Jabberwocky
From one great
master of the unfinished film (Samuel Fuller, Tigrero) to another (Don
Quixote), a gag finish that is the key to the whole enterprise.
A film as amusing
as the poem must be a masterpiece.
The obvious
citations include Chaplin’s The Great Dictator for the rival merchants,
Bergman’s The Seventh Seal for the penitents, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space
Odyssey for the knightly POV, and Stroheim miraculously for the ending. A
great critic is Mel Brooks for several gags transposed into History of the
World: Part I and Spaceballs (he makes the Bishop an Abbot in Robin
Hood: Men in Tights).
Canby of the New
York Times woke up and wrote, “marvelously demented British comedy”, Variety
was not impressed, Time Out Film Guide could not make it out, neither
could Halliwell’s Film Guide, nor the Illustrated London News.
Time Bandits
It is now clear
that what makes this a Handmade Film is its disdain of computer animation. As a
matter of fact, its subject is the revolt of the Evil One by means of the “technological
dawn” or the “Silicon Revolution,” which proceeds by degrees from microwave
ovens through cellphones to computers, ultimately allowing the Supreme Being to
be universally supplanted, Monty Python’s Paradise Lost.
These stages are
mirrored in the film, which introduces into the Monty Python arena actors like
Ralph Richardson as the Supreme Being, Ian Holm as Napoleon, and Sean Connery
as Agamemnon. The title characters are wonderful performers, and a key turn is
provided by John Cleese as Robin Hood (“I’m Hood,” he says, cheerfully).
The opening is a
startling English version of the American suburban-life parody, and set the
tone for E.T. and Poltergeist the following year. Reference is
made to The Wizard of Oz and La Belle et la Bête in the course of
a film which may be said to be Monty Python given cinematic resources and room
in which to work.
The Crimson
The specific
construction of a beautiful joke. A
Assuredly
one of the finest things in cinema.
The central
metaphor of this film, which is a now-famous version of Kafka and Orwell,
constitutes a substantial invention in that it manages to convey a particularly
exquisite double-edged sword consisting of a nightmare realm and a conditional
dream.
Stylistically
this is a considerable advance even upon Time Bandits. It speeds up the
activity of the editing into a consecutive “magic mirror” derived from Keaton’s
discovery (in The Projectionist) of continuity as permutations of
background. In Time Bandits, the camera suddenly rolls on “Ancient
Greece,” and you are there. Brazil accepts the modality of camera and
Moviola to piece together a lambent cinematic continuity without repetitions.
Once or twice
only, the technique shows at this stage the modifications it has undergone.
Lowry starts to ascend in an elevator, sees Jill in the lobby and reverses course:
the elevator descends past the lobby and into the basement. Richard Lester
would have done this with a medium shot framing the elevator and Lowry inside
it viewed from the lobby, but Gilliam cuts to a needless close-up which
neutralizes the gag but prepares the reverse angle in the basement, where two
repairmen place a sign on the elevator cage reading “Out of Service,”
apparently. Either way, the patrimony is Keaton’s.
A tremendous shot
in the Ministry of Information is repeated in The Fisher King: long
dolly-out, track left, dolly-in. The technical accomplishment of this is
traceable right to The Third Man.
Innumerable
citations include Never Give An Inch and You Only Live Twice. The
tortuous history of the final cut is characteristic of the time.
The
Adventures of Baron Munchausen
The commodious
opening is from Bergman’s The Magic Flute, Russell’s The Devils,
which is directly cited later as a “correction,” when Venus (Uma Thurman) and
not the transvestite King rises from the waves in Botticelli’s shell, and above
all Cyrano de Bergerac, which is the main formal touchstone.
The Saracen is at
the gates, Munchausen takes the stage against an impostor to relate his
adventures (which include fighting the Saracen). He has spent some time in
Leviathan like Jonah, but the large-scale joke is twofold. In the heavens, he
has excited the jealousy of the Man in the Moon (Robin Williams), and in the
underworld that of Vulcan (Oliver Reed). Once this spatial distribution of dry
wit is established, the film has made its point as succinctly as Lord Byron
ever did.
The great
invention is Munchausen himself (John Neville), and from this it’s easy to see
how Gilliam proceeded to Don Quixote. As far as the studio’s neglect of the
film is concerned, a studio executive cut the coffee-bar scene from Losey’s The
Servant just because for the life of him he couldn’t see what it was in aid
of.
The
Fisher King
Visible extremes
meet like sore thumbs in a test of roadworthiness. Pity ‘tis, to see them so, but
let the Holy Grail be sought, etc.
Reader, that item
is a brummagem trophy on the bookshelves of a wealthy New York oppidan who
would rather be dead...
There’s a nice
touch of Welles at the end—cut to headline held by patient in wheelchair,
wheeled off to show
The structure
is very rich and, for once, has excited a good deal of informed comment. This
makes available the observation that Mahler probably learned from conducting
Strauss, large structures permit small effects.
Gilliam achieves
a genuine eeriness in his time travel per se, it’s enchanting for the
traveler to miss ’96 for ’90, with the specific information provided that his
psychiatrist drives a ‘94 Cherokee, it makes a game of the calendar. There’s a
kind of Slaughterhouse-Five alternance of reality that’s useful and
interesting in itself and in much the same terms. And the Hitchcockisms have no
doubt been taken into account, The Magnificent Ambersons as well.
The marvelous
subtlety of the thing is a consideration hard to adumbrate. Borges has Hitler a
suicidal maniac who not only dreamed of destroying Germany with him, but also
of making all men rise to his occasion in total war. To this it might be added
that Jewish populations in Europe remain diminished.
It’s the subtle
point here, to look at it from another point of view, that a prominent act has
the forces behind it and impelling it beyond the time of its eventuality, or
that a thing being done has still the character of fate, so that, as Borges
says, a certain kind of response fulfills unseen wishes of the actor. Here,
specifically, it’s a murder observed in childhood that has untold consequences
many years later in a great swath of destruction that cannot have been
envisioned at the time.
There’s another
thing, however, that’s enchanting, and that’s the surrender of the hero to his
“madness”, because the psychiatrist is so charming, her world so fair, while
she slowly realizes he isn’t mad at all (this has probably been commented upon
as well). The nuance of musical, novelistic structures that recur and foretell
is achieved with great freedom, probably indicating the utility of the
distancing lens.
The
Brothers Grimm
For a madly
misunderstood movie, look no farther. The groundwork of an analysis is laid
with the brothers as thaumaturges of the Handmade Films school earning a living
by dramatically representing a witch, for example, and quelling her in
superstitious times.
The French occupy
And so you get
the dramatic ranges of a completely unified plot complained of by critics as
nowhere to be found.