Brazil (1985)

"We're all in it together." 

Director

Terry Gilliam

Cast

Jonathan Pryce - Sam Lowry

Kim Greist - Jill Layton

Michael Palin - Jack Lint

Katherine Helmond - Ida Lowry

Ian Holm - Mr. Kurtzmann

Peter Vaughan - Mr. Helpmann

Bob Hoskins - Spoor

Robert De Niro - Tuttle

Terry Gilliam's dystopian comedy "Brazil" has been on my "blog about this" list for a long time. It's a movie that's popular to some degree but doesn't seem to be talked about as much as other British films. Thankfully, it has been released through the Criterion Collection. 

As Gilliam is an alumni of the British sketch comedy troupe, Monty Python, the movie has a Monty Python feel with its surreal cynical imagery and comedy style. And in true Monty Python fashion, it takes satire to an otherwise sacrosanct level as it pokes fun of George Orwell's novel "1984." However, it is not a Python movie.

Fellow Python member Michael Palin also stars in this film which helps give it that comedic style. 

In "Brazil" the very not-distant future is a grimy, heavily bureaucratic, totalitarian, consumerist and rather flimsy one. In the midst of this rather present future is a grey-suited government employee named Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce). 

He's at the bottom of the pole when it comes to his government job. 

Lowry has a reoccurring dream in which he's a winged warrior who finds and rescues a gorgeous blond woman in distress. Reality, however, is drab business with little to no peace of mind.

During the Christmas season, a random office worker in a random office kills a fly with a magazine. The dead carcass falls into a printer causing an error on an arrest warrant the machine is typing. 

The name Archibald Buttle is accidentally printed on the warrant, which leads to the arrest of an innocent shoe repair operative instead of a criminal terrorist named Archibald Tuttle.  

Buttle's house is raided by heavily armed officers as he listens to his sweet wife read "A Christmas Carol" to their young children. He's later killed for Tuttle's crimes as authorities don't yet realize they have the wrong person. But what can the government do? Mistakes are made. Nobody's perfect. Oopsy.

Lowry catches the mistake when the wrong bank is charged for the cost of the arrest. 

So, Lowry is given the task of visiting Buttle's emotionally broken widow to hand her a refund check. 

While at her apartment he spots the upstairs neighbor, Jill Layton (Kim Greist), who looks just like the girl in his reoccurring dream. He tries to get to her and talk but she disappears before he can get a chance.

Jill, who works as a truck driver, has been trying to help Mrs. Buttle figure out what happened to her husband. She finds its nearly impossible to work her way through the thick layers of administrative paperwork and officials requiring stamps and approvals. 

All her efforts to help her neighbor leads to the ignorant bureaucrats thinking she's an accomplice to terrorism because she reported Buttle's wrongful arrest. 

That night, the air conditioning in Lowry's apartment fails. He wakes up late at night, roasting, and calls Central Services to fix it. While they're not very eager to help, Tuttle himself (Robert De Niro) shows up to fix his AC. 

Jonathan Pryce as Sam Lowry.

Tuttle says he used to work for Central Services but left because he found the amount of paperwork more tedious than one would expect. 

With his history being what it is, Tuttle is rather apprehensive and jumpy. While he's working on Lowry's AC, two Central Service workers named Spoor (Bob Hoskins) and Dowser (Derrick O'Connor) end up coming by his apartment to fix his AC.

When he declines their services, they become annoyed. Of course, he doesn't tell them that Tuttle is in his apartment. 

Later, Spoor and Dowser return, trash his air ducts, and take control of his apartment under the false claim that they're making necessary repairs. 

Meanwhile, Lowry searches for Jill's personal file, but he discovers it's classified. The only way he can access it is to be promoted to the Department of Information Retrieval. 

His mother, Ida (Katherine Helmond), who is very wealthy and influential, previously managed to get him a governmental promotion, but he declined. 

So, he backtracks his previous refusal by talking to Deputy Minister Eugene Helpmann (Peter Vaughan) during a suave dinner party hosted by Ida. Helpmann gives him the promotion, and now Lowry has access to Jill's file. 

He happens to spot Jill in the lobby of the Ministry of Information. Authorities, too, are closing in to arrest her.

Lowry uses his office to stall the arrest and escorts Jill back to her truck. He jumps in with her and, right away, professes his love to her while government authorities are chasing them. 

They stop at a mall where a terrorist bomb goes off. 

Government agents catch up and arrest Lowry.

