DIRECTED BY: Terry Gilliam

FEATURING: Jonathan Pryce, Kim Greist, Michael Palin, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Peter Vaughan, Bob Hoskins, Charles McKeown

PLOT:  Sam Lowry is a lowly, unambitious bureaucrat working in the Records Department in an authoritarian society “somewhere in the Twentieth century” who frequently dreams he is a winged man fighting a giant robotic samurai to save a beautiful woman.  An error results in the government picking up a Mr. Buttle as a suspected terrorist instead of a Mr. Tuttle; Buttle dies during interrogation.  Sam visits Buttle’s widow to deliver a refund check for her dead husband, and finds that the upstairs neighbor, Jill, looks exactly like his dream woman; he transfers to the “Information Retrieval” Department to access Jill’s personal files and learn more about her, but ends up running afoul of powerful government interests.

BACKGROUND:

• Brazil is the second part of Gilliam’s unofficial “Imagination” trilogy, which began with Time Bandits and ended with The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.  Time Bandits is told from the perspective of a child, Brazil from that of an adult, and Munchausen from an elderly man.  Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm and Monty Python buddy Michael Palin all appeared in Time Banditsas well.
• Terry Gilliam co-wrote the script for Brazil with Charles McKeown (who also plays Harvey Lime here, and would later collaborate on the scripts for The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus) and playwright Tom Stoppard.  The three together were nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar.  Novelist Charles Alverson also worked on an early version of the script, but he and Gilliam had a falling out and he was not credited for his work, although he was paid.
• Besides Best Original Screenplay, Brazil was also nominated for a Best Art Direction Oscar.
• The movie is named after its theme song, Ary Baroso’s 1939 “Aquarela do Brazil” ["Watercolors of Brazil"].  “Brazil” represents the exotic, colorful world (with an amber moon) that Sam dreams of escaping to. According to one story, the film was originally to be titled 1984 1/2, but the title was dropped over worries about lawsuits from George Orwell’s estate (a fine adaptation of 1984 had been released the previous year).
• Robert De Niro read the script and lobbied to play the part of Jack, but Gilliam turned the star down because he wanted Palin in the role.  De Niro accepted the role of Tuttle instead.
• Brazil has a legendary distribution story.  The film was released overseas in Gilliam’s original cut, but in the U.S. Universal Studios did not like the unhappy ending and attempted to recut the film, reducing it from 142 minutes to 94 minutes and editing the ending in an attempt to give it a happy ending.  (This studio cut of the film later played on television and has been dubbed the “Love Conquers All” version of Brazil).  Gilliam opposed the changes and feuded publicly with Universal Studios head Sid Sheinberg, blaming him personally for holding up the movie’s release, appearing on the television program “Good Morning America” and holding up a picture of Sheinberg, and paying for a full page ad in Variety reading “Dear Sid Sheinberg, when are you going to release my movie?”  Against studio orders, Gilliam screened the uncut film for free at the University of Southern California.  Curious critics attended the screenings, and before the movie had been released to U.S. theaters, the Los Angeles Film Critics voted Brazil Best Picture of 1985.  In a compromise agreed to by Gilliam, Universal cut only 11 minutes from the complete version, left the unhappy ending largely intact, and released the movie soon after (reportedly so as not to jeopardize its chances at winning an Academy Award).
• Calling its style “retro-futurism,” Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet credit Brazil‘s art design with influencing their vision for Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children.  Brazil’s junkyard of the future look also directly inspired the visual sensibilities of movies such as Dark City, Tim Burton‘s Batman, and 2011′s Sucker Punch.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Some may nominate Sam’s dream of soaring as a mechanical angel battling a giant robotic samurai, or the torturer posed in his decrepit doll’s mask in the foreground with his tiny victim chained in the center of a massive open-air tower in the distant background, but it’s Katherine Helmond’s personal plastic surgeon gripping and stretching her facial flab impossibly tight that’s the most striking, incisive and unexpected of Brazil‘s many visual non sequiturs.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Terry Gilliam explained his vision for the milieu he molds in Brazil

Original trailer for Brazil

as one that’s “very much like our world” but “just off by five degrees.”  He was shooting for an atmosphere that’s uncannily familiar, something just strange enough to shock the viewer while still highlighting the absurdities of modern existence.  Watching Brazil‘s many surreal touches—as when what appears to be a giant boozing tramp peers over a horizon dominated by cooling towers painted sky blue with white clouds—most viewers will conclude Gilliam overshot the five degrees at which he was aiming.  But in the unlikely event the rest of the film isn’t strange enough for you, wait for the finale in which Gilliam pulls out reality’s remaining stops, including a scene where a man is literally killed by paperwork.

COMMENTS:  Terry Gilliam wasn’t kidding when he located Brazil “somewhere in the twentieth century.”  Though sometimes considered as science fiction, this film is not set in a future that could someday be, but in a fantastic alternate world miscellaneously mixing mechanized elements from the bloody industrialized century that brought us totalitarianism, terrorism, two world wars, and air conditioning.  The architecture of Brazil‘s society brings to mind the Bauhaus movement of the 1920s and 1930s.  The Information Ministry is fronted by a giant art-deco eagle that merges sleek modernist abstraction with fascist statuary.  The characters’ wardrobes are temporal wormholes that open somewhere between the 1920s and 1950s; even low-level functionaries wear felt hats and gray three piece suits to work.  (Katherine Helmond’s leopard-skin high-heel hat is an obvious sartorial exception here; it could only have been fashionable in the stoned 1960s or the tacky 1970s).  The propaganda posters that litter the movie’s every wall (with cheery slogans like “loose talk is noose talk”) are variously patterned on Soviet and Nazi (and even British) wartime posters or cheery advertising from 1930s magazines.  Television is omnipresent, but it mostly broadcasts movies and shows from the 1940s and earlier (Casablanca, black and white Westerns and the Marx Brothers are featured presentations).

