BRAZIL

		Review by E.C. McMullen Jr.
BRAZIL - 1985 USA Release: Dec. 18, 1985 Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox Rating: USA: R

Flying above and through the clouds, so far up in the sky that the ground below is unseen, onscreen text tells us it is precisely 8:49pm as we hear the melodious strains of the song, Brazil.

A bit less than precise is the next onscreen text telling us we're somewhere in the 20st Century.

All of this loveliness fades to a TV commercial, radiating out of a grotesquely obese box TV with a too small frame. Though its in color, its shabby art deco bloat suggests old fashioned picture tubes instead of small transistors, let alone silicon chips.

A suited smiling man with slick-back hair appears in a cramped room, nearly threatened by two enormous air ducts. They're so enormous he is forced to lean back. He would like to talk to us about the benefits of such ducts.

For example, why put up any longer with your drab, old, outdated ducts, when you can now have those same ducts in designer colors?

Even when this movie came out in 1985, the idea that this squalid but cosmetically grease-painted future awaited us in what little was left of the 20th Century was discomforting to the point of nervous chuckles.

Is the whole movie going to be like this?

Yes!

Trailer Voice-Over by Percy Rodrigues

Writer and Director Terry Gilliam (TIME BANDITS, 12 MONKEYS, TIDELAND, THE BROTHERS GRIMM), along with writers Charles McKeown (RIPLEY'S GAME) and Tom Stoppard (ENIGMA), were all out to bring their most scathing sarcasm to the public using the most hideous sense of humor they could muster and Terry wouldn't break from this phase until Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

That one TV is part of a shop window full of Televisions. One explosion later we see another TV where a Mr. Helpmann (Peter Vaughn: VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, DIE! DIE! MY DARLING!, STRAW DOGS, THE MACKINTOSH MAN, TIME BANDITS, GAME OF THRONES [TV]) is being interviewed about what motivates these damn terrorists to blow up shop windows full of consumer goods. Mr. Helpmann takes an astoundingly humorous view of the matter. Yes, all the fault lies with the terrorists, but their motivations are now deeper than mere jealousy.

One of the people tuned into this broadcast is an austere looking man in an austere looking room that houses massive automated printing machines, whining about as they do their job. The man absentmindedly watches the show while he absentmindedly does his job, pausing to fixate on this or that bit of stain or rubbish on his desk. What little attention span he has left is momentarily engaged in killing the fly that pesters him. When he does the bug corpse falls into the man's machine, causing just enough glitch to change the name on the print out from Archibald Tuttle to Archibald Buttle.

BRAZIL is a Horror movie and the death of this insignificant insect by an equally insignificant man will set off all of the torment, torture, bloodshed, murder, and Horror we will witness.

It's Christmas and an impoverished family is holding their children close to tell Holiday stories, because there's little room what with the TV, the tree, and the intimidatingly large air ducts. They're all squeezed in like mice beneath the pipes of the bathroom sink cupboard.

Nobody seems to watch the TV, they just have it on and babbling away like a comfort. The one person who does watch her TV, Jill Layton (Kim Greist: C.H.U.D., MANHUNTER), does so through a series of mirrors that reflect the TV in her miniscule living room all the way to her bathroom, where she relaxes in the bath with a cigarette and enjoys watching The Marx Brothers.

Then a shadow passes between her TV and her mirror. Vulnerable in her situation and instantly frightened she demands to know who is there, but gets no answer.

Meanwhile, below her apartment, storm troopers bust into the apartment of Archibald Buttle (Bryan Miller), arrest him, bag him, threaten his children, and demand that Mrs. Buttle (Sheila Reid: Z.P.G., THE BLACK ROOM, HUSH, CONTAINMENT), give them the authority to be held blameless for everything they've just committed. The fact that, in the midst of all this government sanctioned terror, she dutifully complies reveals how oppressively crushed the people of this alternate(?) England are.

The storm troopers and their S.S. officer stand-in leave, leaving Mrs. Buttle and her children to survey the wreckage of their old lives and the unknown of their new one.

