Brazil

Plot synopsis:
The story is set in a dystopian near-future of an indeterminate year of the 21st century in a nameless authoritarian European country during the Christmas season. Terrorist bombings are frequent and the government's war on these enemies of the state has lasted for a few decades. In a government office a man sitting in a room full of teletype machines swats a fly on the ceiling; the fly falls off the ceiling and into one of the teletypes, changing the name on one printout from "Tuttle" to "Buttle."At the Buttle home the family is peacefully trimming their Christmas tree. Men burst into the apartment upstairs and cut a large hole in the floor, dropping down into the Buttle's apartment. After his wife is forced to sign several forms, Buttle is arrested and taken away.Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) is a low-level government employee for the nation's Ministry of Information (MOI), often daydreaming of himself as a winged warrior saving a beautiful maiden. One day he is assigned the task of trying to rectify an error created by a government mishap, causing the arrest and incarceration of a Mr. Harry Buttle instead of a suspected terrorist, Harry Tuttle. His boss, Mr Kurtzmann (Ian Holm), is flustered by the appearance of a compensation check issued to Mrs Buttle for her husband. Sam is asked to transfer the funds directly to Mrs Buttle's bank account. The request is sent back because she doesn't have a bank account. Sam says he'll drive out to her flat and deliver the check in person.When Sam visits Buttle's widow, he finds the woman in shock in her living room. He tries to give her the compensation check but she's too upset and hysterically asks where her husband is.He discovers Jill Layton (Kim Greist), the upstairs neighbor of the Buttles, is the same woman as in his dreams. Jill is trying to help Mrs. Buttle find out what happened to her husband, but she has gotten tired of dealing with the bureaucratic paperwork and the run-around from various departments at MOI, while unbeknownst to her, she is now, in turn, considered a terrorist friend of Tuttle for trying to report the mistake of Buttle's arrest. When Sam tries to approach her, she is very cautious and avoids giving Sam full details, worried the government will track her down.Later that night, Sam comes in contact with the real Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro), a renegade air conditioning specialist who once worked for the government but left due to the amount of paperwork. Tuttle has come to Sam's flat to deal with his malfunctioning climate control -- Tuttle's covert work is highly illegal and he's is intensely cautious when he enters Sam's flat, having been nearly trapped before. Tuttle helps Sam deal with two government workers, Spoor (Bob Hoskins) and Dowser (Derrick O'Connor), who are taking their time fixing the broken air conditioning in Sam's apartment. When Sam tries to pay Tuttle, the repairman waves off the money saying that Sam had done him a favor by concealing his presence in his apartment when Spoor & Dowser arrived. Tuttle exits flamboyantly, sliding down a nearby cable right after telling Sam "Remember Kid, we're all in this together!"Sam determines the only way to fully learn about Jill is to accept a promotion to "Information Retrieval" where he would have access to her classified records as she is considered a terrorist. He requests the help of his mother Ida (Katherine Helmond), vainly addicted to rejuvenating plastic surgery under the care of cosmetic surgeon Dr. Jaffe (Jim Broadbent), as she has connections to high ranking officers and is able to help her son get the position. His mother is delighted as she used to be frustrated at her son's prior lack of ambition, and the promotion Sam receives is one his mother has previously arranged for him but that Sam had declined before.When same arrives at Information Retrieval, he is treated like a bureaucrat and given his own tiny office in their bleak and cavernous hallways. He soon discovers that he literally shares a desk with the agent next door, Harry Lime (Charles McKeown). Lime has a functioning computer and Sam eventually obtains Jill's records. He leaves to track her down before she gets in trouble. Before he goes to find her, he meets with an old friend of his, Jack Lint (Michael Palin) who, despite his pleasant personality, is actually an agent who tortures and interrogates MOI prisoners. Jack warns Sam not to dig too deeply into the darker affairs of MOI because it can be a danger to Sam as well as Jill.When Sam finds Jill driving a large truck outside the entrance to MOI, he joins her, despite her obvious reluctance. He also notices that she picks up a mysterious package, which he believes is a bomb. While they're out shopping, a bomb goes off in the store and Sam immediately thinks Jill planted it.Sam returns to his flat to find Tuttle waiting outside. Spoor and Dowser are inside, wearing contamination suits amidst a tangle of hanging duct work. Tuttle switches the air couplings in their suits for the apartment's sewage hose and gives Sam a periscope to watch them explode when their suits fill up. After