for many decades.  Stylistically and thematically, Brazil fits neatly within the nascent sub-genre of sci-fi noir, alongside Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) and James Cameron's The Terminator (1984) - films that achieved a new gritty realism and heightened dramatic intensity through the application of expressionistic techniques employed in classic film noir thrillers of the 1940s and '50s.  Robert Aldrich is often credited as the originator of sci-fi noir with his 1955 genre-crossing oddity Kiss Me Deadly (1955), although Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) did much more to establish the look and feel of the sub-genre.

Brazil is ostensibly set at some time in the 20th century (around Christmas), yet its specific date and location are kept from us.  The setting is both familiar and alien, implying the story takes place in a parallel universe in which humanity has totally surrendered to a fetishistic impulse for needless paperwork and plastic ducting.  The design motifs of the architecture, interior decor and costumes have a striking Art Deco feel, suggesting that events are taking place in the 1940s, but the technology on which the society has become so dependent is clearly from a future era.  As in Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), the technology is more organic-looking than designed, with paraphernalia cobbled together in a piecemeal fashion from existing bits and pieces.  This suggests a society where innovation has stagnated to such a degree (thanks to all the time-wasting regulations and form-filling) that progress is achieved only through a process of incremental jerryrigging of existing technology that has exceeded the limits of usefulness.  A good example of this is a computer consisting of a ridiculously small TV screen mounted on an ancient typewriter.  To make the miniscule print on the screen readable a large lenticular lens has to be placed in front if it.

This 'retro-tech' look has been emulated in many subsequent films and was to prove highly influential for the French filmmakers Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro.  The latter's own dystopian curiosity pieces Delicatessen (1991) and La Cité des enfants perdus (1995) clearly owe a great deal to Brazil.  Another important design feature for Brazil is the special effects work, in particular that required for the extraordinary dream sequences.  For the time (several years before digital effects became widely available) these model-based effects are remarkably effective and, crafted with meticulous artistry and an incredible attention to detail, they still look jaw-droppingly impressive.  The film's most iconic image, of Sam as the winged knight flying to the rescue of his beloved, was achieved using an intricate articulated figurine on wires, obviating the need for a blue screen live-action shot which could never have had the same authenticity and poetic impact.

For the film's distinctive noir look, Gilliam and his cinematographer Roger Pratt took much of their inspiration from German expressionistic masterpieces of the 1920s - most obviously Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) - as well as American film noir of the 1940s and a few films by the Soviet master Sergei Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin and Ivan the Terrible Part 1).  The director's preference for real locations over studio sets serves the film well, with spacious industrial interiors helping to shape our impression of the bleakly utilitarian world in which Sam Lowry exists.  The interrogation scene at the end of the film takes place inside one of the cooling towers at Croydon power station, a cavernous void that, in one stunningly effective shot, drives home the utter insignificance of Sam's existence with a heart-stopping jolt.  With his customary bravura flair and unwavering eye for visual poetry, Gilliam combines his trademark use of wide-angled lens and extreme deep focus photography with the familiar stylistic tropes of classic noir - expressionistic set designs, slanted camera angles, chiaroscuro lighting and bold menacing shadows.  All of these add to the sense of a hermetic society in the grip of highly oppressive regime, where everyone is expected to conform and not even the slightest hint of dissent is tolerated.

Unlicensed heating engineers to the rescue

George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four would seem to be the most obvious literary reference, although Gilliam claimed not have read the novel at the time or seen any of its screen adaptations.  In contrast to Orwell's stark vision of a society governed by a totalitarian state that is ultimately under the control of one man (the party leader Big Brother), Brazil shows us what can happen when the system - namely a self-serving, self-perpetuating bureaucracy - takes over and everyone is reduced to nothing more than an insignificant cog in an unimaginably large administrative machine.  The characters in Gilliam's nightmare dystopia are not the victims of a controlling elite; they are prisoners of their own making, mindlessly serving the needs of a system they have created, negating their own needs in the process.  When things go wrong - which is frequently the case - no one is capable of taking responsibility.  Fortunately, the administrative maze is so vast and complex that there is always someone else to blame, so when mistakes are made it is always the fault of 'the other guy'.  Cock-ups that are too big to gloss over in this way (because the death count is unacceptably high) are blamed on terrorists, the best friend of any incompetent authoritarian regime - even if there's no evidence that they actually exist.

