Brazil

[rara avis]

I finally saw this movie last night, and loved it. I'll be watching it again and again I'm sure, to see what else I can find in it... I'm curious to read what you all think of it.

I liked Gilliam's representation of the lameness and overcomplication of this artificial world that people have built to serve them. Nothing actually works enough to serve anyone, except in that they feel righteously helpless, able to abdicate all personal responsibility, and are no longer even slightly in control of anything... so much more comfortable that way, isn't it? Let the byzantine mechanisms and bureaucracy and even the little desk toys surrounding you make your decisions for you, and absolve you of guilt; your hands are tied, there's nothing to be done for it, it's just how the system works...

Except that this poor, unassuming Lowry, who is just trying to do what he has to do to have a comfortable, peaceful life and fly under the radar, has an accidental inner life that drives him to begin to first mildly circumnavigate and then defy the system he's worked in for so long. He's uncomfortable with it at first, believes that anyone who doesn't conform to the world as it's been made must probably be a terrorist... and then he begins to develop an enthusiasm for it, as his weak and stuttering forays into his sense of his own humanity are rewarded a little at a time by glimpses of life's possibilities...

I'm typing Lowry as an ISTJ, (maybe ISTP?) and Jill as... an ENTP, I think.


I also really liked the art direction and visuals, of course - kind of goes without saying - set design, costume, style, etc.

For those who've seen it, did you think there was any significance to his dream-nemesis being a samurai? Was it just aesthetic preference on Gilliam's part, or was there a reason for the Japanese/Asian imagery used in the nightmares?




AND I just learned that Tom Stoppard co-wrote the screenplay. That makes so much sense, and makes me even happier. :D

[rwyatt365]

I've seen this movie perhaps a half-dozen times over the years and it never gets old. I don't have any relevant input concerning the use of Asian imagery in the dream sequences (but if I think about it, I'm sure I'll come up with something).

Good for you rara, most people don't "get" this movie.

[Nemesis]

I discovered this movie a couple months ago and absolutely love it. I particularly liked De Niro's goofy character. As for the asian themes within the dream, I think that that was probably an aesthetic thing. But, if I had to force an interpretation, it may have been a symbol of collectivism. Being that the guy is struggling for individuation within such a collectivist context, it may have been an effective way to symbolize that struggle (although a bit provocative).

Did you like the depiction of bureaucracies absurdity? I thought it was hillarious.

[BlackOp]

I thought it was almost as good as Shawshank Redemption. :laugh: Yeah, Its pretty fucking fantastic....in my top ten. I love the way all the machinery never works quite right yet everyone is a slave to it. The hot pink casket with the jet black funeral (with the liquefied corpse) was outstanding set design....as was the mirrored bathroom scene.

[rara avis]

I wondered about the samurai and little baby-headed guys being representative of collectivist society.

But it really may have just been aesthetic... and with all the period-esque forties elements... I don't know, it works somehow, art-wise, in Lowry's dreamscape. The mysterious exotica of The Orient, etc.

I also want to go back and have a closer look at the samurai's armor - I couldn't quite make out what it was made from - at a glance, it almost looked like it was decorated with resistors, capacitors, diodes, batteries, etc...


This movie may also be one of the few times that DeNiro hasn't annoyed the hell out of me. He actually did something different, for once.





rara avis added to this post, 9 minutes and 30 seconds later...

BTW, I SEE you offliners lurking down there. :suspicious: BLACKOP. You guys think you're so stealthy.

[rwyatt365]

I think that DeNiro was just a bit annonying still, but not enough to detract from the rest of the movie.

[rara avis]

It took me about 15 seconds before I became overly conscious that it was Robert DeNiro. For him, that's some fine, fine acting.

[AnotherNormal]

Yes ! Brazil is a great movie, have seen it several times over the years.

[thod]

I regard it as a classic, yet lots have never heard of it. It represents the absurdity of modern bureaucracy well.

GUARD
Don't fight it, son... confess
quickly... Before they get into
the expensive procedures. If you
hold out too long you could
jeopardise your credit rating.


Oh no, not my credit rating!

[rara avis]

yeah, that was one of the best quotes. I lol'd.

[Rudy]

*Puts Brazil on his watch list*

[blueback]

I just watched this on Netflix's recommendation. Then I watched it again with Gillian's commentary. It was really good. I actually think I liked it better before I heard Gilliam describing how it got made.

There's always been a pet peeve I can't shake, which starts acting up every time I realize that an artist made something good by accident. It shouldn't in any way impact my appreciation of the piece, but it does. I just don't like it when I hear that half of the final masterpiece is either random stuff the artist did because they were bored or merely holes they didn't fill that appear to be significant.

For example, the dream-samurai thing was totally random. Gilliam just wanted to have a samurai in his movie because he liked Kirosawa. And they made the armor out of circuit components because they had a small budget and a lot of extra circuit components. Gilliam himself calls the movie incoherent, and says he wouldn't have made it that way now.


That being said, the movie does a very good job of taking most of the things that normally comfort people and flipping them backwards so they become extremely uncomfortable. A really good example is when Jill and Lowry are escaping from the goons via a normal, heroic vehicle chase scene. They make the goons crash, and then they look back and see one of them burning to death in the fireball. That is supposed to be the place where the audience feels good about what just happened, but instead they feel horrible.

