Brazil

Sometime in the future, or maybe somewhere in the past, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil takes place. We are never told what year it is or in which country the action takes place, because it doesn’t really matter. The world of Brazil is utterly anachronistic, a place where past, present, and future collide, and time might as well be nonexistent. All that exists is the government and the miserable people it perhaps once served. That’s not even true. There is no government, because we never even see the big picture. Instead, there are only government departments created with the sole purpose of passing the buck to other departments and creating an infinite loop that never answers the cries of the people asking for help. In this world lives Sam Lowry, a worker of the Department of Records whose job seems to consist of shuffling papers, using computers, and calming down his ineffectual boss. He’s just another worker bee, sadly and routinely making his way through life. The only escape from his dreadful existence is in his elaborate dreams, where he becomes the hero who gets to save a damsel in distress. One day, he wakes to find that the government is looking for a woman identical to the one he saves constantly in his fantasies, so he takes it upon himself to save her in real life for once. The madness that ensues takes up most of the movie as Sam leaps through every bureaucratic obstacle placed in front of him to rescue the one he loves. 

An introverted man wakes up to save the girl of his dreams. It almost seems like it could be a bright fairy tale, a romance for the ages, but Brazil actually draws from so many dark and cynical works of art, it's astounding: 1984, Blade Runner, 8 1/2, Dr. Strangelove, Monty Python, Ikiru, Playtime, Battleship Potemkin, Metropolis, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, just to name a few. In turn, Brazil seems to have inspired even more fascinatingly complex, nasty works of art itself: The Matrix, Dark City, Batman, Minority Report, and The Truman Show come to mind. These works, both before and after Brazil, have their bright spots, but for the most part they are dark, disquieting, and challenging pieces of art. Yet, there is absolutely nothing like Brazil. It is magnificently, stubbornly, manically, its own thing. And it’s beautiful. 

For starters, there is no situation that director Terry Gilliam cannot  turn into a joke: A man sitting at home is suddenly kidnapped by government officials, and Gilliam focuses on the forms his wife has to fill out right before they take him away, including a receipt for him, since everything must be accounted for; the straight-faced, sinister looking, security guards that populate Brazil secretly meet in a government building basement to practice Christmas carols; the whole film takes place during Christmas; two helpless and hopeless government employees, who are merely ants in an overwhelmingly powerful system, are disposed of when the oxygen supply to their suits is replaced by filth and explodes from the pressure; walls throughout the land are covered with deceptively optimistic government-issued slogans like “Suspicion Breeds Confidence.” These are just a few of a seemingly infinite number of jokes ranging from the highly cerebral to the lowest of the low, assuring that there will be something for everyone to enjoy, even if only for a moment of this 2 + hour film. Indeed, Gilliam packed so many jokes into the film that few of them, relatively speaking, get any real attention. Instead of being at the center of the screen, most jokes slink at the sidelines, taking place at the corners of the frame. Blink and you'll miss them, but they're there. Brazil is the sort of artwork that demands multiple viewings to unpack (I'm thinking now of Dark City, which it inspired, or Arrested Development which it resembles in weird ways). 

Of course, Brazil is fucking scary as hell. It stirs up the chilling realization in the viewer that maybe our world is not so different from the one up on the screen. Like 1984, from which it borrows heavily, the question becomes not if, but when will a fully realized Brazil-like nightmare envelop us all? Sooner than you think, probably, says Gilliam. Brazil contains many things that will make your blood turn cold, but chief among them is a terrible, terrible (terribly accurate?) depiction of life-sucking bureaucracy that could be deemed too extreme for the average viewer. People literally drown beneath mountains of paperwork in this film! The only benefit of that comes from the many bureaucratic inefficiencies is that it gives lowly government workers (i.e. most of the film world’s population) enough room to trudge along life with occasional moments of happiness, like tuning in to Casablanca when the boss is not watching. However, the one thing that does work wonderfully in Brazil is the SS-like police system used to neutralize, equalize, and delete (the film calls it several different names) unwanted peoples. Anyone who becomes too much of a nuisance, like Sam does, will eventually raise enough red flags that the system will make sure they are quietly, efficiently, and permanently silenced. 

As if to pacify people to make them forget of the disappeared, the soundtrack features a lot of catchy music. It serves, like so many of the elements on-screen, to hide the ugly truth that lies scattered throughout the world of the film. The sound design terrifies with the sound of pipes groaning and gurgling in agony in the background of every scene, but all of this nastiness is drowned by the soothing music that mirrors the way in which Sam's mother and her old friend try to hide their decrepit skins under layers of makeup and plastic surgery. If you've seen the film, you know where that road leads: death. Gruesome, sickly, nauseating death that swallows any beauty or hope that could exist in such an awful world. 

Ultimately, there is no salvation in the world Terry Gilliam has created. Sam finds his mystery girl, but she doesn’t love him. She changes her mind drastically for a few scenes in one of the film’s major missteps, but what their scenes ultimately amount to is her merely putting up with him for a while before disappearing from his life for good. In fact, the details from the story never quite add up, even when the broad outlines of the story are easy to understand, and the film drags here and there (too much time with the mother, for one). The film succeeds more at creating a disturbing, hopeless mood rather than telling a coherent story. In the end, Sam’s only hope is to take the blue pill, as it were, and retreat forever into his own fantasy, a glorified version of the small reprieves his work used to provide at the start of the film, a place where he can be the hero and the rescued damsel loves him in return. Sam is neutralized. Nothing is accomplished, and the system marches on unscathed. 

In their works, artists like Orwell and Gilliam have shown us the fast-approaching destination of humanity. Now the question is, can we prevent it? 

Oh, and I wrote this whole thing without mentioning my favorite part of the movie: Robert De Niro. He plays a man labeled a terrorist by the government, but who’s essentially Brazil’s twisted version of a superhero. He appears out of nowhere, when needed, to blow stuff up, get our hero out of a few tough spots, and then vanish as if he were never there. Creating mayhem is his way, I guess, of giving the finger to the omnipresent Big Brother. Given the nature of the film, you can probably guess his fate, but his attempts at undermining the system are admirable while they last. De Niro provides the film with some of its most lighthearted humor and demonstrates a third way of life other than compliance (mostly everyone) or oblivion (Sam): resistance. Maybe there is hope after all? 

Verdict- 3.5/4
Brazil (1985) 2h 13min. R