Everyone - including the film's supposed hero Sam Lowry - is complicit in this hell of grinding inertia, happily informing on their friends and neighbours as they subliminally ingest the multitude of glib slogans plastered on every wall.  'We're all in it together!' cries one of these, setting up the film's most hilarious visual gag.  The British Prime Minister David Cameron used the same phrase whilst promoting his ultimately doomed Big Society initiative in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.  What subsequently happened to Cameron isn't too far removed from the fate of the two unsuspecting heating engineers in the film after Robert De Niro sneakily switches the air supply to their protective suits with the outlet to a raw sewage system.  Suffocating to death in human excreta is probably not what the originator of 'We're all in it together!' meant, but it would seem to be an apt metaphor for a world in which humanity is collectively drowning in a stagnant sea of bureaucratic effluence.

Brazil is one of three films - along with Time Bandits (1981) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) - in which Terry Gilliam shows the importance of imagination in our lives, in defining who we are and how we are able to free ourselves from the limits that our circumstances impose on us.  It is through his imagination that Sam Lowry ultimately triumphs over a morbidly oppressive state that makes not the slightest concession to individual freedom, routinely arresting and torturing anyone suspected of harbouring seditious thoughts.  The film's moral is succinct and powerful - we can all be free if we allow our thoughts to be guided by our imagination, rather than submitting to an externally imposed, entirely arbitrary notion of one-size-fits-all conformity.  It is clear from the start that, in the world in which he is trapped as a lowly pen-pusher, Lowry has no hope of fulfilling his involuntary night-time dream of thrashing The System and flying off with The Perfect Woman.  But in his imagination, anything is possible - even being rescued from an administratively sanctioned torture by an anti-paperwork crusader played by none other than Robert De Niro!

A perfect ensemble

De Niro's presence in the film is all the more wonderful for being totally unexpected.  At the time, the actor had become one of Hollywood's biggest stars and was only ever considered for leading roles.  It was Gilliam's producer Arnon Milchan who invited De Niro to play a minor role in the film (having recently worked with him on Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy), and he readily agreed as he had long been an avid Monty Python fan.  Turned down for the slightly bigger part of the interrogator Jack Lint (which Gilliam had earmarked for his friend Michael Palin), De Niro gladly accepted the role of the renegade heating engineer Harry Tuttle - and made it one of his most memorable turns (even if he is on screen for only a few minutes).   Among the plenitude of high calibre actors cropping up in cameo roles are such familiar faces as Bob Hoskins, Peter Vaughan, Ian Richardson, Jim Broadbent, Nigel Planer, Gorden Kaye, Simon Jones and Don Henderson - all immaculately chosen and remarkably impactful for the limited time they are on screen.

The casting decision that was Gilliam's masterstroke was the choice of Jonathan Pryce for the leading role of Sam Lowry.  Outside the world of British theatre, the Welsh actor was a virtual unknown at the time, although he had become highly regarded for his stage work, notably with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and had received the Olivier Award for his lead performance in Hamlet at the Royal Court.  Weedy, self-absorbed and somewhat morally ambiguous, Sam Lowry is far from being the conventional hero, but Pryce's low-key, subtly humorous portrayal compels us to sympathise with him, to such a degree that he becomes the one thing of substance in the awful nightmare reality that Gilliam throws at us.  (It's shocking to think that the director's original choice for Lowry had been Tom Cruise - thankfully the latter ruled himself out by refusing to supply an audition tape).  It is the solid, dependable bland ordinariness of Sam Lowry that makes virtually every other character in the film appear so grotesque and unreal - from Palin's suspiciously likeable Jack Lint (who turns out to be a torturer par excellence) to Ian Holm's outrageously wimpish Mr Kurtzmann (a man so weak and feckless that he can't write a cheque without succumbing to a panic attack).

