Brazil

I first encountered 1985's BRAZIL a year or so after its (troubled) U.S release.  I was still in high school and had just gotten my first VCR for Christmas.  I eagerly taped a late night HBO showing.  I was aware of director Terry Gilliam from his involvement with Monty Python and TIME BANDITS.  But this was something, er, completely different.  My film taste was beginning its refinement during this time and BRAZIL was one of the first appreciations I had for more adventurous, subversive cinema.  It was a mind blower for someone who had spent most of his viewing time with pop culture. How dark comedy could meld with science fiction so beautifully was also an eye opener.

It's been called Orwellian.  I believe George would've adored this movie.   The totalitarian society depicted in the screenplay co-written by Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown is fraught with malfunctioning machines and equipment.  It's clearly the future, but everything appears oddly retro.  The cars, the optical computer monitors, the pneumatic tubes.  And all that air conditioning duct work,  which you can rightly say is so integral as to be considered a character unto itself.  Its circuitous make up mirrors the bureaucratic society depicted here, one utterly choked in paperwork and protocols.  One where a form is needed to get another form.

Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) is the Everyman who happily toils in his essentially dead letter department.  He's unambitious, content with his repetitive mundane existence.  His boss, Mr. Kurtzmann (Ian Holm) is an oaf who utterly depends on Lowry to help with the most mundane of tasks, and has blocked his promotion to Information Retrieval, one made possible by Sam's well connected (and plastic surgery obsessed) mother, Ida (Katherine Helmond).  Sam only wants the higher profile job to get more info. about Jill (Kim Greist), a woman he sees who looks exactly like the ones in his daydreams, where he is a winged hero who rescues her.   Jill has been trying help her neighbor, a widow named Mrs. Buttle who wants to know why her husband was falsely arrested (and subsequently died from a heart attack).  The viewer knows -  A fly lands in a printer, causing the "T" in the name "Tuttle" to be changed to a "B". 

The real Tuttle is a renegade air conditioning repairman, played by Robert DeNiro.  He has gone off grid, exchewing his job in Information Retrieval due to the excessive paperwork, and shows up more than once to help Sam.  Tuttle's fate is one of several perfect ironies in BRAZIL.

Gilliam's imagination is full throttle.  The story is darkly clever and quite sad, though the humour is rarely absent.  There are moments that are worthy of the silent clowns, but every slapstick moment (such as that moving desk) is drenched in the acid of Gilliam's themes.  The tone may waver here and there, and the movie is not perfect, but its brilliance on every level outweighs any such quibbles, love.  This is probably the finest dystopian satire on bureaucracy and consumerism I've seen.