This futuristic vision is a movie now considered a 20th century masterpiece of the imagination, on a par with Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," yet director Terry Gilliam had to fight for more than a year to get it released in the USA at all. He even took out ads in the trades saying things like "where is my movie?" The problem was an impasse between Gilliam and the studio on the film's final version. Gilliam was fighting for the full 142 minute version which was shown in Europe, while the studio had prepared a 94 minute version that they preferred. The studio hated Gilliam's bleak ending, which was emotionally unsatisfying, but Gilliam argued that a happy ending would be contrary to the entire point of the movie. There can be no happy endings for individuals in a dehumanized bureaucratic society. Since individuals were submerged in Gilliam's future society, it couldn't follow that one little bureaucrat could somehow triumph over a massive institutionalized behemoth. He could only fantasize about it.

The peculiarities of Gilliam's contract prevented an easy resolution to the stalemate. While he had the contractual right to "final cut," he also had the contractual obligation to deliver a film shorter than 125 minutes. Since the studio could not legally change the "final cut," and could not persuade Gilliam to honor his own obligation, Universal's only legal leverage was to withhold the film from distribution. Looking back on it, it seems obvious that Universal should simply have swallowed their pride, accepted their losses, treated this film as a prestige product, and promoted the hell out of it for award season. We live in a world full of copycats and formulae, so when geniuses like Gilliam come along, we have to give them a little freedom to realize their visions, at least within reason, and we must nurture them. Sometimes they may miss the mark, but we still need them, and the film studios need those occasional non-commercial works of art to give some artistic credibility to their otherwise businesslike endeavors. In the long run, such compromises convince artists that the studios really care about their work. Eventually, Gilliam did manage to negotiate a 131-minute compromise version, which was released to an unenthusiastic reception. It grossed only $9 million, and Roger Ebert gave it only two stars at the time. The BAFTA committee nominated it only for two technical awards, nothing for writing or directing, and no Best Picture nod. It did get one major Oscar nomination (Best Original Screenplay), as well as one for art direction, but lost both of those. History's judgment is that Brazil got one of the all-time hose jobs from the Academy. Although it now has the the second highest ranking of any English-language picture made in 1985, it was not even nominated for Best Picture, despite the fact that the field was weak in 1985 and the winner that year was the lowest-rated film ever to win the Best Picture Oscar!!! (That was Out of Africa, a film which is currently rated 6.8 and is not among the twenty highest-rated of 1985 at IMDb. Additional details on this subject can be found in my article on the worst Oscar winners,)

Top-rated 1986 films in English. Oscar nominees shaded.

Granted, Brazil is a "love it or hate it" experience, but whatever your opinion, you must concede that it is a unique film from an imaginative genius. Gilliam's original vision was to extend a view of the future as seen from the past. Remember all of those "Popular Science" magazines in the 40s and 50s which pictured the world we would someday live in? If not, imagine their world, absorbed by Bauhaus and Art Deco, ruled over by Stalin and Hitler, then imagine how the people of that time would imagine life today. They would take the trends of their day, both political and artistic, and extend them. Gilliam held this concept quite consistently throughout, detouring only to deliver the occasional smirk based on knowing how it really did turn out.

Jonathan Pryce stars as the insignificant bureaucrat whose only happy moments occur in the flights of his imagination, in which he soars like an angel and battles various symbols of the State Behemoth. Pryce was stirring, but my favorite character was Robert DeNiro's "terrorist." In a world that requires hundreds of forms to be filled out before anything can happen, DeNiro is a simple repairman who intercepts calls to the official state repair agency, then answers the calls promptly and simply fixes things. That's it. That's his act of rebellion - he fixes things without requiring any paperwork. Then he slides into the night on high-wire cables, like Spiderman. Needless to say, the State considers him highly dangerous.

Brazil is a visual masterpiece, no question about it, and there are moments and concepts I like very much, but the pacing is much too slow and the humor much too obvious for my taste. The whole schtick of Gilliam's Monty Python troupe really came down to carrying all points out ad nauseum. As you know, sometimes that could be very funny, and sometimes it was just guys acting silly after the joke was already over. There is a lot of the latter here, in my opinion. I admire Brazil, but I wouldn't watch it over and over again, despite its brilliant conceptualization and design.