The female characters are even more incredible.  As the neighbourly do-gooder Jill Layton, Kim Greist has an unfortunate love-me-hate-me persona, one minute kicking the hero Sam out of a moving truck, the next luring him into bed as the classic femme fatale.  Gilliam was sufficiently unimpressed by Greist's lacklustre performance that he reduced her presence in the film to the bare minimum, with the result that Jill ends up appearing as vague and mysterious as the alluring damsel in distress of Sam's recurring dreams.  As Sam's status-obsessed mother Ida, Katherine Helmond (best-known for her role as Jessica Tate in the 1970s sitcom Soap) is the ultimate screen gorgon, so determined to regain her youthful appearance that she seems to spend her whole life in the cosmetic surgeon's chair.  When she is not being 'nipped and tucked' by a horribly self-adoring Jim Broadbent, Helmond is flaunting her wealth in the company of other vampiric narcissists at the city's poshest eating establishments - every culinary feast resembling a neat dish of what seems to be pureed frog.  In the spectacularly surreal climax to the film, Helmond is ultimately transformed into Greist, implying some deeply unsettling Oedipal connotations about the true nature of Sam's relation with his ickily libidinous mother.

Kafka, Freud and Stoppard

Terry Gilliam's original conception for the film was a loose reworking of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in which rampant bureaucracy was the villain of the piece rather than a ruthlessly totalitarian governing party.  He intended adopting the wildly flamboyant narrative style of Federico Fellini's 8½, a film in which the imagination of its protagonist (a famous director wrestling with a crippling mid-life crisis) plays a central part.  1984½ seemed to be a neat title - until Gilliam discovered that another filmmaker (Michael Radford) was working on an adaptation of Orwell's novel, to be released in 1984.  Gilliam claims he came up with the alternative title Brazil after recalling seeing a man peacefully sitting on a coal-dust covered beach in South Wales whilst listening to Ary Barroso's classic 1939 song Aquarela do Brasil on the radio.  The image of a man escaping the grim reality of his daily existence through Barroso's exotic ballad gave Gilliam not only the central idea for his film but also its enigmatic title.  Reworked by the guitarist-composer Geoff Muldaur, Barroso's famous theme recurs throughout the film (even hummed by the protagonist) and becomes an uplifting leitmotif for Lowry's repressed yearning for freedom.

Whilst Orwell's novel clearly had some impact on Brazil, a more striking literary influence is the work of the Czech writer Franz Kafka.  Sam Lowry, the easily cowed underdog forever trapped at the heart of a bureaucratic web, is Josef K. in all but name (albeit with a fair amount of Winston Smith and Walter Mitty).  Not only that, the film is resoundingly kafkaesque to its very core, not just in its unremitting aura of paranoia and oppression, but also in its eerily deranging dreamlike composition and bountiful supply of black humour.  The film's obvious absurdist slant is readily attributable to Gilliam's co-screenwriter Tom Stoppard, a greatly respected British playwright best known for his groundbreaking philosophical plays Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), Jumpers (1972) and Arcadia (1993).

Stoppard's working relationship with Gilliam was by all accounts fraught but it proved to be immensely fruitful, three re-writes yielding a revised screenplay that was far richer and far more intelligently structured than the inchoate mass of ideas which the director had originally knocked together with Charles Alverson.  It was Stoppard who introduced the 'bug in the machine' gag, with the Buttle-Tuttle mix-up providing a way to connect Sam with the real-life object of his desire.  Stoppard is also responsible for the samurai robot warrior that appears in Sam's dreams.  The warrior's significance becomes apparent after Sam has slain it in battle and removes its mask to find that his adversary is himself.  The word 'samurai' is a Freudian pun, an attempt by Sam's subconscious mind to tell him that by fighting the bureaucratic system he is merely fighting himself, as he is inevitably a part of the system.