Although Sam’s dream sequences where he flies on golden mechanical wings and fights a giant robotic samurai are done with then state-of-the-art effects (that stand up beautifully today), Gilliam mostly mines cinema’s past for Brazil‘s stylistic elements; this grab-bag of film techniques further belies the supposedly futuristic setting.  The drab gray color schemes of the city mimic monochromatic film.  Dramatic shots, lighting, odd camera angles, and abstract designs hearken back to German expressionism of the 1910s and 1920s (indeed, the world of Brazil‘s looks like it might have been designed by Fritz Lang if he’d survived to 1985 and been handed a fifteen million dollar budget).  The characters’ fedoras, the double-crosses, and the cynical tone of paranoia and distrust evoke 1940s film noir.  Pryce delivers a couple of out-of-place slapstick routines that could have come out of Charlie Chaplin‘s Modern Times (1936): in the most famous, he shares a desk with a man in a neighboring office, and they engage in a tug-of-war through the wall.  Further broadcasting the movie’s intent to merge the cinema of the past 85 years, the rescue scene directly quotes from the classic Soviet propaganda film The Battleship Potemkin (1925).  The theme song comes from 1939, and even Michael Kamen’s brilliantly overwrought, melodramatic incidental music, with its swelling heroic and romantic themes, simulates a symphonic soundtrack from Hollywood’s golden age.

Just as the film’s look and atmosphere is a messy amalgamation of styles from across the decades, the machines and technologies that dominate this world exist outside of time.  Gourmet steak is served in a mushy green lumps (is it Soylent brand?) A few security robots roam the halls of the ministry, but they are just elaborate clattering riggings housing a camera on an eyestalk; they look like they’ve been built from leftover 1950s sci-fi B-movie parts, though they beep like R2D2.  Computers are also everywhere, but they resemble old Smith-Corona typewriters with mounds of gears and tubing attached, except that they’re equipped with transparent crystal monitors that look futuristic even today.  Gilliam materializes the intense mechanization of this world as a series of ductwork and flexible plastic tubings that stick out of every wall; even swanky restaurants have giant pipes running through the dining room floor. The movie begins with an advertisement pitching the ability to spiff up your old-fashioned ducts with Central Service’s new line of multicolored ducts.  Sam is bewildered when he looks behind a panel in his apartment wall and sees its stuffed full of a convoluted maze of hoses, wires and and tubes.  There’s a jury-rigged, junkyard look to the Brazil‘s industrial appliances, as if each new machine was built on top of an older machine, with everything constantly growing more and more complex by a process of accumulation.  And the machines people depend on to live their daily lives are constantly breaking down.  Sam’s alarm system, apparently designed by Rube Goldberg for George Jetson, not only fails to go off, making him late for work, but also pours his morning coffee onto his toast.

The malfunctioning machines of Brazil are little images representing the biggest dysfunctional apparatus of all: the modern State.  The world of Brazil is a horrifying dictatorship, but its citizens are accustomed to it and don’t notice.  When there’s a terrorist bombing in the restaurant, no one reacts with anything but mild annoyance, and management thoughtfully puts up a screen to shield the diners’ eyes and sensibilities from the bloody limbs scattered about the next table.  The embodiment of the State’s otherwise disembodied evil is Michael Palin’s Jack, who disgusts us because he’s so normal and respectable.  He’s invariably polite and proper, he’s a dedicated family man (though he sometimes confuses his triplet daughters’ names), he buys a stack of Christmas gifts for his co-workers, and he looks out for Sam’s upward social mobility, goading him to conform and fit in.  Jack just does his job, and he doesn’t even notice the bloodstains on his smock anymore, nor does it ever cross his mind that there’s anything to hide or be ashamed of about his job in the trenches “retrieving information” and combating terrorism.  Evil has never been more banal than Palin.  In Brazil, there’s no sense of Big Brother, of a cabal pulling strings behind the scenes; society simply seem to have gradually slipped into this horrid condition unnoticed, as a result of everyone doing their job unquestioningly, following proper procedure, playing their role as an insignificant cog in the State’s vast machinery.

It’s bureaucracy and paperwork, the reduction of human beings to slips of paper and signatures on the proper form, that keeps this world going, much in the same way that obsessive documentation kept the Nazi regime running (like the bureaucrats in Brazil, Nazi charged Jews for expenses related to their own deportations and executions).  There has never been a movie in history so contemptuous of paperwork (a character even dies onscreen in a hail of forms), and that’s one of the features that allow viewers to connect with the story.  Brazil is what the entire world would look like if the CIA was under the direction of the IRS.  Every major plot development stems from a slip up in paperwork; a name misprinted on a form will eventually lead to the death of at least two characters, and the permanent insanity of another.  But paperwork is also the source of most of the film’s mirth.  A renegade becomes an enemy of the state because he illegally fixes people’s heating and air conditioning units outside of the state servicing monopoly, without filling out the proper forms; he works like Batman, sneaking in at night to work on the AC and sliding down a zip line to safety when he’s done.  (Gilliam once expressed astonishment that the political right embraced the film—he shouldn’t have been surprised after he made a folk hero out of a freelancer who valiantly defies ridiculous government over-regulation).  When stormtroopers seize Mr. Buttle, they make a terrified Mrs. Buttle sign a receipt for her stolen husband (and are careful to take their own receipt for her receipt).  Sam stymies a couple of meddlesome technicians by asking them if they have a form 27b/6, which sends one of the pair into an apopleptic fit.  A victim facing torture is advised to confess quickly so as not to jeopardize his credit rating.  Anyone who’s ever stood in the wrong line at the Department of Motor Vehicles for a half-hour can relate to the devilishly funny absurdity of Brazil.

Scrapped together from various historical parts, with added twists of both fantasy and science fiction, Brazil is a unique world for the viewer to explore. It’s also one of the most densely detailed movies you’re likely to see.  Because jokes, visual quips, and even important plot points pass by in the blink of an eye, it’s worth a second or third viewing to catch all the minutia (try to read every one of the propaganda posters pasted on every wall).  My favorite blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gag occurs when Sam has to pause in his pursuit of his dream girl to pick up some papers he’s dropped on the street at the insistence of a busybody out walking her dog.  She raps loudly on the sign advising “keep your city tidy” with her cane as she browbeats the meek Sam, who’s still accustomed to following the conventions he’s grown up with.  At the end of the scene we briefly see the evidence that this old lady practices what she preaches: she’s placed masking tape over her yapping lapdog’s anus to keep it from pooping on city sidewalks.

