Brazil
Monty Python’s Flying Gulag
If Brazil does nothing else, it helps prove that George Orwell was brilliant, and wrong. Brilliant, first, in his role in creating the “negative utopian” form of literature, which still stands as a proud and noble genre. Wrong, secondly, in his portrayal of England under a totalitarian government. 1984 is a wonderful and important book, but it buys into the mythos of the “New Soviet Man” just a tad too much in assuming that Englishmen would lose their essential national character as a part of Airstrip One.
Brazil knows better. Brazil features a scene with the hero (Jonathan Pryce) being taken to the Ministry of Information in a Black Maria straight out of the Gulag Archipelago. Pryce is lying on the floor, battered and bruised after a tussle with the stormtroopers. Two of the stormtroopers start chatting about their helmets, and how much it makes them sweat. One of them says how fortunate he is to have thick eyebrows; they channel the sweat away.
Solzhenitsyn has a scene that’s briefly alluded to in the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago; his Black Maria actually got lost, and he had to help his guards find Moscow on the map. Lewis has a scene in the dungeons of Belbury in That Hideous Strength, a conversation between the hero and a wandering tramp that involves the health benefits of toasted cheese. The point that both these writers make — and a point that Orwell doesn’t make, for reasons of his own — is that you can’t dehumanize someone, not really, not fully. Despite the best efforts of pirates and despots and Democrats and tyrants, men and women retain some part of their essential character under the most difficult circumstances. The world of Gilliam’s movie is dark and hopeless and bleak and full of advertising and exposed ductwork, but it is a richly — although darkly — humorous world.
Brazil is an incredibly dark comedy, or an incredibly light and Pythonesque dystopian nightmare, take your pick. It’s chock-full of quirky performances from veteran Brit character actors like Ian Holm and Jim Broadbent and Michael Palin and Bob Hoskins, and expert back-up from Robert DeNiro and the underrated and underappreciated Kim Greist as the object of Pryce’s affections. It’s got a twisty, mindbending script courtesy of Gilliam and the redoubtable Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love, most recently).
The movie revolves around Pryce’s character, an everyman at the Ministry of Information, Records division. He is called on to rectify a typographical error that led to the accidental death of a humble shoemaker at the hands of the torturers. This is done by means of a check for 31 pounds to cover the cost of the interrogation and investigation, and the scene where Pryce delivers the blood money is the most riveting in the movie, emotionally. From there, he falls in with a truck driver (Greist) who lives upstairs and who he’s previously only seen in dreams. His quest to find her, win her, and protect her from the clutches of the bureaucracy is the meat of the second half of the movie.
The plot — as important, as vital, as deliciously mystifying as it is — is secondary, however. The visuals are the best and strongest reason to see the movie, and in watching Brazil for the first time — fifteen years after it was made — you can truly see how influential it’s been. (Alex Proyas’s Dark City doesn’t look half as good with ten times the CGI.) The movie is incredibly stylish and visually interesting in every possible way. The computers are a wonder of exposed wires and tiny screens that require giant plastic magnifiers; it’s as if they were designed by Janet Reno, in total misapprehension of market forces.
I find that, in describing just one aspect of the visuals, that I’m back where I started. There’s no way to even begin to describe all of the things that you see in this movie — and I’ve only seen it once, mind you — it is something that you have to experience for yourself, on the biggest screen you can find.