That receipt Mrs. Buttle signed goes to the Department of Records. A busy wasp nest of cold efficiency where no one knows what is going on and they don't care. Their job is only to effectively take the paperwork that comes in, stamp it as received, and properly file it in its proper place. The head of this engine's interior is M. Kurtzmann (Ian Holm: ALIEN, TIME BANDITS, KAFKA, NAKED LUNCH, FRANKENSTEIN [1994], eXistenZ, THE FIFTH ELEMENT, BLESS THE CHILD, FROM HELL, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, THE HOBBIT) and he watches over his underlings with suspicious eyes.

Today Mr. M. Kurtzmann's problem is the paperwork of Archibald Buttle. His paperwork is received and now it must be filed in its proper place. But there is no proper place. There is only this one signed sheet that corresponds to nothing and that makes Kurtzmann's ugly clunky computer stop everything with an Error message.

Mr. M. Kurtzmann calls for his assistant, Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce: SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES, THE DOCTOR AND THE DEVILS, DEADLY ADVICE, TOMORROW NEVER DIES, STIGMATA, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL, THE BROTHERS GRIMM, RENAISSANCE, DARK BLOOD, NARCOPOLIS, GAME OF THRONES [TV], TABOO [TV], THE GHOST AND THE WHALE, ALL THE OLD KNIVES), but no one knows where he is.

Now we're back to a lovely sky of clouds in the warm light of sunset. It's here that Sam Lowry dreams he's a superhero of sorts. He soars in a winged, mechanical flying suit. Unlike the noisy, clattery, chattery, sprocket and clog machines he uses at work, his flying suit is a graceful segmented armor of art. In this dream a woman floats among the clouds, calls his name, kisses him, and though he's never seen her in real life, Sam's dream lover looks very much like the Marx Bros. loving Jill we met.

The dream is ended by a phone call from Mr. M. Kurtzmann. Sam's power failed so his clock failed to wake him. Sam's tiny apartment is clockwork automated and everything does its job poorly.

When he finally gets to work his boss thrusts him into fixing the Buttle error. Sam's boss can't do it. His boss doesn't know how to do this job and he shouldn't be expected to: He's middle management, damn it!

Sam figures out that the problem isn't their fault but the department before theirs. They are the ones who didn't catch the error before they sent it on. Kurtzmann cackles in relief and the idea of someone having to suffer for this. Finally! This is exactly the job Mr. M. Kurtzmann was hired to do, but it would mean confrontation, exposure, being seen. He's afraid. It could involve politics and he needs to keep his head down until retirement and all that.

So Sam, as he's apparently used to doing, goes to take the pressure off of Mr. M. Kurtzmann by delivering the paper to the proper people at the proper bureau so they can fix their error.

It's here in the convoluted labyrinth of government bureaucracy where everything goes to hell for Jill and Sam. Jill needs her floor fixed as the department who routed the huge hole in it for the storm troopers to needlessly drop down into Mr. Buttle's apartment, won't do it themselves. They want to, but their floor plugs are built to Metric specs and their Routers still use the good old fashioned Measure system.

This means she's blaming someone. She's insinuating that someone in the government is at fault. And if someone is accusing the government of being at fault then obviously they're against the government. Anyone against the government is likely allied with the Terrorists.

Because the government never makes mistakes.

True, Archibald Buttle died in their care, but that wasn't a mistake, it was an accident. Accidents happen to the best of us and you can't blame someone for accidentally doing something. Mistakes on the other hand insinuate inefficient, ineffective, someone somewhere in one of the many bureaus being bad at their job, which means their boss is bad as this ineffective person was not discovered before the error was committed!

The problem is Archibald Buttle died in their care and he was supposed to be Archibald Tuttle. If only his damn wife had signed "Tuttle" instead of "Buttle" this wouldn't be a problem!

You think we can get Mrs. Buttle to sign a new form as Mrs. Tuttle?

In a bureaucratic system where people either try to stay hidden or fight their way to the top, such errors at the bottom have a peristaltic domino effect of going up where underlings try and score a promotion by knocking their boss off the throne.