Gilliam’s genius in Brazil was to recast George Orwell’s propaganda-ridden nightmare 1984 not as some disaster that might happen in the distant future if humanity is not vigilant, but as something that has already happened, and went unnoticed.  The ugly industrialization, the quiet assimilation of machines into daily life, the crushing bureaucracy, and the dehumanization and insignificance of the individual are all events that actually came to pass in the twentieth century. Brazil‘s dislocation in time isn’t just a random choice decided on because of its cool-looking steampunk aesthetic.  By creating a world that incorporates elements from his grandfather’s generation to his own, Gilliam compresses a bleak century into a little less than two and a half hours, and makes us chuckle at its sorry excesses and horrors.  But while we laugh, the hair on the back of our heads rises a little in fear—because we can still feel the hot breath of modernity stirring on the nape of our own necks.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The movie is awash in elaborate special effects, sensational sets, apocalyptic scenes of destruction and a general lack of discipline. It’s as if Gilliam sat down and wrote out all of his fantasies, heedless of production difficulties, and then they were filmed – this time, heedless of sense.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“…a glimmering hunk of fractured brilliance riddled with Orwellian paranoia encased in a production design seemingly pieced together from the shared dreams of Franz Kakfa and Salvador Dali…”–Wesley Morris, The San Francisco Chronicle (contemporaneous)

“…a willfully absurdist dystopian fable about an impossible future that feels more like an antiquated past, a Romantic pretzel-twisting of Orwell and a nursery-rhyme-inflected sci-fi dream epic that appropriates equal parts Fritz Lang, Hellzapoppin’, Orson Welles, and illustrator Brian Froud.”–Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice (1998 director’s cut re-release)

IMDB LINK: Brazil (1985)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Wide Angle/Closeup: The Terry Gilliam Files – Look for and click on the still from Brazil to reveal links to interviews with Gilliam, Palin, and production designer Norman Garwood, along with production sketches and audio files of script read-throughs by Gilliam, Pryce and McKeown

Terry Gilliam | Dreams: Brazil – The Brazil page at Dreams, the Terry Gilliam fansite, contains a FAQ, production stills, and a vintage collection of promotional material

Shot to Remember: Welcome to Brazil – Gilliam annotates a series of stills from a climactic moment of the film for “DGA Quarterly” (Vol. 2, No. 3 – Fall 2006)

Modernity and Mise-en-Scene: Terry Gilliam and Brazil – Article by Keith James Hamel for “Images” magazine on the film’s relationship to modernity and how Gilliam employs an “optimistic” mise-en-scene for fantasy sequences and a “pessimistic” one for scenes based in reality

Brazil (1985) at AMC Filmsite – a detailed overview of Brazil from critic Tim Dirks as part of the “Greatest Films” series; it includes a complete synopsis of the movie that runs for several pages

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

The Battle of Brazil: Terry Gilliam v. Universal Pictures in the Fight to the Final Cut – Journalist Jack Matthews recounts the epic battle between Gilliam and Universal over the release of Brazil

DVD INFO: Universal’s 1998 DVD release (buy) is the currently in-print version of Brazil, and the one used to compose this review.  This release restores Gilliam’s original cut of the film, including the 12 minutes cut from the U.S. theatrical release (much of which consisted of a single scene of Jack Vaughn, dressed as Santa Claus, talking to the imprisoned Jonathan Pryce).  This release is unfortunately light on extras, containing only production notes, cast and crew bios, and the original trailer.  Designed before widescreen TVs became commonplace, the image is both letterboxed and pillarboxed to recreate the proper 1.85:1 aspect ratio, resulting in a small ini picture playing in a large black space; this setup initially takes some getting used to.

True fans of the film may want to track down the out-of-print but readily available 3-disc Criterion Collection edition (buy), which was the first release to restore the film to the director’s original vision and includes commentary by Gilliam, the usual Criterion booklet, the featurettes “The Battle of Brazil” (detailing the spat between Gilliam and Universal) and “What is Brazil” (a “making of” mini-doc), and production notes.  A curiosity takes up the third disc: “Love Conquers All,” the infamous bowdlerized 94 minute studio cut of the film that was only shown on American television, with commentary by critic David Morgan explaining the edits.  Criterion also issued a single disc edition of Brazil (buy) containing only the complete film and Gilliam’s commentary.

Universal is released a Blu-ray edition of Brazil on July 12, 2011, sans extras (buy).

(This movie was first nominated for review by “Kass,” who added, “not seeing Brazil on the list struck me as a terrible injustice to weirdness and Terry Gilliam.”  Consider this injustice rectified.  We would have fixed the oversight earlier, but we lost the paperwork.   Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Heath Ledger, Christopher Plummer, Lily Cole, Tom Waits, Colin Farrell, Johnny Depp, Jude Law

PLOT: A 1000 year-old mystic enlists the help of a seedy amnesiac to save his

daughter, whose life he exchanged for eternal youth, from the clutches of the Devil.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a return to extreme fantasy for Terry Gilliam, who hasn’t delved so deep into the realm of untethered imagination since The Adventures of Baron Muchausen.  It is a madcap vaudevillian escapade that is anything but ordinary, a rekindling of the fires of whimsy in modern cinema that has not been lit in some time.  Gilliam conjures a tale that comes from the divine and the pedestrian, fills it with colorful, albeit thin, characters, and lets the magic happen as the elements coalesce into a Victorian sideshow of epic proportions.

COMMENTS: Set over a thousand years of the titular character’s life (although it’s mostly set in modern day England), The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a fantastical meditation on choices: good ones, bad ones, the weight-laden overabundance of decisions we all face at some point, and the demeaning lack of options we also experience.  From literal metaphors involving people choosing their destinies in a realm of imagination to the figurative posturings of the opposition between that which is right and that which is merely easy, director Terry Gilliam muses with this film on the ages-old dilemma of free will and how these characters will go about using it.

But forget about that!  What everyone wants to know is how well they shoe-horned in all of Heath Ledger’s stand-ins during post-production!  As you’re well aware, I’m sure, this is the final performance of the late, great Heath Ledger.  Mr. Ledger died during the production of this feature, leaving his role, that of the amnesiac Tony, woefully incomplete.  Gilliam, being ever the professional, and no stranger to ill circumstances befalling his films, decided to soldier on and finish the film with various other leading men filling in for Ledger in the remaining scenes.

How is such a thing possible?!  Well, luckily for Gilliam, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, or as I’ll soon be calling it for brevity’s sake, TIoDP, is heavy on the fantasy, so Gilliam comes up with a fair explanation for the sudden change of face and build of our main character.  TIoDP is about a 1000 year long rivalry between the devil and Doctor Parnassus, a decrepit old man who runs a nasty vaudeville side show with a little person, a wispy teenage runaway assistant, and his own hot daughter, where he exhibits his ability to take people into the world of imagination.  Throughout the years he and the devil have made wagers, and they have each outwitted each other more than once.  But Parnassus ended up losing the last wager they made, and now when his hot daughter turns 16, which will be very soon, he will be forced to relinquish her to Satan.  It’s a terrifying reality for him, and in these last few days before her 16th birthday, he grows desperate and morose.  But, as fate would have it, two extreme coincidences happen withing minutes of each other.  First, the devil shows up completely unannounced with one more bargain for the soul of the hot daughter—the first one to seduce five souls into putting their faith in him wins.  Almost immediately following this extraordinary stroke of luck, Parnassus’s show encounters a nearly dead man strung up by the neck named Tony, a real charmer with no memory of his past.  He has the ability to charm anyone into doing anything, it seems, and he appears to be the blessing that Parnassus needs to win this wager.  But this man is not all that he seems, and neither the devil or Parnassus can truly see the heart of this strange ne’er-do-well or the role he will play in their wager.

