Editor’s note: Brazil is one of the ten best films of the 1980s voted on by staff, friends, and readers of Movie Mezzanine. For the sake of surprise and building anticipation, we’ll wait to reveal where this and every other film ranks on the list until the very end. We hope you enjoy.
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This past week, a trailer for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty took the Internet film world by storm. Watching Ben Stiller’s office drone retreat from his drab existence by becoming a hero in his own mind reminded me of another character: Sam Lowry. While the short story on which Walter Mitty is based preceded 1985’s Brazil by decades, watching fantasy Stiller crash-dive between buildings felt strongly reminiscent of Jonathan Pryce’s Lowry taking flight as an armored Icarus. This is a prime moment to talk about Terry Gilliam’s dystopian satire – the gang of smarts at The Dissolve just selected it as their movie of the week, and they’ve written some great stuff about it. Stacking my own thoughts on the film alongside theirs is both an honor and slightly intimidating.
I think that the Walter Mitty trailer struck a chord with so many people because it conveys so well what will presumably be the vibe of the film. That’s the urge to escape, and how imagination can let us do so when there’s no other way out of our circumstances. This is what I think Brazil taps into so well, and why the film, which initially flopped at the box office, went on to be considered a classic. It’s a theme that Gilliam has revisited again and again in his work, and I think he does it better here than in any other movie he’s yet directed.
And there’s a reason escapism resonates with viewers. While cinema is capable of helping us directly confront various aspects of our world in a powerful way, it’s far more popular as an avenue of distraction. The movies that let an audience forget everything outside a theater are, almost without exception, far more popular than those that remind us of what we’d rather ignore for a while so that we can feel a rush. Of course, the best films can both provide an escape and say something meaningful about life, and Brazil does so with a delightfully off-kilter style.
At The Dissolve, Tasha Robinson goes into how Lowry is in many ways a stand-in for Gilliam, who has, and still does, see himself as a martyr for creativity in the mainstream film industry. But the oppressive regime in Brazil can stand in for any number of dull jobs that one can think of. The movie was made at the peak of the office age of grunt work, and while we’re beginning to see the work environment morph into some kind of stranger, tech-focused place, its satirical vision still holds true. You don’t have to be a clerk in a nightmarish bureaucracy of blood to want to get away. You could work for a magazine, like Walter Mitty in his upcoming film.
Inside his own head, Sam Lowry is free from his world of dungey automation, from his status as a fleshy cog in a sociopathic bureaucracy. His fantasies look like something out of a Hollywood blockbuster, full of giant samurai, damsels in distress, all manner of sparks and flashes, and the basic joy of flight. His world is upended because he encounters in real life something that resembles what he’s imagined, a woman with the face of the damsel from his daydream, and he chooses to act out his dream in real life. It ultimately leads to what is simultaneously his undoing and his salvation. His love is killed, he loses everything, and he becomes a torture plaything of The State, but he is free. He is fully subsumed in his fantasy, where the government can’t touch him. 1984 is a tragedy because in the end, Winston Smith loves Big Brother. Brazil, even in the version where love does not conquer all, is about personal liberation from dictatorship. It’s one of the most heartbreaking happy endings of all time.
Film shapes our individual and collective imaginations, and is fed by each new crop of artists’ fresh perspectives. And all of this is in the service of distraction and reflection. Most of us can’t achieve the luxury of going completely mad, so we pursue temporary madness in the theater. Brazil is a paean to thinking in more grandiose and romantic ways than what is convenient for the string-pullers of the world. It’s an escape that affirms your desire to escape, and that’s one reason we love the film so much.
2 thoughts on “History of Film: Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’”
Easily one of the best films ever made. I was just mesmerized by it when I first saw it years ago. Truly one of a kind. I love Robert de Niro’s appearance in the film as a guy who just wants to do things his way w/o any complications and paperwork.
Visually I think you can credit Brazil with a lot but thematically it mostly borrows. This is a reason why I find it hard to give it outright praise as so many do. A lot of Gilliam’s work is like that though. He seems really indebted to ideas somebody else came up with at some point (at least half of his films). His greatest asset is his ability to visualise for screen. I wouldn’t try to take that away from him.