UK (1985): Comedy/Fantasy/Science Fiction

If Franz Kafka had been an animator and film director -- oh, and a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus -- this is the sort of outrageously dystopian satire one could easily imagine him making. However, Brazil was made by Terry Gilliam, who is all of the above except, of course, Franz Kafka. Be that as it may, Gilliam sure captures the paranoid-subversive spirit of Kafka's The Trial (along with his own Python animation) in this bureaucratic nightmare-comedy about a meek governmental clerk named Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) whose life is destroyed by a simple bug. Not a software bug, a real bug (no doubt related to Kafka's famous Metamorphosis insect) that gets smooshed in a printer and causes a typographical error unjustly identifying an innocent citizen, one Mr. Buttle, as suspected terrorist Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro). When Sam becomes enmeshed in unraveling this bureaucratic glitch, he himself winds up labeled as a miscreant. The cast also features Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin, Ian Richardson, Kim Greist, Peter Vaughan and Jim Broadbent.

The movie presents such an unrelentingly imaginative and savage vision of 20th-century bureaucracy that it almost became a victim of small-minded studio management itself -- until Gilliam surreptitiously screened his cut for the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, who named it the best movie of 1985 and virtually embarrassed Universal into releasing it. (Embassy Int'l, Universal) (Jim Emerson, Amazon.com)

 View the trailer for the Criterion DVD release of this film on YouTube.com.

2 nominations