Tuttle leaves, Sam sees Jill standing there. He takes Jill to his mother's home for safety and returns to his office, falsifying her records to make her appear deceased, allowing her to escape the bureaucracy. The two share a romantic night together before Sam is apprehended by the government at gun-point for misusing his position.After being read a long list of charges, Sam is given to Jack Lint to be tortured, as he is now considered part of an assumed terrorist plot including Jill and Tuttle. However, before Jack can begin, Tuttle and other members of the resistance shoot Jack and save Sam, blowing up the Ministry building as they flee in a hail of gunfire. As they try to disappear into the crowds, Tuttle's disappearance is more surreal and mysterious -- littered paperwork that had been lying in the streets suddenly adheres itself to his body. When Jack tries to help him, Tuttle's body has disappeared inside the paper.The scenes become more dream-like as Sam runs to his mother at a funeral. The funeral is described as that of Mrs. Terrain (Barbara Hicks), a friend of his mother's who over the course of the film has suffered increasing "complications" as she has submitted to the "acid treatment" of Dr. Chapman (Jack Purvis), a rival of Dr. Jaffe and whose technique Sam's mother does not hold in high regard. Other than Mrs. Terrain, recently deceased due to her cosmetic surgery gone wrong, Sam's mother, thanks to Dr. Jaffe's repeated surgery, now seems as if she's in her 20s again, looking exactly like Sam's love interest Jill, and is surrounded by a flock of juvenile admirers younger than Sam himself. She refuses to help and, falling into Mrs. Terrain's seemingly bottomless coffin, he then continues to run from the police in streets that more and more resemble the concrete and brick walls of his nightmare daydreams.When Sam finds himself surrounded on three sides by the police and the imaginary monsters of his nightmares, he turns to the only escape way left and climbs up a seemingly insurmountable pile of old flex-ducts such as those running the world of Brazil, and finds sanctuary in a trailer driven by Jill, whereupon the two leave the city together and settle in the countryside, free from their past lives.However, it is quickly revealed all of Sam's adventures of the past few minutes, including the happy ending, are all happening inside Sam's head. In front of the idyllic scene, two faces come into view staring at the camera, that of Jack and of Mr. Helpmann (Peter Vaughan), who as Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Information is the system's highest official we see in the film. What they are looking at, as they now realize, is Sam having become catatonic at Jack's hands. Apparently the whole escape from the Ministry of Information and the scenes afterwards were all part of a dream that Sam had while being tortured. Seeing that Sam is too far gone to reveal any more information, Jack gives up trying to torture Sam further. Sam is left still sitting in his chair with a smile on his face, quietly humming "Brazil" as Jack moves Mr. Helpmann in his wheelchair away from the scene.In an alternate version of the film, subtitled the "Love Conquers All" edition, Jack's dream ends with the idyllic life he's taken up with Jill in the small house in the countryside.

Tags: comedy, dark, neo noir, murder, fantasy, thought-provoking, cult, alternate reality, atmospheric, insanity, psychedelic, absurd, satire, humor, sci-fi

Review:
A virtual celebration of writer/director Terry Gilliam's singular creative vision and seemingly limitless imagination, Brazil is a unique movie experience.
Like many other dystopian sci-fi films (e.g. Fahrenheit 451, Equilibrium, The Hunger Games), Brazil depicts a totalitarian society, but that's about as far as the similarities with other films go.The whole design of Brazil's crazy world is unlike anything I've ever seen in other movies (with the exception perhaps of those made by the same filmmaker).
Where films with similar themes typically go for a futuristic look that is defined by all the technological advancements the writers and filmmakers can dream of, Terry Gilliam chooses the complete opposite direction.
In that sense, Brazil is mainly a satire (at least that's how I perceive it), and it is often either darkly funny or downright hilarious.There is simply not a dull moment in the film: it's a wild ride that never lets up and almost every image on the screen practically bursts with clever (often hilarious) details; from the way food is served in restaurants to how the benefits of plastic surgery are presented, Gilliam's imagination can only be marveled at.
Nearly twenty years ago, before Terry Gilliam's reputation is what it is today, seeing this in a cinema without knowing ANYTHING about it, it was one of the most unforgettable movie experiences of my life!
The rest of the cast includes an amusing cameo from Robert De Niro, Kim Greist (only her second movie, after 'C.H.U.D.' of all things!) as Pryce's love interest, Python's Michael Palin, and a bunch of excellent Brit character actors - Bob Hoskins, Ian Richardson, Ian Holm, Jim Broadbent, etc.etc.
