Brazil is a surrealistic nightmare vision of a "perfect" future where technology reigns supreme. Everyone is monitored by a secret government that forbids love to interfere with efficiency. Jonathon Price and Robert DeNiro star with Michael Palin in this chilling black comedy directed by former Monty Python Member Terry Gilliam. When a daydreaming bureaucrat becomes unwittingly involved with an underground superhero and a beautiful mystery woman, he becomes the tragic victim of his own romantic illusions. This offbeat fantasy blends biting humor with an unforgettable gettable look at a delightfully dastardly tomorrow.
(26 votes)
2.
BRAZIL is Terry Gilliam's masterpiece. The film, cowritten by Gilliam, playwright Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown, is set in a futuristic society laden with red tape and bureaucracy. When a bug (literally) gets in the system, an innocent man is killed, leading mild-mannered Sam Lowry (an excellent Jonathan Pryce) to reexamine what he wants out of life. He decides to fight the totalitarian system in his search for freedom--and the woman he loves. The terrific, offbeat cast features Robert De Niro as a renegade heating engineer; Katherine Helmond as Sam's ever-younger mother; Michael Palin as a frightened worker bee terrified of upsetting the status quo; Bob Hoskins as a vengeful Central Services employee; Jim Broadbent as a wacko plastic surgeon; the wonderful Ian Holm as Sam's nerve-ridden, pitiful boss, afraid of his own signature; and Kim Greist as the rebel Sam falls for.
The look of BRAZIL is relentless, overwhelming, and outrageously spectacular. Giant monoliths rise from the street; government offices are a network of computers, pneumatic tubes, and narrow hallways built with Nazi-like precision; and apartment complexes are a maze of washed-out grays and numbers, all frighteningly uniform. The terrorist explosions actually bring color into this dull, monochramatic world. BRAZIL is a nightmare vision of the future, yet also hysterically funny and incisive, one of the most inventive, influential, and important films of the 1980s.
(26 votes)
3.
If Franz Kafka had been an animator and film director--oh, and a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus--Brazil is the sort of outrageously dystopian satire one could easily imagine him making. In fact it was made by Terry Gilliam, who is all of the above except, of course, Franz Kafka. Be that as it may, Gilliam captures the paranoid-subversive spirit of Kafka's The Trial (along with his own Python animation) in this bureaucratic nightmare-comedy about a meek government clerk named Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) whose life is destroyed by a simple bug. It's not a software bug but a real bug (no doubt related to Kafka's famous Metamorphosis insect) that gets squashed in a printer and causes a typographical error unjustly identifying an innocent citizen, one Mr Buttle, as suspected terrorist Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro). When Sam becomes enmeshed in unravelling this bureaucratic tangle, he himself winds up labelled as a miscreant. The movie presents such an unrelentingly imaginative and savage vision of 20th-century bureaucracy that it almost became a victim of small-minded studio management itself--until Gilliam surreptitiously screened his cut for the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, who named it the best movie of 1985 and virtually embarrassed Universal into releasing it. --Jim Emerson
On the DVD:Brazil comes to DVD in a welcome anamorphic print of the full director's cut--here running some 136 minutes. Disappointingly the only extra feature is the 30-minute making-of documentary "What Is Brazil?", which consists of on-set and behind-the-scenes interviews. There's nothing about the film's controversial release history (covered so comprehensively on the North American Criterion Collection release), nor is Gilliam's illuminating, irreverent directorial commentary anywhere to be found. The only other extra here is the ubiquitous theatrical trailer. A welcome release of a real classic, then, but something of a missed opportunity. --Mark Walker
(29 votes)
4.
Gathering footage from both the European and American versions, Director Terry Gilliam has assembled the ultimate 142-minute cut of his most celebrated film. Criterion is proud to present its landmark special edition of Brazil in an exclusive three-disc set. DISC ONE: The restored windscreen transfer of the film with a remastered Dolby Surround soundtrack and Gilliam's shot-by-shot commentary.
DISC TWO: A treasure-trove of Braziliana: the 30-minute on-set documentary What is Brazil?, Criterions original expose The Battle of Brazil: A video History reassembles the players in the battle over the film's U.S. release; plus, hundreds of storyboards, drawings, and publicity and production stills; rare raw and behind-the-scenes footage; exclusive video interviews with the production team; and the original theatrical trailer. DISC THREE: The 94-minute "Love Conquers All" version of Brazil, with all the changes Gilliam refused to make and an audio essay by journalist David Morgan.
(24 votes)
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