Film
Seitz, Michael H.
FILM Michael H. Seitz The Stuff of Nightmares People tend to have extreme reactions to Terry Gilliam's Brazil. Two of my friends hated it, thought it was strikingly ugly, more gross than comic,...
...Tangles of ducts and pipes and wires are crammed into every enclosure, constantly threatening to erupt...
...horror disrupts burlesque...
...Further disorientation is induced by Gilliam's willingness to engage in drastic shifts of tone and mood: Slapstick suddenly gives way to gory realism...
...There was nothing I could say to persuade them they had missed something important...
...Directed by Martin Ritt {Norma Rae...
...Lowrey is ultimately disowned by his mother, who undergoes a series of radical face and body lifts and then finds it embarrassing to have a grown son...
...He is betrayed by his best friend, chillingly played by Michael Palin...
...A suicidal but opportunistic derelict intrudes into an affluent home, providing an occasion for some mild satire of bourgeois manners and values...
...Brazil, incidentally, has nothing to do with Brazil...
...It is a world of automation and high technology, but the machinery is constantly malfunctioning and breaking down...
...The production design, directed by Norman Garwood, does much to make the film compelling...
...Yet I'm convinced Brazil stands out among today's films for the originality of its vision, its willingness to take risks (which don't always pan out), its off-beat wit, and its achievement in presenting us with a nightmare world that isn't all that different from the one we actually inhabit...
...The dialogue is unintentionally funny...
...The Mystery of Alexina Classy historical docudrama based on the memoirs (discovered by Michel Foucault) and tragic life story of a Nineteenth Century French hermaphrodite...
...The inhabitants of this oddly familiar world wear clothes of the 1940s...
...The protagonist, designated a female at birth, is raised in a convent, falls in love with a young woman and seeks to marry her, petitions for a legal change of sexual designation, but is neither fully accepted nor able to adapt to a masculine role, and ends by committing suicide...
...And while the film effectively depicts Lowrey's paranoid nightmares, it also endows everyday routine with a nightmarish aura that is likely to linger long after you leave Brazil...
...Gilliam's creativity has been seen in the Monty Python graphics and in Time Bandits...
...The physical world in which Sam Lowrey keeps his rendezvous with destiny is ambiguous and disorienting, oddly combining elements of the futuristic and the obsolete...
...Bits of simplistic psychological drama, an insipid romance, and elements of an action thriller are haphazardly tossed together in a film that exists mostly to show sequences of ten-speed bicycles speeding through the streets of San Francisco to the pronounced beat of the rock sound track...
...M Hits and Misses Quicksilver Not nearly quick enough, and more dross than silver...
...Murphy's Romance The first big "feel good" movie of the year, representing the slowly developing love affair between a feisty and endearing young divorcee (Sally Field) and an older and even more endearing widower (James Garner...
...A title announces that the narrative begins at "8:49 p.m., somewhere in the Twentieth Century...
...The film is sporadically amusing, but it has no brains and no real bite...
...The performances, except for Joan Plowright's, are horrendous, and the direction is ham-handed...
...Robert De Niro, Ian Holm, and Bob Hoskins turn in superb supporting performances...
...It's not much of a movie, but it may sell some records and some bikes...
...Down and Out in Beverly Hills A genial but rather aimless remake of the Jean Renoir classic, Boudu Saved from Drowning, directed and co-scripted by Paul Mazursky...
...The film is named for the hit pop tune of the 1940s that haunts the sound track...
...And he is ruthlessly thwarted by the system as he attempts, desperately, to pursue the girl of his dreams...
...As this may suggest, Brazil's strong suit is not its plot but its imaginative force and cinematic realization...
...Two of my friends hated it, thought it was strikingly ugly, more gross than comic, stupid and uninvolving...
...But the characters here are too simplistic to be believable, and social content is nowhere to be found...
...Television monitors are everywhere, as are computers (connected to the keyboards of old manual typewriters), but essential communicaJonathan Pryce plays an unprepossessing young man in the totalitarian world of 'Brazil.' tions are dispatched by antique pneumatic tubes...
...Revolution A promising subject (the American Revolution has rarely been treated in motion pictures) and a potentially interesting point of view (the Revolution as experienced by an initially uninvolved "common man...
...The work raises many questions concerning sexual identity and social perceptions, but the film is dramatically predictable and rather lifeless...
...Not everything he attempts in Brazil works, and his sociopolitical insights fall short of matching his brash wit and visual inventiveness, but compared to most current motion pictures, Brazil is profound...
...The screenplay is incredibly contrived and neglects the issues and meaning of the Revolution...
...who is known for his penchant for social themes and his attention to the development of character...
...But this British production from the director of Chariots of Fire is an overall embarrassment...
...The renewed British cinema hereby proves that it can produce overwrought clinkers quite as awful as those concocted in Hollywood...
...Nick Nolte is decidedly miscast as the tramp, but Richard Dreyfuss and Bette Midler admirably portray the shallow but touching heads of a troubled household...
...The movie focuses on the desires, fears, and frustrations of Sam Lowrey (Jonathan Pryce), an unprepossessing young man who strives to live a quiet, unobtrusive life in a totalitarian society vaguely set at a time not too remote from ours...
Vol. 50 • April 1986 • No. 4