One of the things Gilliam describes is constantly trying to figure out how obvious/subtle to make things. He mentions Hitchcock blatantly showing the audience every clue necessary to solve the mystery, so that there's no possibility anyone could miss it. And everyone loves Hitchcock. But I liked the elements of the movie that were never directly explained. It took me most of the movie to finally make the connection between "Central Services" and all the duct work everywhere, and the effect was that much greater for me making the connection myself, rather than having it made for me.

Another example is how no one is ever forced to acknowledge the fact that Lowry is not in any way heroic. He's the main character, but everything he does is motivated by desperation and fear. Just compare his character arc to the arc of Theo in Children of Men. Lowry refuses promotion, not because he is refusing to participate in an evil hierarchy, but because he is afraid of responsibility. He then blatantly utilizes his mother's connections to get the promotion back (after turning it down), not to do anything good, but because he is afraid of not being able to track his dream girl down. He runs roughshod over all the rules and systems in his society not because they are absurd and deserve to be ignored or sabotaged, but because he is desperately chasing Jill, and is afraid that if he takes time to fill out the right forms he'll lose her. Eventually, he completely disengages from reality by retreating into his childish dream world because he is afraid of dealing with the facts, the most immediate of which is that his life-long best friend just tortured him into massive debt.

I think that is important to keep in mind when compared to Gilliam's commentary, in which he repeatedly says he is fascinated by the "heroic guys who keep things working." It's never mentioned specifically, it's subtle, but the only people in the movie who manage to accomplish their goals are either sheep, or wolves. Two contrasting exampls are the secretary outside the torture room and Tuttle. They are both very happy with their lives, but only because they have choosen an approach that works. Lowry tried to have it both ways. He kept the cognitive dissonance of the secretary, but he also kept the distain for the rules of Tuttle. The natural result was that he attracted the attention of the system when he broke all of its rules, but he remained blissfully unaware of the forces mounting against him. What could possibly happen except failure? Just as the threat he posed was at its peak, he goes on a honeymoon in his mom's apartment. He makes no attempt to deal with the trouble he has stirred up, or to simply flee, he just indulges in the woman he finally caught up with.

Lowry is a perfect example of the kind of person who is guaranteed to have a tragic story arc no matter what story he's dumped in to. He is an incompetent dreamer. His tragedy would probably not involve torture and catatonia in a less dystopian society, it would probably be more like a mid-life crisis, but there's no way for a guy like Lowry to ever succeed.

I think that's the ultimate reversal. Just like turning the camera back in time to see one of those goons the hero escaped from burning alive, by the end of the movie it is subtly revealed that the protagonist was doomed from the start. He never had a chance. Movie watchers aren't used to tragedies. Usually you have to go looking specifically for them. They're just not that popular, and why would they be? People don't pay money and spend time on things that upset and depress them. Real life does that for free. But tragedy is important. I remember complaining about Stranger Than Fiction in which the need for the story to end in tragedy is specifically explained to the audience, and yet the movie still ends with everyone getting laid. At least Gilliam didn't cave at the last second.

[HackerX]

I wouldn't for a second assume anything Gilliam does is by accident.

The movie is indeed brilliant though.

[thod]

*Puts Brazil on his watch list*

You will need form 27B-6 for that.

[blueback]

I wouldn't for a second assume anything Gilliam does is by accident.

You don't have to. He says so himself in the commentary.

The movie is indeed brilliant though.

I noticed that a lot of the reviews focus on the dystopian beurocracy, and how it's a bad thing and all that.

And then I noticed that I'm not sure I agree. I mean, obviously I agree that an abusive and inefficient system that is abusive and inefficient merely because it feels like being so is a bad thing. But, I think I look at the movie (and others with the same theme) differently.

This comes back to something I noticed before, which is that there are two kinds of people in the world 1) those who enjoy recreating something and 2) those who enjoy not having to recreate something. A simple way to illustrate this is the difference between musicians who love to work in studios, carefully crafting a single track, and musicians who love to jam in a live setting, not even recording what they play. The former wants to make a perfect track, so that they never have to make it again; they can simply reuse it. The latter wants to recreate the experience manually over and over again.

I've always preferred the former. I like building things that are perfect. Getting things exactly right the first time so that I don't have to worry about them again. So I appreciate the spirit behind the Ministry in Brazil. The entire thing is motivated solely by the desire to build a perfect system.


I think it's significant that, for all the flaws in their system, they have achieved something truly spectacular: their system is impartial. At the end of the movie Lowry, who is obviously wealthy and very well connect (he is a personal friend of the most powerful man in the Ministry), gets processed and ultimately tortured just like everyone else. His wealth and connections don't protect him. By any measure, that is impressive. Wealth and connections have always been the one thing people can count on in any situation to protect them.

Gilliam actually talks about how he would rather deal with an out-right-crazy person than someone who is truly objective. He says he doesn't understand someone like that. But that's exactly what we want people to be like. All the stuff we tell people to believe, that all men are equal, that no one is more deserving than anyone else, that the collective good is more important than individual waffling, etc; that stuff is objective.


I'm reminded of a nuclear strategy analyst who was famous for his ice-cold assessments of millions of deaths being asked if he could humanize his predictions a bit. He responded by asking if a "nice warm mistake" was preferable. I think an awful to of people really would prefer a nice warm mistake. They'd rather an undercover cop who bonded with a criminal let him go rather than shoot him like he's supposed to (Point Blank). For a lot of people being human means avoiding objectivity. To be objective is to be a robot that can't do anything right, because nothing is done warmly.

[tp6626]

Looks good Rara, I'll have to get it ordered. Bet its only a couple of quid on amazon or play.com :)