This is a good film, but nowhere near Gilliam’s dizzying past heights.  TIoDP has a problem with tone in that it can’t take itself seriously for very long.  To be honest, I was never sure whether I was supposed to take anything seriously, when Verne Troyer is the wise-but-wisecracking second-in-command to Parnassus and the devil is Tom “Gravel Throat” Waits!  There are moments here when the forces at work seem sinister and malicious, and Satan’s wager really means a lot to him, and then the next minute, WHAM!, a line of police officers starts can-canning a la Magical Mystery Tour in a whimsical dream world!  It makes for a weird experience, to be sure, but the results feel mixed.

Gilliam’s fancy of the occult, the wonders of magic, and imagination break no new ground with his fans, but anyone new to his unique vision will be surprised by what they find.  This is a director obsessed with fanciful imagery, and TIoDP is a film fueled by the bizarre, the fantastic, and the slightly macabre.  This too, feels bittersweet, but one cannot deny this film’s ability to stick in your head.  Two images stick in my mind very vividly; one scene where Parnassus falls from the sky alone in the desert of his imagination, where a giant thumb tack, as big as a mountain, barely avoids skewering him, and another scene where Parnassus’s hot daughter (played by apple-faced model Lily Cole) and charming Tony act an entire scene with what appears to be a freshly dead chicken in their hands.  One scene evokes some mental stimulation from me, making my brain work a bit, while the other makes me want to wash my hands more thoroughly.

It’s definitely a very good final performance for Ledger, but not nearly as iconic as his take on The Joker in The Dark Knight, the role for which he will be remembered. This is a much more subtle, mannered performance that is typical of all Gilliam heroes or antiheroes.  It is a performance that will be recalled for its humor and its clumsy, casual tone, a tone that invites you in and makes you comfortable in the grandiose nature of the film, much like the smile of the charming Tony.  Ledger here is warm and reeks of cheap perfume and cheaper drinks, his charisma springing forth from a place where the bars stay open after 2:00 AM and the streets are filled with cocked necks and bitten lips.  Ledger finished all the scenes in the real world, but when the scenes involving the world of imagination are involved, he is replaced by the likes of Colin Farrell, Johnny Depp, and Jude Law (which easily explains away the character’s lack of Ledger-ness.  Clever!)  Their performances are admirable, and the reasons they stepped in to complete the movie are noble indeed, but this is nobody’s real time to shine.  In the face of Ledger’s Tony, these three leading men wither in the wake of his memory.  In order of appearance, Depp gets a B-, Jude Law gets a slap on the wrist and a D, and Colin Farrell skates by with a C-.

This movie as a whole, however, has a lot of heart, character, and, most importantly, imagination!  TIoDP is a terribly unique vision, and while it isn’t Gilliam’s best film, it has more than enough remarkable qualities to put it into this List. A good friend of mine once said about this list of the 366 weirdest movies, “The weirder it is, the less it has to be jaw-droppingly good,” and although my jaw remains planted firmly on my skull, the feet of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus are nowhere near the tame earth of Hollywood, and that is a testament to both Terry Gilliam’s inventiveness as a director, and Heath Ledger’s insight as an actor.  And a testament to the weirdness of a mountain-sized thumb tack.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Fantasmagorical is the word that comes to mind, this lavishly bizarre and gloriously ramshackle film from Terry Gilliam, with its Victoriana design elements jutting into contempo London and the psychedelic world of Dr Parnassus’ mind… Dr Parnassus is the kind of film that a hard nosed cynic may dismiss as balderdash, but for a flight of imaginative fancy, the film is pretty well unparalleled, with breathtaking sequences that take place on the other side of the travelling show’s silver mirror.”–Andrew Urban, Urban Cinefile

DIRECTED BY: Terry Gilliam

FEATURING: Craig Warnock, David Rappaport, David Warner, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Shelley Duvall, Sean Connery, Ralph Richardson, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm

PLOT:  11-year old Kevin is largely ignored by his parents, who are more interested in news about the latest microwave ovens than in encouraging their son’s interest in Greek mythology.  One night, a gang of six dwarfs bursts into his bedroom while fleeing a giant floating head, and Kevin is swept up among them and through an inter-dimensional portal in their scramble to escape.  He finds that the diminutive and incompetent gang is tripping through time robbing historical figures using a map showing holes in the space-time continuum of the universe that they stole from the Supreme Being; things get complicated when Evil devises a plan to lure the bandits into the Time of Legends in order to steal the map for himself.

BACKGROUND:

• Time Bandits is the first movie in what is known as Gilliam’s “Trilogy of Imagination” or “Trilogy of Dreams.”  It deals with the imagination in childhood; the second movie, the bleak Brazil (1985), with adulthood; and the third, Baron Munchausen (1989) with old age.  Gilliam did not intend from the beginning to make three films with similar themes; he only noticed the connection between the three films later, after fans and critics pointed it out.
• Gilliam began the script in an attempt to make something marketable and family-friendly, since he could not find anyone interested in financing his innovative script for Brazil.  The success of the idiosyncratic Time Bandits allowed Gilliam to proceed making imaginative, genre-defying films.
• The film was co-written by Gilliam with his old Monty Python’s Flying Circus mate Micheal Palin, who is responsible for the snappy dialogue.
• Ex-Beatle George Harrison helped finance the film, served as executive producer, and is credited with “songs and additional material” for the movie.  Only one Harrison composition is featured, “Dream Away,” which plays over the closing credits.
• Gilliam shot the entire movie from a low angle to give an impression of a child’s-eye view of the world.
• Sean Connery was not originally intended to appear in the final scene, but was meant to appear in the final showdown with Evil.  The actor’s schedule did not allow him to appear when the battle was being shot, but Connery suggested that he could play a role in the final scene.  His second, quite memorable, role consists of two shots, filmed in an afternoon.
• A low budget release, Gilliam’s film cost about $5 million to make but grossed over $42 million.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The avenging floating head of God appearing out of a cloud of smoke.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  As an utterly original blend of history, comedy and theology

Original theatrical trailer for Time Bandits

wrapped in Monty Pyhton-eque verbal sparring and presented as a children’s fable, Time Bandits starts with a weird enough design.  As the film continues and the bandits journey from history into myth, the proceedings get more mysterious and existential, until the flick winds up on a shatteringly surreal climax that is bleak enough to supply the most well-adjusted of kiddies with years of nightmares.  As the tagline says, it’s “All the dreams you’ve ever had—and not just the good ones.”

