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Genres:
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Comedy /
Drama /
Fantasy /
Sci-Fi
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Release:
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Director:
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Terry Gilliam
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Actors:
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Peter Vaughan,
Michael Palin,
Kim Greist,
Charles McKeown,
Bryan Pringle,
Kathryn Pogson,
Barbara Hicks,
Jonathan Pryce,
Robert De Niro,
Katherine Helmond,
Ian Holm,
Bob Hoskins,
Ian Richardson,
Jim Broadbent,
Derrick O'Connor
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Duration:
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137 min.
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Rating:
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(8/10)112
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Plot Summary:
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BRAZIL is Terry Gilliam's master-work. The picture, cowritten next to Gilliam, playwright Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown, is set in a futuristic society laden with red cassette and bureaucracy. When a malady (literally) gets in the system, an innocent man is killed, leading mild-mannered Sam Lowry (an matchless Jonathan Pryce) to reexamine what he wants out of passion. He decides to scrum the monolithic approach in his search by reason of emancipation--and the woman he loves. The terrific, unconventional cast features Robert De Niro as a treasonous heating engineer; Katherine Helmond as Sam's perpetually-younger mammy; Michael Palin as a frightened working man bee terrified of upsetting the status quo; Bob Hoskins as a vengeful Central Services employee; Jim Broadbent as a wacko soft surgeon; the wonderful Ian Holm as Sam's cheek-ridden, pitiful boss, pusillanimous of his own signature; and Kim Greist as the nonconformist Sam falls in love with.
... The look of BRAZIL is relentless, overwhelming, and outrageously spectacular: giant monoliths rise from the street; sway offices are a network of computers, pneumatic tubes, and narrow hallways built with Nazi- precision; apartment complexes are a turnings of washed-distant grays and numbers, all frighteningly outfit. The terrorist explosions absolutely bring to color into this hardened, monochromatic rapturous. BRAZIL is a nightmare vision of the future, furthermore also hysterically funny and incisive--song of the most inventive, influential, and important films of the 1980s.
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Tags:
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The Best Sort of SF.
Brazil is one of my two favourite films and I've seen it several times over now. Rewatching it it struck me again how little it's aged in 20 years, thanks to Gilliam's timeless visuals and a preposterously brilliant script (by Tom Stoppard among others).
If anything, it's more relevant today than it was in 1985, what with a society entirely geared towards combatting possibly non-existent terrorists, cosmetic surgery-obsessed rich people, children being given credit cards by Santa, the countryside no longer existing due to the human greed... Everything Brazil poked fun at then is even more of a serious problem now, which I think qualifies it as possibly the best science-fiction film ever. If somehow you haven't seen it yet, do yourself a favour and do.
Mind Bendingly Long
There seems to be an element of the "Emporer’s new clothes" about Brazil.
Certainly there are impressive aspects and as a humorous parody of 1984 it succeeds. It’s a fusion of ‘How Tomorrow’s World saw the future in 1945’ and Reggie Perrin. The sets are brilliant and Gilliam’s ability to extract hilarity out of the banal and extrapolate is undiminished, for the first hour it’s superb, worthy of a six at least.
Ultimately, for me at least, it fails almost as spectacularly as it starts. There is no discernable plot, and once the wow factor of the visual imagery recedes your left waiting for something to happen and it’s a long wait, another 90 minutes until the end of the film in fact. Kim Griest was as awful as the dream sequ...
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