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I downloaded a few movies onto my Kindle for a long plane trip. One of them was Terry Gilliam's last, THE ZERO THEOREM, which made the trip so much longer. It got me thinking about the peaks and valleys of Gilliam's career, which is unusually steep in both the ascent and the descent thereafter. He is, like Ridley Scott, an extravagant visualist with only a passing relationship to coherence. An animator before he became a Python, sustained narrative is not really in his wheelhouse. But Gilliam is a Quixotic poet of the imagination, often balking at studio control, known at least as well for his many projects that were scrapped or mangled as he is for his successes. Gilliam is wildly inconsistent, but when he's good...
Anyway, here's a Terry Gilliam film festival. Anybody who could sit through all of it unscathed gets... well, whatever one can imagine.
1) Shit & Armor:
* MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1974) - His first feature, Gilliam co-directed it with fellow Python Terry Jones, and co-wrote and performed it with the troupe. It is the essence of Python and a cultural touchstone for a generation. My son and his teen pals even quote it still.
* JABBERWOCKY (1977) - Gilliam forces some Grail-type knights through Carroll's looking glass in this Arthurian-era fantasy of heroes and monsters. It looks like it was shot through a feces-smeared lens, but begins his life-long tribute to the power of imagination. Actually interesting only in conjunction with GRAIL.
2) Python's scribe:
* MONTY PYTHON'S LIFE OF BRIAN (1979) - Gilliam penned Python's most coherent feature, directed by Terry Jones, a blackly funny attack on political and religious doctrinism.
* MONTY PYTHON'S MEANING OF LIFE (1983) - Gilliam wrote and co-directed (with Jones again) this anthology of sketches, with some hits and misses, like the original TV series.
3) Through the eyes of a child:
* TIME BANDITS (1981) - A British lad leaves his stultifying suburban family and follows a gang of dwarves through holes in time and space, landing in different historical eras before meeting god and the devil. BANDITS is funny, ascerbic and fantastical, with some great performances (Sean Connery, David Warner, Ralph Richardson, Ian Holm), but its episodic nature works against its narrative (as Gilliam's films usually do). Still, I've watched it many times and it continues to hold up. Acting as a co-producer, too, it's one of Gilliam's most accessible, successful movies (co-authored with Michael Palin). George Harrison was another of the producers and he wrote the final credits song. Some critics see BANDITS as the beginning of Gilliam's "trilogy of imagination", followed by BRAZIL and BARON MUNCHAUSEN, as we see characters escape into their imaginations... first a boy, then a middle-aged man, then an elderly man. But that could describe any Gilliam film, so i don't buy it.
* TIDELAND (2005) - Gilliam's story follows an abused young girl escaping into solitary imaginings while enduring a horrible life on a Texas farm. This barely released feature garnered strong reaction (mostly negative).
4) The Dystopian trilogy:
* BRAZIL (1985) - Gilliam's blackly funny rif on Orwell's 1984 is among the best works of his career. Presented in a style he called "retro-futurism", he created a future that looks like the past... or rather a future that might have been naively imagined in the past, like Menzies' THINGS TO COME and Lang's METROPOLIS. Jonathan Pryce is simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious as the doomed everyman destroyed by soul-killing bureaucracy, with DeNiro great in a cameo as a revolutionary air-conditioning engineer. But this film marked a new low in Gilliam's relationship with a film studio taking over his film. Like BLADERUNNER a few years earlier, the studio wanted the film cut shorter and with a happy ending, which he resisted mightily. Gilliam's version was released successfully in Europe and, when he screened it privately for film schools and critics, it ended up winning the LA film critics award for best picture. The studio relented and allowed him another cut, making it somewhat shorter but still with its dark ending. The film has gone on to be ranked among the greatest SF films of all time and, as a progenitor of the "steampunk" scifi aesthetic, one of the most stylistically influential.
* 12 MONKEYS (1995) - Bruce Willis is a haunted hero in this SF time travel tragedy, written by David Peoples (BLADERUNNER, UNFORGIVEN) as an adaptation of the French short film, Chris Marker's LA JETEE. Gilliam was brought in to helm it and created one of the biggest commercial and critical successes of his career. He's working with his typically dark dystopian themes and devices like retro-futurism, nonlinear storytellng, a haunted (and possibly insane) hero, and a hopeless finale. Brad Pitt was nominated for his supporting performances as a whacked out revolutionary. One of Gilliam's more grown-up and serious (some would say humorless and grim) films, but still very watchable.
