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Brazil
1985
BRAZIL is Terry Gilliam's masterpiece. The film, cowritten by Gilliam, playwright Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown, is set in a futuristic society laden with red tape and bureaucracy. When a bug (literally) gets in the system, an innocent man is killed, leading mild-mannered Sam Lowry (an excellent Jonathan Pryce) to reexamine .. Read more
| Starring | Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm |
|---|---|
| Director | Terry Gilliam |
| Genres | Comedy |
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Brazil
BRAZIL is Terry Gilliam's masterpiece. The film, cowritten by Gilliam, playwright Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown, is set in a futuristic society laden with red tape and bureaucracy. When a bug (literally) gets in the system, an innocent man is killed, leading mild-mannered Sam Lowry (an excellent Jonathan Pryce) to reexamine what he wants out of life. He decides to fight the totalitarian system in his search for freedom--and the woman he loves. The terrific, offbeat cast features Robert De Niro as a renegade heating engineer; Katherine Helmond as Sam's ever-younger mother; Michael Palin as a frightened worker bee terrified of upsetting the status quo; Bob Hoskins as a vengeful Central Services employee; Jim Broadbent as a wacko plastic surgeon; the wonderful Ian Holm as Sam's nerve-ridden, pitiful boss, afraid of his own signature; and Kim Greist as the rebel Sam falls in love with.
The look of BRAZIL is relentless, overwhelming, and outrageously spectacular: giant monoliths rise from the street; government offices are a network of computers, pneumatic tubes, and narrow hallways built with Nazi-like precision; apartment complexes are a maze of washed-out grays and numbers, all frighteningly uniform. The terrorist explosions actually bring color into this dull, monochromatic world. BRAZIL is a nightmare vision of the future, yet also hysterically funny and incisive--one of the most inventive, influential, and important films of the 1980s.
| Starring | Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin, Ian Richardson, Peter Vaughan, Kim Greist, Jim Broadbent, Barbara Hicks |
|---|---|
| Director | Terry Gilliam |
| Studio | 20TH CENTURY FOX HOME ENTERTAINMENT |
| Run time | DVD: 2 hrs 17 mins |
| Certificate | |
| Genres | Comedy |
| Language | English |
| Hearing-impaired | English |
| Subtitles | Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish |
| Released | DVD: 19 May 2003 Production year: 1985 |
| Format | DVD |
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Critics' reviews (3)
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In this extraordinary vision of a futuristic bureaucratic hell from director Terry Gilliam, Jonathan Pryce stars as the Orwellian hero, a permanently harassed clerk at the all-seeing Department of Information Retrieval. Pryce is only kept sane by his vivid daydreams, which see him as a heroic flying warrior coming to the aid of a beautiful woman (Kim Greist). As unpredictable as Gilliam's Monty Python animations, this daring and dazzling take on 1984 creates a weird world inhabited by an assortment of crazy characters, including Robert De Niro as an SAS-style repairman. The movie's sledgehammer conclusion gave studio executives sleepless nights. Expect the same.
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An expensive, wild, overlong, hit-or-miss Orwellian satire: enough good jabs to please the intelligentsia, but a turnoff for patrons at the local Odeon.
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Most helpful member's review
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50 out of 79 people found this review helpful
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 sequences were pointless.
Quite boring really. -
Most recent members' review
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2 out of 3 people found this review helpful
Follow your dream
The serious and sometimes very funny study of the effects of a highly controlled, form-driven society on one of its privileged naive elite who shuns this privilege, control and power in order to dream - to be free. He follows his dream. But this rigidly controlled society cannot tolerate this 'anti-social' free thinking and so ultimately stifles it. But, in doing so, ironically, gives him his wish to dream.
Basically, the only place we are free is in our heads. It also shows how such total control stifles progress and so this society is stuck in a George Orwellian 1940s and going nowhere boringly very slowly. The film has many funny bits and many sad ones too. A great thought-provoking film. -
News and features
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A-listers flock to watch Jackson's This Is It
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Los Angeles came to a standstill on Tuesday night (27Oct09) as Hollywood A-listers joined the Jackson brothers for the premiere of the King of Pop's concert rehearsal movie This Is It. The L.A. launch of the tour documentary - featuring Michael Jackson's final stage performances before his death in June (09) - coincided with the worldwide release of the film, which premiered across 15 cities including London, Seoul, South Korea; Johannesburg, South Africa; Rio De Janeiro, Brazil and Berlin,... Read more
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