COMMENTS: Sandwiched between the Biblical parody of Life of Brian (1979) and the dystopian weirdness of Brazil (1985), you can almost see Terry Gilliam transitioning from the absurd wit of Monty Python into the dark forest of fairy tale fantasy as Time Bandits progresses.  The film begins as a series of uneven, if often hilarious, sketches based around Napoleon, Robin Hood and the sinking of the Titanic; it ends on a totally fantastic and reflective note, with the child protagonist having met God, and lost his parents.  In between, the boy meets and is adopted by the legendary Greek king Agamemnon, is almost cooked by an ogre and travels by ship perched atop a giant’s head, is captured by giants with cow skull heads and hook hands and placed in a cage hanging over a void within the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness, and witnesses a battle between ultimate Evil facing off against an army of cowboys, Greek archers, a tank, and a spaceship.  Not a bad gig for a kid whose life previous suburban life was dull as prime time television.

Spanning across reality, an absurd version of history, and complete fantasy, Time Bandits is nothing if not ambitious, and as might be expected, the resulting film is cluttered and shambolic.  It’s a movie filled with wonderful moments, marvelous visions and memorable lines that don’t quite cohere into a whole; it seems to lacks a center, flitting between light witty comedy and deep existential despair.  It’s the type of movie that inspires love and loyalty in its defenders, precisely because of its imperfections.

What’s funny about the picture ultimately eclipses what’s wondrous in it, at least from an adult’s perspective.  Time Bandits is intended to work on two levels: as a fantastic adventure for youngsters, and a lightly philosophical and satiric comedy for adults.  Young boys will be enthralled by the rambling adventure, but years later, after the thrill of escaping from an ogre has worn off, it’s the infinitely quotable lines of dialogue like “God isn’t interested in technology…  Look how he spends his time, forty-three species of parrots! Nipples for men!” that will stick in their minds.  Well, lines like that, and the existentially creepy ending.

Time Bandits was marketed based on the bankability of its numerous guest stars. John Cleese, whose role as Robin Hood is nothing more than an extended cameo, gets top billing.  Cleese indeed nails his scene as an unexpectedly effete and detached Hood, exquisitely dressed in snappy green tights amidst a grimy gang of pillaging “Merry Men” in tattered rags.  Looking distracted, he does a meet-and-greet with the bandits, laughing indulgently, punctuating every sentence with “jolly good!” and hardly paying attention to the conversation (“Jolly good!  Four foot one?  Well that is a long time, isn’t it?”)  Other than Cleese, what other cinematic Hood could pull off the line, “Have you met them at all?  The poor?  Oh you must meet them, I’m sure you’ll like them!”  Of all the set pieces, this segment is the most Pythonesque, and not coincidentally it’s one of the film’s most memorable moments.

The other guest stars do well, but are not as memorable as Cleese: one shouldn’t mistake Time Bandits for an all-star comedy revue.  In the time-travelers’ first adventure, they meet Ian Holm, a silly Napoleon with a pronounced Napoleonic complex (“Five foot one and conqueror of Italy! Not bad, huh?”)  He bonds with the dwarfs and their tyke companion because he enjoys towering over them; the joke is amusing, but goes on too long.  Former James Bond Sean Connery is the big name in the cast, but despite his second billing, don’t expect his King Agamemnon to make a huge impression or stretch the star’s range into comedy. Connery plays straight, acting as a heroic, surrogate fantasy-father figure for Kevin.  (The scenes with the half-legendary Agamemnon, who ambiguously slays either a minotaur or a warrior wearing a bull’s head, occur at about the halfway mark and bridge Time Bandits‘ historical and fantasy hemispheres).  Connery also reappears in the denouement in a scene that links Kevin’s fantasy world with the “real” world, adding yet another disquieting element to the already freaky finale.  Also of note are Michael Palin and Shelley Duvall, who appear in multiple scenes across the years as an odd romantic couple whose courtship is eternally doomed to be interrupted by dwarfs falling from the sky.  Their strange, oblique conversations about unstated physical ailments (“No, no, no, I don’t have to wear the ‘special’ anymore”) provide another Pythonesque running gag.

Forgetting the guest stars, its the unselfconscious performance of young Craig Warnock as Kevin (billed 16th) and the cadre of avaricious dwarfs (billed 10th to 15th) that carry the film.  Warnock doesn’t have much to do but to remain sympathetic and stay out of the comedians ways as they rampage across time and space stealing the scenery, and he manages the task admirably.  The ragtag band of renegade little folk, led by the unduly arrogant Randall (David Rappaport), each have idiosyncrasies as shabby as the headgear they’ve pinched from across the eons—an aviator’s hat, a one-horned viking helmet, a colander—but they function as a character unit.  They are greedy, selfish, and more than a bit dim; too slight to be ruffians, they have to survive by their wits, which makes them harmless rather than scurrilous.  They also pull together as a team when push comes to shove, and despite the fact that they are constantly messing up Kevin’s life by snatching him away from the comforts of home, they are also his gateway to a life of adventure. We come to root for them as much as laugh at them.

The protagonists engage our sympathy, but it is villain David Warner, as Evil, who steals the show.  The leader of a band of rapidly diminishing demons (he has a tendency to zap them into oblivion on principle whenever they disrespect his authority, even when he immediately afterward concedes they had a good point), he’s a kid’s cartoon vision of the devil, and he hams the role up wonderfully.  He’s obsessed with technology (which Gilliam here loosely identifies with evil), fascinated by digital watches, computers, and subscriber trunk dialing : “If I were creating the world, I wouldn’t mess about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers, eight o’clock, Day One!”  This Evil Genius sets up a game show in his stone lair to trap the greedy dwarfs and steal the map, and he’s capable of blowing himself up like a giant pin cushion to absorb arrows.  He also gets off some of the best lines, in a movie that’s full of quotable dialogue: “Benson, dear Benson, you are so mercifully free of the ravages of intelligence.”