When he's able to return home, the two guys from Central Services have repossessed his apartment. Tuttle secretly aids Lowry in getting his place back through a rather stinky means. 

Thankfully, Lowry and Jill meet outside his place, and the two of them hook up in his mom's luxurious apartment while Ida is away somewhere with her plastic surgeon. 

He falsifies some documents to indicate Jill died so she can escape the government's manhunt. 

They spend the night together. And the next morning, government agents raid Ida's apartment.

Lowry next finds himself bound and strapped in a medical facility about to undergo torture by his friend, Jack Lint (Michael Palin). 

And I'll end the synopsis there.  

By 1985, Terry Gilliam had solidly proven himself a master of cynical social commentary through a truly original style of surreal photo animation and imagery. His is a dainty and savory type of silly, blended with a distinctly sharp hint of straightforward irony. I could sit and watch hours of his work. His animations sequences in the series "Monty Python's Flying Circus" and the subsequent Monty Python movies are among my favorites by far. They're deliciously saturated in satire, not taking seriously all the seemingly inane formalities that burden us like wet clothes.  

"Brazil" sits in the middle of a trio of surreal style Gilliam movies including "Time Bandits" (1981) and "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" (1988). These three movies all tell stories about escaping societies that are ordered to the point of absurdity. 
"Time Bandits" centers on a child. "Brazil" centers on a young adult man. And "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" centers on an old man. 

Katherine Helmond, Michael Palin, Ian Holm, Peter Vaughan, and Jack Purvis also star in "Time Bandits" while Jonathan Pryce stars in "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen."

The imagery and silliness typical of Gilliam couldn't fit any better in a story like this. There's still room for the audience to come in, relate to the situation and to the main character to some degree. But that Monty Python influence is visible underneath the exterior satirical humor to the fisheye close-ups and camera angles. 
Even as a cult film, it seems to me this movie doesn't receive as much attention as it should though it has inspired directors such as Tim Burton, the Coen brothers, and Neil Marshall.

Despite critic Roger Ebert's less-than-positive review of this movie, I still love it.   

"Brazil" has a place among other off-beat social critique films such as "A Clockwork Orange," "Dr. Strangelove," and I would even be so bold to include Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times." Although Charlie Chaplin's movie is much more simple and less packed than "Brazil" which makes his commentary easier to grasp. 

Gilliam's future in "Brazil" includes a pampered upper-class that doesn't bat an eye to any chaos around them, including terrorist bombs going off, alongside a lower-middle class subject to an unsympathetic machine-like witless ruling class. 

The bureaucracy is heavily built up to the point of senselessness. The shoddy ducts and vents are like some sort of umbilical cord between the masses and the ruling officials always pumping and blowing life (for all practical purposes) into society while killing all beauty and character.

The ruling class doesn't think. It just does. And the masses are either comfortably distracted by materialism, or standing up against the system which plasters and spews propaganda all around. Pointless, meaningless mantras like "Suspicion breeds confidence" and "Information is the key to prosperity" are plastered everywhere and shoved in people's faces as they go about their daily lives. And the rest think the best way to regain society is to destroy it completely. But the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The forced festive music amid the dull gray dystopian and laborious environment tries to get it in people's heads, "See! Things are actually going well" while everything crumbles around them. But no one should pay any attention to that.

Nothing is perfect. There's always a problem, great or small.  

One touch I like is how various characters in this movie are often tuned into classic films. In one scene, Jill sits in her bathtub and watches "The Coconuts" (1929) starring the Marx Brothers. While Lowry is at work, employees secretly watch other old black and white classics when the boss isn't looking. It's as though the society yearns for more normal periods of time. The atmosphere is a mix of past and present done well. 

A favorite scene of mine sees Lowry and another government agent in the next office in a tug-o-war over a shared desk that protrudes through the office walls. 

In this movie, Lowry demonstrates that humanity still exists no matter what. His romantic dreams are haunted by the obstructing, imprisoning bureaucracy around him. In one dream, he battles this bureaucracy which takes the form of a Samurai warrior filled with industrial flames, to save the woman of his dreams. 

As this movie is often compared to Orwell's "1984," "Brazil" is distinct from Orwell's book in that it depicts the here and now. Orwell looks into the future. 

"Brazil" is a loaded movie. It's one of those movies that audiences may have to watch more than once to grasp to take everything in. 

The message amidst all this is clear. The desire for something better and wholesome exist even when drab, stone grey government and they suffering they cause looms high and wide over everyone. They can't take that away no matter what they repeatedly beat people over the head with.