‘Brazil’s’ Timeless Dystopia

Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame thinks his best film is wrongly embraced by conservatives.

The author of the just-released “Gilliamesque: A Pre-posthumous Memoir” has said 1985’s “Brazil” is an anti-authoritarian film to its core, which means it smites America’s far-right platform.

That’s the exact opposite of reality, as if Gilliam’s perception is itself a twisted dream like his own surreal visuals. The conservative political agenda is anti-authoritarian. Leave it to film’s beloved madman to get it wrong. While Gilliam has had trouble translating his singular visions to the big screen since then, he had nothing but success with “Brazil.” The movie’s message still resonates today.

It is a world where everyone follows orders, even though nobody seems to know where the orders came from.

Now 30 years old, “Brazil” offers a dystopian future unlike any we’ve seen since. The (presumably British) people in the film live in an era where seemingly nobody is in charge. Government bureaucracy has literally swallowed society whole. The focus is one a single, ordinary man who tries to escape it all in flights of fancy.

Jonathan Pryce plays Sam Lowry, a mid-level functionary inside the government who one day spots his literal dream woman driving a truck, and he risks everything to try and meet her. In the process, audiences are taken down a surreal rabbit hole where every last little thing Sam does pulls him further afield from reality.

What makes “Brazil” so wonderful is Gilliam’s ability to translate this crazed vision of a government run amok into something wondrous, beautiful, horrifying and intensely human. We immediately identify with Sam, just a regular guy in a terrible world, dreaming of being an armor-clad, wing-sprouting hero, rescuing his angelic dream girl from the forces of evil. In a world not unlike Orwell’s, the mere prospect of finding love gives us everything to hope for.

Government bureaucracy has literally swallowed society whole.

Whereas many films just throw whatever production design they can onto the screen, often with no regard for the story, every little detail of Gilliam’s vision serves the narrative. The production design echoes German totalitarian architecture, with its intimidating and looming skyscrapers. Everything is square or rectangular and hard. Hidden behind every wall panel is a heaving, breathing, living tangle of pipes and ducts. You get the feeling the characters are continually being watched.

It is a world where everyone follows orders, even though nobody seems to know where the orders came from, and what the ultimate goal is when kidnapping a citizen to “assist the Ministry of Information with certain inquiries.”

In “Brazil,” the government is so large that explosions planted by never-seen terrorists may simply be the system imploding by itself. The government has no idea who the “bad guys” are, but assumes that anyone who doesn’t follow the rules is a natural enemy, and thus puts out an APB on Harry Tuttle, played by Robert De Niro.

Oddly, Gilliam has always said the film was “a true political movie on the scale of ‘The Battle of Algiers.'” He’s right, but not in the way he imagines.

Be sure to see the film’s director’s cut, which is about 20 minutes longer, but offers a far more extensive final act that gives great additional life to the film.