Subject: Retrospective: Brazil (1985)

From: [email-masked] (Serdar Yegulalp)
Date: 20 Jul 1998 04:22:16 GMT

Brazil (1985)
* * 1/2
A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp

I admire a movie like BRAZIL for what it tries to do, but as I've said many
times before, I can only review what's on the screen. BRAZIL is a cluttered,
jumbled, overlong and underfocused movie that has many moments of inspiration
-- and little else.

The story takes place in a dystopian future where everything is mechanized
and yet somehow nothing works. Terrorism is commonplace. Sam Lowry (played
with mousy insouciance by Jonathan Pryce) is one of the worker-ants in the
big machine, and fantasizes about epic struggles to save a dreamlike beauty
from the clutches of an evil techno-samurai. By plot complications too weird
to reveal here, he gets involved with a terrorist cell (who alternate between
blowing things up and repairing them) and is eventually branded an enemy of
the state, but not before enduring a whole slew of near-psychotic adventures.
In the abstract, it sounds great, but on screen, it doesn't come together.

What's wrong here? The set design is astonishing and inspired -- there's one
tracking shot inside a really, REALLY big room that may almost be worth the
cost of the ticket alone -- the actors do fine jobs, and there are many
flashes of brilliantly ugly wit (as when a criminal is persuaded to give
himself up so his credit rating won't be too badly slashed). But... some
larger sense of an overall design is missing. There's no sense that Gilliam
has something really cogent to say about a world like this, or even about
Lowry's place in it, other than the usual platitudes about the Individual vs.
the State.

Terry Gilliam makes movies that are crammed with ambitious, eye-attacking
power, but are also frequently confused or meandering. In BRAZIL, Gilliam is
less concerned with a coherent plot than with an overall mood, a sense of
rushing madness and overarching, indomitable paranoia. And sure, he achieves
it. Trouble is, a movie like this could have used a more focused story to
make it really stick, instead of just making it a series of good-looking but
splattery meditations on the same vague subject.

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