Review # 7: Brazil

Above: Jonathan Pryce attempts dangerous yoga moves in his cubicle.

My tears have finally dried, I have finished watching the paltry DVD bonus features (a theatrical trailer), and now it is time to review... Terry Gilliam's Brazil. Let me start by saying, "Hm, what was that movie I called 'the best movie I've seen in months and months'?" Jules et Jim? Bluebeard? Pah! Brazil is better. I will go out on a limb and call this the best movie I have ever seen. Sorry, Wes Anderson (ouch, that hurts my soul a bit); sorry, Tim Burton; sorry, Martin Scorcese, et al. Brazil is officially my new favorite movie.

Here I sit, listening to a freshly downloaded track of Geoff Muldaur performing the title track, writing by the light of the DVD menu. The song, which many will recognize as being that song that goes, "Brazil, la la la la la la la la," plays in stark, cruelly ironic contrast to the dystopia in which Gilliam sets his story. In a blatantly Orwellian setting toils Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), a number-crunching office drone, a stickler for paperwork, who has unsettlingly lovely, escapist dreams in which he (with voluptuous pouf to his hair, a suit of armor ostensibly made of tin foil, and majestic wings) constantly pursues and attempts to save a flaxen-haired maiden. One day, at work, he sees his dream-woman and tracks her down, endangering the two of them by going against the deadly grain of authoritarianism.

I don't want to spoil any more of this movie for anyone who hasn't seen it. It bleakly combines elements of the surreal (one might call it Gilliamesque) with acerbic social satire: seeing how inoculated people in the film have become to the atrocities committed by the government is disturbing, yet the tongue-in-cheek treatment allows the film to dabble in flagrant absurdity without disrupting the flow.

Often, however, I find that satires fail because they don't have a realistic human element, they don't have heart. This film quickly dodges that particular bullet through Pryce's ecstatically emotional performance as Sam. Sam is quietly an iconoclast at the beginning of the film, refusing to move from his lowly department to a more prestigious one with more violent dealings. He calls to mind a charming, slightly buffoonish Winston Smith. And it doesn't hurt that he is precisely the kind of good-looking that I love: manic-eyed, sharply dressed and rather Kafkaesque.

And yet don't dismiss my adoration of this film to mere girlish fancies! Brazil builds a complete world-- such that my sister appropriately said, "This would be better as a book." (She was, apparently, bored. Sad face. ) Every shot establishes the dank, gritty atmosphere to which humanity has against all odds acclimated itself. The undercurrent of humor, the ability to see a bright side in such a horrid world, reminds viewers of the strength of the individual, the power to find happiness in the most destructive of places. And while the leitmotif* of the song "Brazil" may seem to be there just to jar the senses of viewers, while jabbing them forcefully in the ribs, it hints at that pointless hope that somewhere beyond the strictures and smog, someplace beautiful still exists.

Grade: A+

*I always wanted to use the word "leitmotif" in a sentence!

PS: I love this movie