* ZERO THEOREM (2013) - Oscar winner Christoph Waltz stars in this final chapter of Gilliam's Orwellian SF trilogy. Waltz is an emotionally damaged computer programmer given the job by "management" (Matt Damon) of solving the "Zero Theorem", a mathematical proof that life is meaningless. Meanwhile he waits, like Godot, for a phone call to come and tell him what the meaning of his life is. His monomaniacal obsession with his wait for the call ends up rendering his life otherwise meaningless, thus proving the theorem. It sounds better than it is. It's got a kind of goofy, amusing energy and tone early on, but just devolves into Gilliam's typically meandering self-involvement until it is finally unwatchable.
5) German Whimsy:
* THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN (1988) - Gilliam's sumptuous (if inert) rendering of the tall tales of a German nobleman during the Ottoman War, is a story within a story, once again about the power of imagination. The film went over budget and the production was known to be a nightmare. The studio dumped it upon its release, despite Oscar nominations for its visuals and design and mostly positive reviews (a bomb here, it was subsequently successful in Europe). Like most of Gilliam's films, it is episodic in structure and meanders without any narrative energy. The film's whimsy is leaden, but Robin Williams gave a great supporting performance as the King of the Moon, which is worth seeing if just for that, and the film is a treat for the senses.
* THE BROTHERS GRIMM (2005) - Gilliam's adventure fantasy features Matt Damon and Heath Ledger as the noted German brothers, whose lives are depicted as a fictionalized fairy tale. More leaden whimsy, more going overbudget, more fights with a studio, another bomb in the US that did well in Europe, but unlike some of his other similar misadventures, this movie just sucks.
6) Fantasy & Reality:
* FISHER KING (1991) - Gilliam's best movie... a moving, funny depiction of the tenuous hold we have on reality. The great script by Richard LaGravanese providing a strong narrative to ground Gilliam's flights of fancy, and the performances by Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges provide a stronger anchor than is typically found in a Gilliam film (great supporting performances, too, by Amanda Plummer, Mercedes Ruhl [who won an Oscar], and the late great Michael Jeter). Like Gilliam's first film, this is a Grail quest, but this one is not about jokes and gags, but instead about the damage done to the human heart and its ability still to heal.
* FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (1998) - And there he goes, over the deep end. Once again straining at a barely there grip on reality, Gilliam filmed the unfilmable Hunter S. Thompson novel, a fictionalized autobiographical descent into a drug-induced hell of his own devising. Depp's Thompson imitation is spot on, including Hunter's incomprehensibility, but there is a reason the book (one of my all time faves) was deemed "unfilmable", and it should have remained so. Tedious, meandering, plotless, hallucinatory... a titanic disappointment. But this one wasn't entirely Gilliam's fault. The project had been in development for years before Gilliam was brought in. It wasn't really his project, but he imbued it with all his worst attributes (which i suppose is the same point that Las Vegas serves in the book... America at its worst).
7) Production Catastrophes:
* LOST IN LA MANCHA (2002) - This documentary tracks the implosion of Gilliam's film project, THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE, which he started to film in 2000 and then had to shut down. Financial problems, script problems, weather problems and illness of his leading actor all conspired to destroy the mad director's attempt to tell the story of the mad knight. Evocative of similar docs about Coppola making APOCALYPSE NOW and Werner Herzog's FITCARRALDO, both eerily similar in their depictions of mad directors telling stories of mad men despite overwhelming obstacles. Unlike them, however, Gilliam didn't get the movie made and is, in fact, STILL trying to get it done. It's now scheduled to shoot this year with John Hurt as Quixote and Jerry O'Connell as Sancho. But i'll believe it when i see it. Still, its in his very effort that he embodies his protagonist, a Gilliamesque figure who insisted on the power of his delusions to change the world.
*IMAGINARIUM OF DR. PARNASSUS (2009) - This time, the death of his leading man didn't derail the production. Gilliam replaced Heath Ledger with not one but a trio of actors (Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Colin Farrell), who became Ledger's character in turn, adding another layer of insanity and incomprehensibilty to this typically Gilliamesque story of the power of imagination. Great performances by Christopher Plummer as the titular doctor, pre-Spider-Man Andrew Garfield as the young hero, and Tom Waits as the devil. For some reason, i love this movie. i can't for the life of me tell you why, which is how i feel about much of Gilliam's oeuvre.
A uniquely visual satirist and a clumsy storyteller, Gilliam is at least an artist in a dialogue with his time, making his failures as interesting as his successes. Worth a discussion at least... and not many filmmakers today are.
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