Sam's real enemy is revealed to him as soon as he appears in the guise of a samurai warrior - 'Sam, you're I' being the message his subconscious is trying to get through to him.  Several times in the film, Sam is seen reflected in mirrors, a nod perhaps to the incipient personality disorder that will ultimately lead to his total mental breakdown under interrogation.  In the scene in a busy department store, a large mirror is positioned in such a way that Sam resembles Siamese twins and appears to be wrestling with himself - another clue perhaps that the film is far more about Sam's inner conflict than a notional tussle with a greater external power.  Further signs of Sam's encroaching insanity are noticeable in the second half of the film, as elements of his dreams intrude increasingly in his everyday life.  In the end, fantasy and reality become so perfectly intertwined that we can no longer tell where the boundary lies.  By this point, Sam is literally in a world of his own - as we suspect he may have been right from the outset.

When life parodies art

The story of Brazil's American release is every bit as fantastic as that of the film itself.  Indeed, Sam Lowry's hopeless struggle against a faceless bureaucratic state had an almost exact parallel in Terry Gilliam's real-life struggle against the studio executives who seemed determined to prevent him from delivering his artistic vision to the world.  At first, none of the major Hollywood studios had any interest in the project, which was considered far too intellectual for the mainstream.  Gilliam's luck changed suddenly after he rejected an invitation from Twentieth Century Fox to direct the sci-fi blockbuster Enemy Mine, as several other prestigious directors had already turned down the offer.  The boldness of this move elevated Gilliam's standing and he was almost immediately in receipt of a 15 million dollar budget to direct Brazil for rival studios Fox and Universal.  In addition, he was granted final cut (an extremely rare privilege) and a runtime of 135 minutes for any US release.

As it turned out, the film ran to 142 minutes and Gilliam's refusal to cut the film when asked to do so by its distributor Universal led to an acrimonious falling out with the company's president, Sidney Sheinberg.  Having received poor feedback after a preview screening, Sheinberg was convinced that the film's pessimistic tone and convoluted plot would limit its box office appeal massively.  What he wanted was for the film to be vastly reduced in length and to have a happy ending in which the hero rides off into the sunset with his paramour - the exact antithesis of what Gilliam had intended.  (This truncated 'love conquers all' version was subsequently made and syndicated for American television, with a runtime of 90 minutes.)

With help from a usually publicity-shy De Niro, Gilliam immediately went on the offensive with a series of TV interviews.   He then committed what he subsequently considered an act of grand folly by taking out a full-size ad in the trade paper Daily Variety simply asking Sheinberg when he was going to release his film.  By this time (the early spring of 1985), Fox had successfully distributed Brazil in Europe, garnering rave reviews and healthy box office returns.  In spite of this, Sheinberg insisted that Gilliam's film was far too highbrow for a US mainstream cinema audience and continued to block Universal's release in North America.  Only by arranging clandestine viewings of his film to cinema critics in Los Angeles was Gilliam able to make any headway.  In the face of positive reviews from a select cohort of Californian critics, Sheinberg gave in and sanctioned Brazil's US release, on condition that it was trimmed to 132 minutes.  As it turned out, Sheinberg's concerns were justified - the New York critics were quick to pan the film and it struggled at the American box office.  Overall, however, Brazil proved to be a critical and commercial success.  It was nominated for two Oscars, in the categories of Best Original Screenplay and Best Art Direction, and received BAFTAs for its production design and special effects.

Pure genius

Brazil has often been criticised for its confusing labyrinthine narrative, but this perceived flaw is actually one of the film's main strengths, making it not just compelling but totally and irresistibly submersive - if you are willing to go along with it.  An attempt to make sense of everything on a single viewing is doomed to fail.  You have to watch the film at least three times for it to make complete sense - which is no great chore as it actually gets better (and funnier) on every re-watching.  Scenes, ideas and gags are thrown at us in quick succession in a cinematic form of free association and it is left to the spectator to piece it all together.  It's more fun than it sounds.