Villains are typically more interesting than heroes, but Evil meets his match in the Supreme Being (an assured Ralph Richardson), who rides in late to save the day and has some memorable lines of his own: “Back to creation. We mustn’t waste any more time. They’ll think I’ve lost control again and put it all down to evolution.”  The Supreme Being wraps up the messy plot, rather too tidily, but he also suddenly introduces some weighty and disturbing philosophical questions into the movie.  All along we’ve been wondering, as suggested by Evil, whether this Supreme Being is imperfect. How could he build a universe full of holes? (“It was a bit of a botched job… we only had seven days to make it,” Randall explains). How could he let the his bumbling underlings steal his precious map, and why couldn’t an omnipotent Being manage to catch up with the incompetent thieves? 

As it turns out, it was all part of an elaborate, frustratingly oblique plan. “Why do we have to have Evil?” Kevin dares ask the Creator, with childlike impertinence.  “I think it has something to do with free will,” answers the Supreme Being, evasively.  That’s the pat answer to the question of evil, and Richardson delivers it in the offhand manner of a theology professor addressing a bothersome student’s question when his mind is really on what he’s going to have for dinner.  That simplistic solution is undermined by the side conversation between Randall and the Supreme Being.  The dwarf tries to apologize for stealing the map, saying he didn’t mean to.  “Of course you didn’t mean to steal it, I gave it to you, you silly man… I am the Supreme Being, I’m not entirely dim. I let you borrow my map,” replies God, while Randall looks earnestly confused.  This conversation raises the specter of predestination—did the Supreme Being really trick the bandits into stealing the map, to serve his own purposes—as he says, to test his Creation?  At the very least, it implies a more complex scheme of free will than his rote answer to Kevin might suggest; one in which the Supreme Being, creates imperfect helpers and depends on his foreknowledge of their flaws to use them as pawns in an elaborate game he seems to be playing against himself.

That odd, deep, and unresolved bit of theological speculation tacked on to the end of a whimsical kids’ adventure secures Time Bandits‘ weird status.  As powerful as he is, the Supreme Being either can’t, or isn’t willing to, control Evil.  A small bit of concentrated Evil rolls under a tank tread and is forgotten (although with this Supreme Being, you can never chalk these things up to chance).  That chunk of persistent Evil follows Kevin back into the “real” world, where he suddenly wakes to find his home is burning down.  The smoldering remnant of wickedness wreaks a spectacularly mean-spirited revenge on the child, in an epilogue that is stranger and more dreamlike than the actual dream.  The ending is the kind of subversive kiddie cruelty that novelist Roald Dahl used to delight in, but taken to a metaphysical level and given a knifelike surreal edge that comes from Gilliam at his most far-out.  Few of the kids who saw Time Bandits in theaters enjoyed  Gilliam’s mystical, downer ending.  None of them forgot it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…this surreal adventure fantasy has been conceived as a movie for children and adults… Gilliam has a cacophonous imagination; even the magical incongruities are often cancelled out by the incessant buzz of cleverness. It’s far from a bad movie, but it doesn’t quite click together, either. The director doesn’t shape the material satisfyingly; this may be one of those rare pictures that suffers from a surfeit of good ideas.”–Pauline Kael

“…one of Terry Gilliam’s weirdest and best movies.”–Sam Adams, Philadelphia City Paper (DVD)

“Childhood is a pretty weird time, and children need pretty weird stories to help them navigate it. [Time Bandits] feels like the kind of story you made up at nine or ten; old enough to have a lot of strange things floating around in your psyche but still prepubescent.”–Matthew Dessem, The Criterion Contraption (DVD)

IMDB LINK: Time Bandits (1981)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Time Bandits – Bruce Eder’s essay on Time Bandits for the Criterion Collection edition

Wide Angle / Closeup: Time Bandits – an interview with Gilliam after a 2006 screening of Time Bandits (questions are not limited to this movie, but cover the director’s entire career)

Time Bandits at Dreams (the Terry Gilliam fanzine) – This Terry Gilliam fan site contains a lot of material on the auteur’s more recent films, but only a few paragraphs of background on Time Bandits

Time Bandits II Script review – a synopsis/review of an unproduced script for Time Bandits II by Charles McKeown

DVD INFO: Time Bandits has been released in a single disc edition by The Criterion Collection (buy) with the usual extras: a running commentary from Gilliam, co-writer and actor Michael Palin, and contributions from John Cleese, David Warner, and Craig Warnock.  It also contains the theatrical trailer and a “Time Bandits Scrapbook.”

It’s an unusual case, but many videophiles complain about the picture quality in the Criterion release: some claim the image is inferior and cropped slightly, and all agree that the transfer is not anamorphic (enhanced for display on widescreen televisions).  For this reason, many aficionados recommend the Anchor Bay Special Edition (buy) over the Criterion release.  This two-disc edition lacks the commentary on the Criterion edition, but includes a second disc of special features including the featurette “”The Directors: The Films of Terry Gilliam,” an interview with Gilliam and Palin, theatrical trailer(s), interactive DVD-ROM content, and a Gilliam bio.  It also comes with liner notes and a fold-out “map of the universe” with more info on the production.

Time Bandits is also available from Anchor Bay in a slightly cheaper budget release (buy) with no special features except for the theatrical trailer. At the time of this writing the savings by buying the single-disc version was only $1.

DIRECTED BY: Terry Gilliam

FEATURING: Jodelle Ferland, Brendan Fletcher, Jeff Bridges

PLOT:  Jeliza-Rose is a nine year old girl with an active imagination who is being raised by a pair of junkies.  When her father spirits her away to a lonely, dilapidated farmhouse, then takes an extended “vacation” on heroin, Jeliza-Rose is left to her own devices.  She retreats into an intricate fantasy world where her four doll’s heads are her closest companions, but reality is scarcely less bizarre than her imagination: her neighbors are a witch-like one-eyed woman with an unhealthy interest in taxidermy and a childlike mentally retarded man who also lives in his own fantasy world.

