What Brazil Means to Us
Combined with Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil bookends a loose trilogy about dreamers. This wild adventure takes us through an authoritarian world the blending of outlandish dreams and reality produces incredible images and quirky, fascinating characters.
It’s the story of the small man up against a huge, faceless bureaucracy, in a 1984-style future awash in stifling rules and regulations. But the rules don’t work, the technology is prone to breaking – causing explosions blamed on “terrorists”, a tag also applied to those who bend or break the rules, such as the freelance plumber played by Robert de Niro. Beautifully staged, in many now demolished buildings that formed Britain’s industrial landscape, Brazil is Monty Python meets George Orwell and it’s as clever, witty, and provocative as that sounds.
–Vincent Kane
Often described as a Kafkaesque nightmare, Brazil presents a bleak yet absurd vision of a bureaucratic future dominated by oppressive systems and surveillance. It masterfully critiques the dehumanizing effects of bureaucracy while maintaining a surreal and visually captivating aesthetic. It’s an outlier in Gilliam’s oeuvre and definitely unlike any other film of the ’80s. Gilliam’s direction is visionary, blending elements of German Expressionism and 1980s retro-futurism with meticulous production design and an unforgettable score by Michael Kamen. Jonathan Pryce delivers a phenomenal performance as Sam, while Robert De Niro’s appearance as a rogue heating engineer adds a touch of rebellious charm. When talking about set design and world-building, it should be mentioned in the same breath as Metropolis, Blade Runner, and Batman. But unlike those films, it has a surrealist bent and unique comedic tone that sets it apart. I first heard about it when Roger Ebert wouldn’t stop raving about it and once I saw it, I completely understood why he was so obsessed. There’s nothing else like it and there never will be again.
–Sailor Monsoon
Summary
Brazil is director and former Monty Python member Terry Gilliam’s fourth feature film after Time Bandits, Jabberwocky, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (which he co-directed with fellow Monty Python cast member Terry Jones). The film was released in 1985 and was a commercial failure, bringing in only $10 million against a $15 million budget. Brazil stars Johnathan Pryce as Sam Lowry, the film’s protagonist. Sam is a small-time bureaucrat who often daydreams about rescuing a woman (played by Kim Greist) to escape the mundane reality of his everyday life. When a literal bug in the system causes the name of an innocent man to be mixed up with that of a wanted criminal (played by Robert Deniro), Sam’s boring life is upended and thrown into turmoil.
Orwell, Kafka, and Beyond
Years ago, I had a job selling and servicing windows and doors. Although we all had computers and email at the time, this company was slow to move away from the old ways, so when we put in an order or service request, we did it by paper form. There were dozens of different forms, each with its own purpose. Now this type of work was pretty specialized. It had its own very specific nomenclature, standards, and practices. If you didn’t know the lingo, and if you weren’t a detail-oriented person, you were gonna have a hard time. And nowhere was this more evident than when filling out and submitting these various forms. If you missed one detail, the form would get notated and sent back to you. To be clear, I mean physically sent back to you. These forms weren’t getting sent around via email. You got in a golf cart and ran them down to the relevant office and dropped it in someone’s in-box. If something was out of place, you were asked to come get the form and correct it or it would get brought back to you as couriers made the rounds throughout the day. Meanwhile, most of the time, some customer’s order or service request got delayed because you neglected some punctuation or forgot to put the date.
As I said, details were important in that job. But most of the errors could be sorted out with a phone call and a quick correction made by the clerk you’d submitted the form to. But most of the time, that wasn’t the way it worked. Some of it was pettiness. However, some of it was simply down to strict adherence to some rule someone had set 25 years prior. And many times, the person seemed to jump at the chance to send a form back, like they went looking for an error, some reason to send it back to you so you would know who was really in charge.
The world of Brazil is a lot like my old work. Many have likened Terry Gilliam’s 1985 dystopian film to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. But the ex-Monty Python cast member has rejected the idea that the world of Brazil is totalitarian. Rather, he has suggested, it’s more of a “bureaucratic state, not unlike the world we live in”. The state in Brazil isn’t evil or out to intentionally hurt its citizens. The harm is sort of a by-product of a bureaucracy that has grown so large and unwieldy that it doesn’t seem to know what its original mandate even was. It does what it does because that is what the rules say and because that is what has always been done. The inhabitants of Brazil are more like K in Franz Kafka’s The Castle than Winston in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. And as Western governments have only ballooned since Brazil’s release in 1985, the film is all the more relevant today.
What are your thoughts on Brazil? Let us know in the comments!
And if you’re a fan of Monty Python, check out our Canon Podcast episode on Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