Once it has begun to coalesce in your mind, Brazil delivers an incredibly powerful story.  It is the most harrowing vision of a man who is capable of imagining a better life for himself but tragically has no chance of achieving this, so deeply entrenched is he in the soulless Machine that governs his life.  Along with Orson Welles' The Trial (1962) and Roman Polanski's The Tenant (1976) - two similarly disturbing depictions of an ordinary man's descent into insanity - Terry Gilliam's Brazil stands as possibly cinema's most inspired re-working of Kafka's core existential themes.  If you have a compulsion for reading Kafka's novels over and over, this film will most likely have the same effect - you will not be able to stop yourself from watching it repeatedly.

One of the most influential films of the 1980s, Brazil continues to inspire filmmakers, most recently Rian Johnson on his 2017 film Star Wars: The Last Jedi.  Breathtakingly original in its time, Brazil still has a chilling resonance - particularly in its grimly realist portrayal of a society that is blithely allowing itself to be tied up in red tape whilst becoming hopelessly dependent on flawed technologies that hasten the process of dehumanisation.  A landmark in British cinema, Brazil is seen by some as a defining cult classic in the dystopian sci-fi genre, by others as a devastatingly pertinent piece of social commentary.  It was stunning when it was first released in 1985 and remains so to this day - a startling piece of cinema that is as intellectually profound as it is visually enthralling.  It might even make you laugh.

Film Synopsis

Somewhere in the 20th century, Sam Lowry dutifully carries out his duties as a low-ranking government employee in the Department of Records at the Ministry of Information.  A man of no ambition, Sam is content with being the tiniest cog in a vast bureaucratic machine that keeps the population safely under control in the most regulated of consumerist worlds.  Dependent on ramshackle technology which is prone to breaking down, this far from perfect society is frequently disrupted by explosions that are blamed on terrorists.  This provides the government with an excuse for abducting and interrogating under torture anyone who shows the slightest sign of subversive behaviour.  Sam's only prospect of escape from the crushing mundanities of everyday life are his dreams, in which he imagines himself transformed into a winged knight who battles a fierce samurai-armoured giant robot and rescues a beautiful damsel in distress.

One day, a tiny clerical error caused by an insect leads to a harmless shoemaker named Archibald Buttle being arrested instead of a suspected terrorist, the rogue heating engineer Archibald Tuttle (known as Harry to his friends).  The mistake isn't noticed until after Buttle has died under interrogation.  This creates an administrative headache for Sam's easily flustered boss, Mr Kurtzmann, as the dead man's widow has been wrongly billed for the cost of an unwarranted arrest.  Sam volunteers to rectify the situation, by delivering a cheque to Mrs Buttle at her home.  As he does so, he recognises the widow's neighbour Jill Layton as the young woman in his recurring dreams.  Before Sam can make contact with Jill she is classified as a terrorist suspect after she makes an unsuccessful attempt to report Mr Buttle's wrongful arrest.  Mr Tuttle then shows up at Sam's apartment to fix his defective heating system, leaving the scene with the job done just before the authorised engineers from Central Services arrive and wreck the system - once they have obtained the requisite paperwork.

Sam's only hope of getting to Jill is to accept a promotion to another department, Information Retrieval.  He had previously turned down the transfer, which had been engineered by his interfering rich mother Ida, a woman obsessed with youth and status.  Once installed in his new office, Sam wastes no time accessing Jill's records, allowing him to reach her before she falls foul of an arrest squad.  By submitting a false record of Jill's death, Sam would seem to have beaten the system - until he is arrested and taken away to be interrogated by his old friend, Jack Lint - a lovely man who takes a special pride in his work as the state interrogator.  Just when all appears to be lost, the enterprising Harry Tuttle suddenly shows up with an armed gang of resistance fighters and whisks Sam to safety and the prospect of a happy future life with Jill.  Can this really be happening or is Sam allowing his imagination to run away with itself...?