Brazil 4K

Brazil
1.85:1 – 1985 – 143 Min.
Criterion – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
Starring Jonathan Pryce, Michael Palin, Robert De Niro, Kathleen Helmond
Written byTerry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, Charles McKeown
Directed by Terry Gilliam

It’s Christmastime in what appears to be wartime Britain yet the only sign of a blitz is the rampant kidnapping of citizens by masked stormtroopers. Even without anonymous goons kicking down doors even Mayfair would be a joyless place. Once-cozy domiciles have been repurposed for maximum misery; homes are cramped and cluttered with cracked houseware, frayed furniture, and exposed ductwork. The streets of London Town are no more inviting, the city is a cartoonish hellscape that suggests a collaboration between Rube Goldberg and Albert Speer. It’s like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis after the bomb.

Like Metropolis, Terry Gillian’s Brazil is an extraordinarily ambitious vision of an unspecified future, yet it seems more like a roadmap to how we arrived at our present. It’s funny in the most curdled way possible, every laugh sticks in your craw and the horrifying visuals—Gilliam feels and thinks with his eyes—are as extreme as parts of Monty Python’s Holy Grail and the explosive Mr. Creosote in the team’s Meaning of Life. Like Holy Grail, Brazil’s laughter is muted by the dark, dank colors and the very real human suffering. The only truly cheerful people in this film are the fascists who attack their neighbors with a can-do attitude and the lone wolf trying to defeat them, a masked avenger and renegade heating engineer named Harry Tuttle played by Robert De Niro.

Jonathan Pryce can only dream of being Tuttle—he’s Sam Lowry, the nominal hero of Gilliam’s tale, a desk jockey trapped in the tiniest compartment in a workplace that resembles an ant farm—his only escape is fantasy land, a blue-skied Maxfield Parrish panorama where he rules as a winged avenger always on the verge of rescuing his dream girl, who not coincidentally resembles a spunky neighborhood damsel played by Kim Greist. Michael Palin is Jack Lint, a two-faced glad-hander and Katherine Helmond is Sam’s mom, a plastic surgery addict who wears shoes on her head instead of hats. It’s a Lewis Carroll world where “off with their heads” is the punchline.

For better or worse Sam is our everyman, a doomed dreamer in the style of Walter Mitty. He, like Mitty, is intentionally colorless, as drab as one of London’s living rooms. Gilliam wisely surrounds him with a Mad Hatter’s supporting cast; Helmond—channeling Billie Burke—is always on her way to another facelift, the athletic De Niro who exits high-rises with the greatest of ease, Bob Hoskins and Derrick O’Connor as nefarious plumbers, and the eternally lovable Palin cast way against type as Lint, the grinning fiend. In the film’s finale the hapless Sam finds himself bound not under a swinging pendulum but in Lint’s high tech dentist’s chair. Naturally Lint is ever amenable, but the state demands submission and he’s happy to force Sam to comply. Gilliam himself is familiar with those kind of grinning sharks.

At the end of Brazil’s production Gilliam found himself strapped to his own chair when he came up against the director’s worst adversary, the studio head with a whim of iron, in this case it was Universal CEO Sid Sheinberg who refused to release Brazil without a happy ending. Gilliam, ever the rebellious joker, took out an ad in Variety: “Dear Mr. Sid Sheinberg, When are you going to release my film, Brazil? Signed Terry Gilliam.”

To experience a typical Gilliam film you might think his approach to comedy—prat-falling our way to the gallows—was born in war-torn Europe, but he was raised a happy Minnesota boy with a special love for cartoons and Mad Magazine. “I’ve always abstracted. Cartoons always push toward the grotesque. You twist, you bend, you shape.” In other words Helmond is in some ways the figurehead of Brazil, it’s she, rather than the fantasy-loving Sam who is central to the film, a woman who butchers herself to fit into her own fantasy.

Gilliam’s real hero remains the king of the resistance movement, Harry Tuttle. Said Gilliam in a 2003 interview with Salman Rushdie, “…the heart of Brazil is responsibility, is involvement—you can’t just let the world go on doing what it’s doing without getting involved.”  

As one would expect, Criterion’s new 4K UHD presentation of Brazil is glorious, surpassing earlier Blu-ray remasters, with increased detail and new textures in Gilliam’s dense visuals. The flying scenes no longer seem too grainy or washed out; the clutter and ‘kluge’ has more depth and personality. The Blu-ray conveys the same qualities.

Criterion offers up a good selection of extras including an audio commentary by Gilliam called What Is “Brazil?, an on-set documentary by Rob Hedden called The Production Notebook (a collection of interviews and video essays, and memorabilia from Gilliam’s personal collection).

The Battle of “Brazil is a documentary about the film’s fraught history, hosted by Jack Mathews and based on his book of the same name. For completists there’s the so-called “Love Conquers All” version, the studio’s ninety-four-minute, happy-ending cut of Brazil, with commentary by Brazil expert David Morgan. Inside the keep case is a physical essay by film critic David Sterritt.