I have read a lot of understandably negative reviews of the movie 'Brazil.' Brazil(in its proper form) is a long film at well over two hours, it has many cutaways to dream sequences that are only loosely related to the rest of the film, and the narrative story is not always the driving force of the film which many people find confusing.
Brazil is an art film, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.Sam Lowry(Jonathan Pryce) is our hero, an unambitious bureaucrat within the ranks of the Ministry of Information.
While running an errand for work, Sam comes face to face with a woman who is the very image of the dream girl, and his life is forever changed when he surrenders his tranquil unambitious life in the attempt to pursue the woman.This movie is less about the story than it is about the atmosphere in my opinion.
Terry Gilliam is a visual genius, and this movie marks his peak(so far) in producing a visually stunning film, with due apologies to Adventures of Baron Munchausen and 12 Monkeys which are beautiful in their own rights.
The line between his dreams and his reality blur ever further as he goes deeper and deeper into the government machine to find out who she is.Terry Gilliam once again seems to have spared no expense in making sure every visual element of the world adds up to a cohesive whole which makes you feel as if you're really experiencing the characters' surroundings.
But Gilliam, throughout the last part of the film, continually crushed our naive hopes that somehow we can act out the fantasy that many of us may have, to get away, find the girl of our dreams and live in a trailer in a beautiful setting.Because we have no fear of physical control, we assume that we are free.
His "Brazil" features homages to numerous other films, ranging from "Modern Times" to "The Empire Strikes Back," and its plot is broadly similar to "Nineteen Eighty-Four." Yet the result is intriguingly fresh and creative.The best adjective to describe the movie's tone is "whimsical." It's the type of sci-fi film with an almost childlike fascination with strange sights and happenings.
Unlike the more popular dystopian films of today, you can't rely on theme-heavy dialogue to understand Gilliam's warning to society, you have to sit and absorb the bizarre imagery, seemingly irrelevant dream sequences and comic downplay of dramatic events.
Once you understand why it's there and stop worrying about exactly what it means, the genius becomes clearer.The film stars Jonathan Pryce as Sam Lowry, an unambitious bureaucrat who works for the Ministry of Information in a very mechanical society with an extensive yet inefficient process for bringing criminals, namely terrorists, to justice.
Since everything goes mostly unexplained, this humor compounds the oddities of the film, poking fun at the excessiveness whether it be Sam's mother's face lifts and same surgeries that slowly kill her friend or playing up the dialogue between Sam and other characters such as Tuttle (De Niro) in the midst of an abnormal scenario."Brazil" might not be a science-fiction film for everyone, but it deserves classic status for lovers of the genre.
Like something that was wrenched from the surreal dreams of Salvidore Dali, images in this movie are dark, funny, disturbing, thought-provoking, and profound, all at the same time.
Gillian's neon-soaked world of office-bound worker drones, apathy, and the loss of freedom in the face of a terrorist threat is an almost eerie reflection of the current state of our world - 1984 with its tongue wedged firmly in its cheek.Johnathan Pryce, in a role tellingly written for him, is Sam Lowry, a long-suffering everyman dealing with problems not too dissimilar to our own - unreliable technology, feelings of worthlessness and anonymity, a dead-end job, the desires and demands of his mother.
A chance encounter with the woman in the real world (played by Kim Greist) leads him to attempt to break out of his tedious day-to-day life - but reality proves to be a deadly barrier and his pursuit soon spirals dangerously out of control.As in all the best satires, Gillian's film is less laugh-out-loud funny than it is absurdly tragic, steadily walking the dangerous line between farce and drama that in the hands of a lesser director would have seen the film degenerate into an uncertain mess.
In a futuristic world Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) a gawky bureaucrat clerk gets himself caught in the middle of a revolution all because of an error, where terrorists lead by Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro) are out to destroy the bureaucratic governing state and also his literally after the girl of his dreams.A totally grim and surreal fantasy is portrayed in co-writer/director Terry Gilliam's film.
The story has it's tense, mysterious and macabre moments that seem to gel perfectly, while the dream sequences that Sam has were simply splendid and very hypnotic and the same goes for the haunting music score that spirals with emotion.The performances were good and quite colourful- but nothing really spectacular, Jonathan Pryce is charming as the love struck Sam; Kim Greist is elegantly mysterious as Jill Layton the girl Sam's after, Robert De Niro as a chirpy plumber/terrorist Tuttle, Bob Hospkins as Spoor the repair man, Katherine Helmond as the obsessive mother of Sam Mrs. Ida Lowry and Ian Holm as the twitchy Mr. M.
