You're No Fun Anymore: Brazil (Patreon)

My series of Terry Gilliam retrospectives finally returns, now under a new name.

Gilliam had been dreaming of Brazil since the last days of the 1970s. He says that Brazil was born from a vision he had in Port Talbot, a small steel town in South West Wales.

“The beach was completely covered with iron ore, black and awful,” he told the New York Times in 1986, “and I was there at sunset, seeing these strange industrial shapes all over the place.”

It was then that Terry Gilliam had a vision of a man sitting on Albion’s shores, listening to his radio, playing “this wonderful Latin escapist romantic music that has nothing to do with the world that he’s in.”

The vision of a man out of time stuck with Gilliam, an expat from Minnesota who had abandoned America in the Sixties, and had spent his twenties and thirties as the lone non-sketch comedy writer in a troupe with five Oxbridge-educated Brits. Even when Gilliam shot Jabberwocky in the late Seventies, he couldn’t exist in his own orbit, as the movie elicited comparisons to Python (and his love of working with Michael Palin certainly didn’t help). Gilliam’s Brazil co-writer Charles McKeown said that Gilliam told him the story of Brazil at the end of principal photography for Life of Brian in Tunisia. But even after that, Gilliam had to do more Python-adjacent work with Time Bandits, which saddled him with John Cleese alongside Michael Palin. Gilliam is a lone wolf trapped in other people’s spheres, an obsessively independent man cursed to work with people.

Charles McKeown says Gilliam approached him to co-write Brazil after Time Bandits premiered, showing him a first draft he’d penned with Jabberwocky co-writer Charles Alveson (Alveson ultimately did not receive a writing credit for the movie). Gilliam and McKeown then worked on Brazil for a while before Gilliam brought in dramaturge Tom Stoppard to add some structure to the story. Stoppard didn’t stop at structure, adding plot beats like the Buttle/Tuttle mixup and the beetle in the typewriter, more wordplay, and more jokes (Stoppard says Gilliam was nonplussed by “triplets? My, how time flies.”) Afterwards, Gilliam and McKeown took a chisel to Stoppard’s work, bringing back some of the chaos of the earlier drafts (McKeown says his job was to “reintroduce Terry to his own material”).

While Brazil is Terry Gilliam’s third movie as a solo director, it’s functionally the first Terry Gilliam Movie in the sense of being a belligerently, anti-populist, maximalist, violently weird fantasy picture. It has none of the Disneyesque comforts of Time Bandits — Brazil’s aesthetic influences are Nazi Germany, Art Deco, 8 ½. It’s difficult in a way Gilliam’s previous work only aspired to (and at the time, Gilliam said Brazil was his first movie he was really happy with). The myth of Terry Gilliam properly begins here. For the next decade and a half, he’ll produce one of the most interesting bodies of work by an Anglophonic filmmaker.

And Brazil is one of the great filmmaking triumphs of the late 20th Century. It’s certainly an astonishing piece of cinematic vision — dystopian science fiction (regardless of Gilliam’s opinion) cloaked as a screwball noir. The aesthetic of Art Deco-meets-alternate/future-history isn’t far off from later works like BioShock. Brazil exists in a closed-off British state capitalist labyrinth where fascism seems to have won — figureheads often have German names (Helpmann, Kurtzmann, Warrenn). But we only get a glimpse of a small part of this future. In the opening sequence, a broadcaster mentions that the Ministry of Information uses 7% of the country’s GDP. There’s a state behind the Ministry, where people live their day-to-day lives against a backdrop of atrocities, where the wealthy obsess over frivolities while the proletariat suffers and dies under their feet. 

The film’s protagonist Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) carries out his quest to slay an imaginary samurai and stalk a real woman against a backdrop of extrajudicial kidnappings and torture. The woman he stalks witnesses a man being kidnapped in his home on Christmas in front of his entire family. In a rare moment of pathos, Sam’s life of dreaming is disrupted by the atrocities his Ministry has committed, as he gives the widow of the man his ministry killed a refund check for her husband’s life. Sheila Read responds to the world’s most paltry reparations with possibly the most harrowing performance of the entire movie in response, screaming “what have you done with his body?" It is a devastating, brilliantly awful scene that redefines the entire movie.

After that, Sam immediately resumes his life of dreams, chasing Jill (Kim Griest) out of the building in an intentionally abrupt return to the stalking subplot. Here we have one of the central contradictions of Gilliam: his broad sympathy for the oppressed and marginalized clashes with his antipathy towards women and his penchant for being publicly transphobic. He’s laudably vocal about the genocide in Gaza, but in the same breathe he’ll slam trans people as inherently ridiculous. Hell, Brazil got made because Gilliam and producer Arnon Milchan were introduced by child rapist Roman Polanski. His misogyny is plastered all over Brazil: most of the women in the movie are either objects to be stalked or yucky old ladies obsessed with beauty. At some point, we’ll exit the golden age, and see how Brazil presaged Gilliam’s transformation into somebody who’s no fun anymore.

Look at the content of Sam’s dreams (which have something of a prophetic quality if we believe he’s never seen Jill before she visits the Ministry). He spends several scenes in combat with an orientalized vision of his enemy; a samurai covered with hard drives. The titular song of the movie is a nationalist anthem for a country that was at the time of filming was ruled by a U.S.-backed military dictatorship. Sam’s dreams are fanciful, not liberatory — they’re ultimately capitalist dreams of individual fulfillment and quixotic fantasy.

Brazil seems at aware of these contradictions. If anything, Sam Lowry — clearly in part an authorial self-insert by Gilliam — embodies everything wrong with Gilliam’s movies. He witnesses numerous crimes and atrocities, but he’s motivated primarily by a desire to live inside his dreams and be a hero. Sam has given up on the banality of Good — he’s living out the catastrophe of Good. Is this preferable to boring corporate fascism? Yeah, probably.

Something about this may have unsettled Universal CEO Sid Sheinberg. Perhaps that’s why he defaced Brazil with the laughably execrable “Love Never Dies” cut, which loses most of the dream sequences, cuts out almost any exposition that permits the movie to make sense, and ends abruptly after Sam and Jill drive out into the country. Perhaps the most unforgivable change is the decision to recut the “what have you done with his body” scene with shot reverse shot coverage, replacing the extraordinarily tense two shot with more conventional cinematography. The most brutally real part of the movie is turned into conventional spectacle. Brazil, emerging as the neoliberal nightmare took hold of Hollywood, became a poster child for studio interference. Gilliam’s fight to release his version of Brazil made the movie a flagship of artistic integrity in an era of Reaganite commercialism. Brazil, for all its flaws, is a triumph — an ostentatious invitation to the studios to “come and get me.” Gilliam never turns down a fight — and this time, he won.

Terry Gilliam fought the Quixotic fight against Universal. Somehow he won. Heroism didn’t save Brazil — foolhardy courage did. Dreams can distract us, but sometimes they can protect us too. Sometimes the good fight means creating a movie so weird and political that the powers that be have to destroy it. Gilliam has no straightforward answers, and Brazil would be worse if he did. Instead, Brazil invites the audience into a conspiracy of fantastical disruption: dream the dreams that capitalism will have to destroy.