BACKGROUND:

• Tideland was adapted from a critically praised novel by Mitch Cullin; ironically, this faithful movie adaptation was critically panned.
• Gilliam made Tideland while on a six month hiatus from directing the big-budget commercial fantasy, The Brothers Grimm (2005).
• Tideland was a commercial disaster, earning less than $100,000 in its initial domestic run.
• According to Gilliam, the French distributor did not want to screen this film at Cannes because there is a scene involving farting, which the French find objectionable.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Many will remember Jeliza-Rose’s doll’s heads, who make memorably fantastic appearances in an underwater house and flying about inside a man’s ribcage.  But the more indelible image, because it’s repeated so many times, is the view of the broken down farmhouse in front of amber waves of grain.  The look was inspired by the Andrew Wyeth paining “Christina’s World,” and, though unacknowleged, also from the 1990 film The Reflecting Skin (which had an almost identical look as well as an eerily similarly child protagonist). Gilliam often emphasizes the tall gold grass towering over tiny Jeliza-Rose’s head, as if it were surf and she was living in an undersea world.  This ubiquitous aquatic imagery helps to explain the title “Tideland“.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Gilliam has described the movie as a cross between “Alice in

Original trailer for Tideland

Wonderland” and Psycho, which sounds weird enough on its own terms.  He pushes the envelope of weirdness even further with his trademark visual flair for phantasmagorical set pieces, for example, with a gloriously imaginative sequences of Jeliza-Rose falling down a rabbit hole full of tumbling syringes.  But even if the audience wasn’t planted firmly inside the skull of the 9-year-old heroine, peering out onto this grotesque world through her child’s eyes, the scenario would have been weird, as the world of Tideland is peopled by grossly exaggerated lowlifes who live out their lives on the lonely fringes of plausibility.

COMMENTS: Tideland is a misunderstood film, which is not automatically the same thing as a great film.  Popular and critical reaction to Terry Gilliam’s movie and the real-world terrors it tosses at it’s 9-year old protagonist was so devastating that the director affixed a defensive disclaimer on the front of the movie stating, “Many of you are not going to like this film…”  He goes on to explain what should have been obvious to every viewer: “This film is seen through the eyes of a child.  If it’s shocking, it’s because it’s innocent.”

It’s a bit surreal that a proper discussion of Tideland must begin by addressing the controversy surrounding the subject matter of the film.  Tideland is about a little girl with addicts for parents, who is abandoned to her own devices and who makes sense of the absurd adult world by using her active imagination to transform it into an equally absurd, but far more colorful and romantic, childhood world.   This outline reads like the basic building blocks of an Important Work of Art.  It’s the kind of story that’s too depressing for massive mainstream consumption, but seems tailor made for the critics.

If the same story had been told as a relatively straightforward drama, it might indeed have been lauded as a brave and incisive work of art (as was Mitch Cullin’s source novel).  But something happens between that one-line thematic blurb and the film that finally appears.  Gilliam places such powerful, grotesque imagery on the screen—although it’s often transformed by Jeliza-Rose’s overwhelming imagination into something innocent and beautiful—that he lost the goodwill of most of the critics.

There’s truth to the notion that some things that work in prose, where the reader’s mind can pick and chose which details to visualize, are too ugly to depict on screen.  This is a criticism I find true of Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where Hunter S. Thompson’s whimsical and satirical intent is subverted by a literal depiction of puke and debauchery that turns the story into a screed against psychotropic drugs.  But I don’t find this objection to be true of Tideland.  The juxtaposition (more precisely, the co-existence) of the ugly and the beautiful, the jaded and the innocent, is essential to the artistry of this movie.

There are two scenes in particular that send audiences rushing to the exits.  The first is an early scene where Jeliza-Rose cooks heroin for her rock n’ roller daddy, then injects him.  This scene shouldn’t seriously shock anyone, although it should serve notice to those with weak stomachs for human frailties that they may want to select more amiable escapist fare.  In a movie with many bizarre and improbable flourishes, this is one note that rings uniquely true; a junkie father might really assign that task to his daughter, and the daughter would probably treat it as a regular chore, like washing the dishes.  The girl has no adult knowledge or fear of heroin or syringes; it’s simply something she does for her beloved daddy nightly, and the only effect she notices is that papa drifts off into a dream.  Through Jeliza-Rose’s eyes, there’s nothing degraded in her duty; the audience alone supplies that judgement.

The other ”offensive” scene, for those who haven’t been chased away yet, occurs at the very end of the film.  Jeliza-Rose and the developmentally disabled adult Dickens have been developing a tense but sweet pseudo-romance throughout the third act.  This innocent flirtation comes to a deliberately provocative boil near the end of the movie when the ersatz couple’s lovey-dovey kissy-poo games threaten to develop into something unspeakable.  Again, Jeliza-Rose is innocent; she knows nothing of adult sexuality, and imagines that babies come from kissing.  Dickens, who himself has the mind of a 9-year old, is equally blameless.  He has been nothing but playful and chivalrous towards Jeliza-Rose, but we can’t forget that though he’s psychologically a boy, he is biologically an adult male, and he may not be able to control himself or even understand what he is doing if he’s overcome by natural impulses.  Gilliam pushes the inherent ironic tension between the innocence of these characters and the horror of what we fear might, and pray will not, happen as far as he can, building our apprehension to an almost unbearable pitch.  It’s a masterful directorial manipulation in which we are forced to supply the terror the characters cannot, and it’s the one experience that many audiences cannot forgive Gilliam for putting them through.

There’s hypocrisy in that judgement, however.  The scene is provocative, but not exploitative.  It’s not meant to titillate pedophiles in the audience, or thrown out carelessly to shock.  It’s a scene that’s filled with intense human drama (because such a scenario is imaginable) and artistic effect (because of its immiscible blend of purity and sinfulness). By putting two views simultaneously before the viewer, the innocent childish interpretation, and a cynical adult one, the scene is calculated to force the audience to reflect on its own role in creating the drama, not merely to satisfy morbid lust.   Were a director to build up the same sort of Hitchcockian tension using a homicidal stalker and a woman who doesn’t know she was being hunted, audiences wouldn’t bat an eyelash, but would instead delight in the deliciously edgy suspense.  But place a child in the same position, putting the oblivious victim in danger not of her life but of her virtue, and the reaction flips.  We’re jaded to the murder of adults (or sexually mature teenagers), which is standard entertainment in blockbuster thrillers.  Gilliam has found one of our few remaining cinematic taboos to milk, and some people simply believe that this part of human existence must be permanently hidden from view, however honorably the subject is approached.  I disagree.

The one legitimate criticism that arises from this line of thinking is that the child actor’s own innocence might have been compromised by the performance.  It’s a reasonable possibility, but one that again suggests that we’re still projecting our own knowledge of the filthiness of the adult world onto children.  There’s no reason that the actress Jodelle Ferland had to understand the mature aspects of the script any more than the character Jeliza-Rose did: in fact, such an understanding might have jeopardized her ability to project the necessary innocence.  It’s doubtful that the director sat her down before scenes and explained to her the horrors of heroin addiction, or the mechanics of adult intercourse, in graphic detail.