Gilliam admits he hadn't actually read 1984 before making it, but the results get remarkably close to the tone and feel of Orwell's novel, with its shabby future-retro technology and terribly polite torturers, while Kim Greist makes a great surrogate Julia to Pryce's Winston Smith.
It's like being stuck on an ornately decorated carnival ride that looks good but leaves the rider nauseated and wanting to get off.The film plods, churning away without subtlety or any lightness of touch, until Gilliam finally (finally!) flips off Hollywood with his big depressing finale.
It seems disjointed and feels bland; the world here doesn't even seem all that interesting (despite good set design, it just doesn't work as well as movies like Dark City or Batman).
The parts that attempt to display just how bureaucracy dominates this world is really do display that; but, I'm sure, on an entirely different level that the film makers intended: they slow down the pace of the movie to a grinding halt and never seem to end.
Brazil is a Hollywoodesque movie in every way with all the "prescribed" car chases, pretty girl loves pretty boy, evil people are really evil from every point of view, characters are caricatures and some torture/shock scenes thrown in the mix.
Terry Gilliam's best movie, in my opinion, is a warped 1984, with Sam Lowry as a futuristic librarian trapped in the bureaucratic system.
Swirling together ideas from such writers as Kalfa and Orwell and artists like Escher, Terry Gilliam's 1985 BRAZIL is visually stunning--and so disorienting, disturbing, and disconcerting that Universal refused to release it.
The film did not really come into its own until it began to reach the home market, and a remarkably fine DVD from Criterion is the result.Some people describe BRAZIL as science-fiction; some describe it as future prophecy; in actual fact it is a bit of both and lots of other things as well.
Whatever the case, it presents us with a society collapsing under the weight of its own technology, a world in which bureaucracy has run amok, terrorists challenge the status quo, and the general public is largely indifferent to the whole thing as long as it doesn't affect them personally.When a bug is splattered inside a computer, it results in the wrongful arrest of an innocent man--and through a series of odd circumstances plunges a low level and unassuming government employee into a series of romantic but ultimately nightmarish adventures expose the truly sinister nature of the ruling government, adventures that range from bombings to hideous torture, from beautiful surfaces to grotesque underpinnings.The film has a unique look, dancing between dream states and the stark world against which they occur; it is often beautiful, but it is all a bit off-kilter, and as the film progresses that off-kilter edge grows and grows into a profound paranoia all the more unnerving due to the visual beauty of the film.
I felt confused for the first half-hour as to why so many film-goers loved it, because as far as I could tell, it was another crazy Gilliam cartoon with an established script and a wide-angle lens to match.Slowly, we go into the psyche of the plot and characters, and a glowing admiration grows in the mind, which grows on the verge of exploding on the film's final frames (assuming you're watching the director's edition of the film).In England, sometime in the future, Sam Lowry works in a hustle and bustle office and is constantly visited by strange fairy-tale dreams involving an angelic woman whom he doesn't know.
This troubles me greatly.Terry Gilliam's 1985 dystopian classic is beautifully realised, often hilarious and utterly horrifying, not least because it has turned out to be so prophetic.Fundamentally - and very coherently - this is a film about systems breaking down: A dead fly drops into a printer, causing a misprint which leads to a man's mistaken death by torture; heating systems break down, and cannot be repaired because the Central Repairs support system is overstretched; the ubiquitous, massively complex systems of machines, presumably designed to make life easier, invariably go wrong when one or another link breaks down.It is also a film about systems breaking down humanity.
Our main protagonist, the affable dreamer Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), is bent on using his access to the Ministry of Information to find out more about the woman he thinks he loves, Jill Layton (Kim Greist), a quest which is complicated by the fact that she is considered an enemy of the state thanks to her efforts to find out what happened to her neighbour, the unfortunate victim of a clerical error.
The closest thing we have to a hero in this story is Harry Tuttle, a renegade heating engineer played with much panache and very little restraint by Robert De Niro.This was Gilliam's third non-Python feature, after Jabberwocky and Time Bandits, and it maintains many of the comedy tropes of his earlier work.
While any budding critic can reel off the Orwellian influences in Brazil, I felt it may be more interesting to consider the divergences and attempts by director Terry Gilliam to distance himself from Orwell's masterpiece.Brazil is a much more visually arresting film then 1984.
Its rife with dark humor and takes an already serious subject matter seem superfluous and disjointed in places, almost like a dream (which is in effect what most of the film could be interpreted as) - however it works and Brazil uses its completely unique retro future look combining it with a quirky self depreciating humor that keeps the viewer entertained and engrossed.
