THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN
A film review by Craig Good
Copyright 1989 Craig Good
There is a new film at the very top of your "Must See" list.
THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN caps Terry Gilliam's trilogy begun with TIME BANDITS (the escape of the boy) and BRAZIL (the escape of the man). The Baron represents, among other things, the escape of the old man. This film is so packed with images and ideas that I hardly know where to begin.
The story is set in the late 17th Century, the dawn of the "Age of Reason." A city is under attack by the Turks, and a small troupe of actors is performing "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" -- who is the protagonist of European legends and folk tales. An old man enters the shelled-out theatre and proclaims himself the *real* Baron Munchausen. No one believes him except for a young girl.
The Baron starts to tell his story, and the line between fact and fiction stretches to the breaking point. He and the girl embark on a bizarre quest to re-unite the amazing Baron with his equally amazing servants: the strongest man in the world, the fastest man in the world, a dwarf with amazing hearing and the ability to create gale-force winds from his lungs, and a marksman capable of seeing -- and hitting -- a bulls-eye from half way around the world.
The sheer scale and audacity of MUNCHAUSEN is tremendous. Gilliam has the amazing ability to make metaphors, legends and gods literally walk and talk. Any one of a dozen sequences from this film could have been the climax of any ordinary movie and still been enough to make it a good one. Gilliam has combined a child's sensibility, thousands of years of myth, and his own formidable genius and vision into a truly fantastic film. His ability to pack the frame with new ideas and minute details to build a consistent and wonderful world was very evident in BRAZIL, but now with MUNCHAUSEN he has eclipsed himself.
The imagination at work here makes THE WIZARD OF OZ seem cautious and PINNOCHIO appear plausible. There are many levels to this film, but I think that THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN is primarily the story of romance versus reason, of imagination versus science, and of fantasy versus fact. And romance, imagination and fantasy win triumphantly.
If this isn't the best movie of 1989 it will have been a very, very good year indeed.
--Craig
...{ucbvax,sun}!pixar!good
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