The viewer who allows himself to be driven away by Tideland‘s ugliness will miss out on a lot of beauty.  Jodelle Ferland’s performance is wonderful.  She’s as enchanting and adorable as Lewis Carroll’s Alice.  Her performance is heartbreaking, because we recognize sordid circumstances of her life that she can’t see.  Remarkably, Ferland performs no less than five characters: she speaks for and carries on dialogues with her four doll’s heads, each of whom has a different voice and personality, throughout the film.  Brendan Fletcher’s Dickens is also an amazing portrait.  He captures the nervous tics, the strange halting speech and the even stranger preoccupations of the mentally retarded that involuntarily repulse us, but he too is so sweet and innocent that we are won over to his side.  He’s pitch-perfect.  Jeff Bridges’ deranged, notice-no-evil rock and roll junkie, despite being the ultimate unfit parent, is an amiable clown whom we almost like against our will.  He also hits the right note, because it’s necessary that we almost like him: he’s tender and playful enough towards his daughter that we can understand why she dotes on him.

The fantasy sequences are visually sumptuous, especially the underwater centerpiece.  They also are the key to the redemption-through-imagination theme of the film.  When Jeliza-Rose imagines three of her lost doll’s heads flying around happily inside the cathedral-like ribcage of her father, we realize how essential her fantasy world is for her to survive her real-life losses.

The film as a whole is far from perfect, however.  The audacity of Tideland‘s vision is strong enough to buoy it above sea level, but the execution is often questionable.  The real problem with the film is that it’s fairly clear where Jeliza-Rose’s imaginary world ends, and the real world begins, but there is not enough contrast between the two.  Tideland‘s reality is too bizarre.  Jeliza-Rose’s choice is not between reality and fantasy, but between an irrational dream and an irrational nightmare.

There are too many false notes in the “real” world.  Jennifer Tilly’s plays the improbably named “Queen Gunhilda” unrealistically as the ultimate trailer-trash parody.  But the little girl’s casual acceptance of even such a queer mother’s death, her complete lack of bereavement, is so implausible that it leaves a sour steak on her otherwise lollipop-sweet charm.  And the entire character of Dell, who at the same time is every kid’s inner picture of a witch, yet another irresponsible and completely self-absorbed adult, and the single most disturbed exhibit in Tideland‘s menagerie of weirdos, goes a step too far.  It’s no fault of actress Janet McTeel, who plays the role given her well, but Dell is superfluously weird;  it’s just too inconceivable to think that yet another bizarre character could be thrown in our poor waif’s path.  Jeliza-Rose deserved at least one real adult to interact with before the credits started to roll.  A movie that posits two levels of reality should play fair in at least one; reality should be something relatively recognizable, so the fantasy world can provide a legitimate flipside.

The movie also suffers from pacing problems.  It meanders about episodically for almost an hour before recognizing that the friendship between Dickens and Jeliza-Rose is the driving force behind the narrative.  More importantly, the ending is too abrupt.  The heroine is placed in horrible jeopardy, but yanked away to safety at the last possible moment.  Although some plot elements come together at the end, the resolution is rushed, and in the end we feel like we’ve suddenly been awakened from a dream by a frantic alarm.

In his disclaimer to the film, Gilliam advises, “I suggest you try to forget everything you’ve learned as an adult—the things that limit your view of the world.  Your fears, your prejudices, your preconceptions.  Try to rediscover what it was like to be a child, with a sense of wonder, and innocence…”  With all respect to the director, that’s only half the advice he should have given.  To truly appreciate Tideland, to experience all it’s irony and suspense and artistry, you must see it simultaneously through one eye of a child, and one of an adult.  If your childish eye has been stung out by a swarm of bees, like hopeless Dell’s, you may be permanently unable to view Tideland for what it is: both beautiful and disgusting, and flawed like this sinful world itself.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Way too disturbing for kids and too weird for most grown-ups, ‘Tideland’ is likely to wash up in boutique distribution where Gilliam’s name will pull in only his most devoted fan base.”–Leslie Felperin, Variety (contemporaneous)

“…unrestrained inventiveness is both the blessing and the curse of Gilliam’s wack-job of a film, whose anti-conventionality (and anti-commercialism) is a breath of eccentric air even as its narrative and stylistic lack of self-control ultimately results in something of a catastrophe… employing a tsunami of askew camera angles and fish-eye lenses that are less inspired than simply insistent, Gilliam turns his film into a phantasmagoric funhouse bereft of rhythm, basic coherence, and, finally, much in the way of fun.”–Nick Schager, Slant Magazine (contemporaneous)

“…easily one of the most audacious, weird and unapologetically outrageous films I have ever sat through. In certain respects, it is questionable—but I remained intensely engaged as I watched the thing unfold before me.”–Matthew Hayes, Montreal Mirror (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE: Tideland official site: As of 4/13/10, the location of the former official site has been snatched up by a cybersquatter, who has so far supplied nothing but some text (in German) about the movie.

IMDB LINK:  Tideland (2005)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Dreams: Tideland: The Tideland page at Dreams, the Terry Gilliam fansite; contains numerous interviews with Gilliam, Cullin, and others, and even more links of interest for fans to peruse

Alice in “Nightmareland”: Panel member Sergi Sánchez defends the controversial choice of Tideland as Best Film at the 2005 San Sebastian (Spain) film festival

Stuart Jeffries meets Terry Gilliam:  Guardian piece about Gilliam and Tideland.  Contains an audio link to the 30 minute press conference with Gilliam and Mitch Cullin from which the quotes in the article are taken.

Gilliam, Searching for His Audience:  A Washington Post profile and retrospective of Gilliam’s career with an emphasis on Tideland

Terry Gilliam begs for financing for Tideland on the street:  Youtube clip of the director scrounging for pennies and nickels outside the Comedy Central studios

Tideland, a Terry Gilliam film, Cropped:  A visual demonstration of the cropping of the theatrical image that occurred in the transfer to DVD

DVD INFO:  The only available Region 1 (North American) version is the two disc “collectors edition,” (buy) which features commentary by Gilliam and co-scripter Tony Grisoni, a 45 minute making-of documentary filmed by director and fan Vincenzo Natali (Cube), two shorter mini-docs, 5 minutes of deleted scenes, and interviews with Gilliam and producer Jeremy Thomas.

This release caused a furor among film buffs because the DVD transfer is presented in a 1.77:1 aspect ratio rather than the 2.35:1 ratio shown in theaters (see “Other Links of Interest” above).