Brazil
(1985)
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BRAZIL is Terry Gilliam's masterpiece. The film, cowritten by Gilliam, playwright Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown, is set in a futuristic society laden with red tape and bureaucracy. When a bug (literally) gets in the system, an innocent man is killed, leading mild-mannered Sam Lowry (an excellent Jonathan Pryce) to reexamine what he wants out of life. He decides to fight the totalitarian system in his search for freedom--and the woman he loves. The terrific, offbeat cast features Robert De Niro as a renegade heating engineer; Katherine Helmond as Sam's ever-younger mother; Michael Palin as a frightened worker bee terrified of upsetting the status quo; Bob Hoskins as a vengeful Central Services employee; Jim Broadbent as a wacko plastic surgeon; the wonderful Ian Holm as Sam's nerve-ridden, pitiful boss, afraid of his own signature; and Kim Greist as the rebel Sam falls in love with. |
In this extraordinary vision of a futuristic bureaucratic hell from director Terry Gilliam, Jonathan Pryce stars as the Orwellian hero, a permanently harassed clerk at the all-seeing Department of Information Retrieval. Pryce is only kept sane by his vivid daydreams, which see him as a heroic flying warrior coming to the aid of a beautiful woman (Kim Greist). As unpredictable as Gilliam's Monty Python animations, this daring and dazzling take on 1984 creates a weird world inhabited by an assortment of crazy characters, including Robert De Niro as an SAS-style repairman. The movie's sledgehammer conclusion gave studio executives sleepless nights. Expect the same.
Halliwell's Film Guide
An expensive, wild, overlong, hit-or-miss Orwellian satire: enough good jabs to please the intelligentsia, but a turnoff for patrons at the local Odeon.