Brazil (1985) * * 1/2 A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
I admire a movie like BRAZIL for what it tries to do, but as I've said many times before, I can only review what's on the screen. BRAZIL is a cluttered, jumbled, overlong and underfocused movie that has many moments of inspiration -- and little else.
The story takes place in a dystopian future where everything is mechanized and yet somehow nothing works. Terrorism is commonplace. Sam Lowry (played with mousy insouciance by Jonathan Pryce) is one of the worker-ants in the big machine, and fantasizes about epic struggles to save a dreamlike beauty from the clutches of an evil techno-samurai. By plot complications too weird to reveal here, he gets involved with a terrorist cell (who alternate between blowing things up and repairing them) and is eventually branded an enemy of the state, but not before enduring a whole slew of near-psychotic adventures. In the abstract, it sounds great, but on screen, it doesn't come together.
What's wrong here? The set design is astonishing and inspired -- there's one tracking shot inside a really, REALLY big room that may almost be worth the cost of the ticket alone -- the actors do fine jobs, and there are many flashes of brilliantly ugly wit (as when a criminal is persuaded to give himself up so his credit rating won't be too badly slashed). But... some larger sense of an overall design is missing. There's no sense that Gilliam has something really cogent to say about a world like this, or even about Lowry's place in it, other than the usual platitudes about the Individual vs. the State.
Terry Gilliam makes movies that are crammed with ambitious, eye-attacking power, but are also frequently confused or meandering. In BRAZIL, Gilliam is less concerned with a coherent plot than with an overall mood, a sense of rushing madness and overarching, indomitable paranoia. And sure, he achieves it. Trouble is, a movie like this could have used a more focused story to make it really stick, instead of just making it a series of good-looking but splattery meditations on the same vague subject.
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