None of my people would do that because all of my people are top people. Which means that someone at one of the other bureaus, with their bottom people, are trying to scorch us!

If we only knew who.

Jill, as she's given the run-around from one irresponsible department to the next, filling out forms, requests, registrations: being constantly given the wrong paperwork to fill out (because, after all, she lives above the Buttles, not the Tuttles), which means she has to go to another department to cancel her request and start all over again, is putting herself in the cross-hairs.

Jill doesn't know it, but she's dangerously becoming The Who that no one in this world ever wants to be.

Jill won't give up and accept an apartment with a massive hole in the floor, which means she's trying to penetrate the paranoid bureaucracy which means

"Whoever's side she's on, I don't think it's ours."

Naturally these two are going to run into each other and when they do, the happy machine cog Sam Lowry goes lovestruck.

Of course, Sam is not the man of Jill's dreams which means he'll have to make the effort to win her over.

Suddenly no longer content to be an unseen cog, Sam goes to his Mother, Ida (Katherine Helmond: TIME BANDITS, THE ELVIRA SHOW, THE SPY WITHIN, LIVING IN FEAR). His long deceased Pop had pull and friends in high places and Sam's Mom has always wanted her son to make something of himself. The fact that he never did is seen by her as a childish act of rebellion and she's happy that her 30-something year old Sam is finally growing up.

Sam's new position has greater responsibilities. His new boss, Mr. Warren (Ian Richardson: THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES [1983],THE CANTERVILLE GHOST [1997], DARK CITY, FROM HELL) is the Minotaur of his bureau's maze and he's too impatient to wait in the center. Instead he endlessly marches, every day, up and down the halls, followed by a retinue wake of assistants and lackeys. Some orbit him, others swing by, are charged to do something, and continue on to their tasks: to return at some distant time. The unflappable Mr. Warren is an i-dotted perfectionist with t-crossed precision. He's cool and merciless but damn glad to have you onboard and expects great things!

Only great things as he's always moving, on the go, and able to deflect and redirect any paperwork in error to the proper responsible party. All responsible parties must correct their errors and, of course, those errors Never. Ever! Stop with his bureau.

Only that will make him flap.

Between the personel politics and backstabbing, Sam is out of his depth. He's only doing this to find, then impress, then help Jill. He'll do whatever it takes for her to love him back. What Sam doesn't know is Jill is being watched, tracked, and whoever is seen with her is a suspect.

I've said enough about the characters and story of this masterpiece. Other actors come and go in BRAZIL and give some of the best performances of their lives (sometimes to Gilliam's frustration).

Bob Hoskins (PINK FLOYD: THE WALL, WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, SHATTERED, STAY, DOOMSDAY, SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN) does a hilarious turn as the pushy bully boy Public City Works worker, Spoor.

Jim Broadbent (TIME BANDITS, HOT FUZZ, HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE, GAME OF THRONES [TV]) is the plastic surgeon in love with his job, Dr. Jaffe.

Terry's friend and fellow Monty Python alumni, Michael Palin (TIME BANDITS) is Sam's almost friend. He wants to do the right thing as long as he won't have to suffer for it. After all, he has to think of his children, whose names he has some difficulty remembering.

And of course, there's the mysterious Archibald Tuttle, who prefers the name Harry, and is played by Robert DeNiro (ANGEL HEART, CAPE FEAR, FRANKENSTEIN [1994], GODSEND, HIDE AND SEEK).

BRAZIL feels like its in the same world, a few years advanced, from Gilliam's TIME BANDITS from 1981. Moreover, more than a decade later Gilliam would appear to revisit this world in his movie 12 MONKEYS.

That's how I see it, but not how Terry saw it. According to IMDb, he saw his movie Baron Von Munchausen as the third in this trilogy.

Then in 2013 he changed his mind and saw the trilogy as BRAZIL, 12 MONKEYS, and THE ZERO THEOREM.

Wait. Did I call BRAZIL a masterpiece somewhere in all of this? I believe I did. And so it gets -

All Five Shriek Girls.

This review copyright 2023 E.C.McMullen Jr.

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