"Brazil" is easily one of my favorite films of all time, enough that I bought the sixty-dollar Criterion Collection version of the film, with its 'final cut' of Gilliam's masterpiece at its proper running time at 2 hrs and 22 minutes.It's the story of one rather passive, meek man named Sam Lowry whose dreams literally soar far beyond the dull and dreary world he lives in, and his struggle to realize a part of that dream.Simply put, Brazil has a great deal of everything interesting in movies.
It's film as dream and nightmare, surreal yet somehow plausible.Where "Brazil" really shines is in the quirky, savagely satirical details, like when you see a parade of the "Consumers for Christ", or the way everyone refuses to use the word "dead", preferring to resort to an endless stream of politically correct synonyms.
When someone says to you that David Lynch makes movies about his dreams on film, please pass them a copy of 'Brazil'.
I love Terry Gilliam's films: the stories, the visuals, the acid and cynic humor...
He uses humor to make an extremely acid critic and it becomes obvious that what is described in Brazil is not THAT far from our own society, that we are only a few steps away from a manipulative police state (hey, and America's war on terror had not even started!)The visuals in this film, as always with Terry Gilliam are stunning.
It's a bleak, dystopian love story partly about the dangers of Totalitarianism, much in the style of Orwell's classic 1984 novel, so if you're not a fan of that sort of thing, you may not like it.The film is co written, and incredibly well directed by my favorite director, the aforementioned Terry Gilliam, and despite his other fantastic films(Twelve Monkeys, Fisher King, ETC.) I consider it his magnum opus.
The film is the story of Sam Lowry, who has a dull life working for the Ministry of Information until it changes through a strange chain of events.
Here Jonathan Pryce plays Sam Lowry, and with the help of a great cast and Gilliam's oversee, he plays someone who wishes to escape from the totalitarian society that he works for.Each seen is watchable with the dazzling effects and sets and parts really do have you laughing and getting scared.
Gilliam blends some python-esque notes with many Orwellian themes, most specifically from the novel "1984." Taking place "somewhere in the 20th century", Brazil tells the story of a man who is caught in the chaos of suffocating bureaucracy, and dreams of literally flying away (a la a particular sequence from the Fellini film "8 1/2") The story begins with the main character involved in a messy situation involving terrorists and a woman whom he can't stop dreaming about.
I'm happy to have the blu-ray version, because it's the first time I've seen the "US edit" since originally seeing the film in a theater on a college campus shortly after it first came out.I can't really write an unbiased review of the movie, because from that first viewing I became obsessed with both Brazil and Terry Gilliam's films in general.
And the background plot of a bloated government bureaucracy turning the country into a surveillance state in response to a perceived terrorist threat - I know it was based on things happening in England at the time, but it's like Gilliam had a crystal ball and looked 20 years into the United States' future.
Not that I mind watching movies which demand the concentration of the viewer - in fact, I rather like films that are challenging and thought-provoking - but Brazil is extraordinarily hard to follow, even for those who give it the level of attention it demands.
I think that "Brazil" isn't a movie about the fight against totalitarianism - it's much more about the dreams, the visions, the flights of imagination...
The film Brazil is about a young man named Sam Lowry(Johnathan Pryce) who works a desk job in a government bureaucracy.
Set in the unglamorous future, "Brazil" follows the the path of an average guy named Sam Lowry (played by British actor Jonathan Pryce) who like the movie is appalled by the world around him.
Gilliam's directing was precise and invigorating, and the lesser credited stuff like sets, costumes and cinematography are some of the best you'll see.Overall, this movie comes off as a film that will make you think.
While it can be argued that this is a very depressing movie, and seeing as how Universal made Terry Gilliam make a more happy ending for it, the original ending was in its own way a happy ending.Johnothan Pryce plays a man who is constantly sub-merged in society's chaos, but his only way to escape is through his mind, where he builds a world where he is a hero and is in love with a beautiful girl.
Some cast members loved the script so much they didn't care what role they would be given just as long as they were in the film.The Director of Brazil is Terry Gilliam.
Gilliam is intelligent in giving Brazil a dark claustrophobic look as this is not a light story, but one filled with conflicts that Lowry must overcome in order to find his dream girl and leave his paperwork-obsessed world forever.
George Orwell's estate refused Terry Gilliam the right to call this film "1984 1/2", which is a real shame, because nothing could more aptly describe "Brazil"'s grimly humorous take on a dystopian future Britain.