Have you ever seen any of those "Popular Science" magazines in the 40s and 50s which pictured the world we would someday live in? Director and co-author Terry Gilliam took those technological imaginings and layered in a vision of how the people of that era might have pictured the artistic and political environment in which that technology would flourish. The people of that time would have to picture our life today from a world absorbed by Bauhaus and Art Deco, and ruled over by Stalin and Hitler. The film gets into their heads and stays on that course quite consistently throughout, detouring only to deliver the occasional smirk based on knowing how it really did turn out.  

Jonathan Pryce stars as an insignificant bureaucrat whose only happy moments occur in flights of his imagination, in which he soars like an angel and battles various symbols of the State Behemoth. Pryce's fantasies are stirring, but my favorite character in the film is 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 slides into the night on high-wire cables, a Spider-Man with a tool belt. Needless to say, the State considers him highly dangerous.

This futuristic vision is 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, and they were far apart in the negotiations. Gilliam was fighting for the full 142-minute version which was shown in Europe, but the studio had prepared a 94-minute version that they preferred. The studio also hated Gilliam's bleak ending, which was emotionally unsatisfying. Gilliam countered 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, and it would not have been possible for one little bureaucrat to triumph over a massive institutionalized behemoth.

The peculiarities of Gilliam's contract prevented an easy resolution to the stalemate. On the one hand, the contract stipulated that the studio could not change Gilliam's final cut. On the other hand, Gilliam was required to submit a version which ran 125 minutes or les, and Gilliam had insisted on submitting a 142-minute final cut. Since Universal could not legally alter the film and could not persuade Gilliam to trim it, their only leverage was to withhold the film from distribution. Looking back on the situation, 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. After all, 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, but its release was greeted by an unenthusiastic public ($9 million gross), and little love from the British and American film academies. The BAFTA committee nominated Brazil only for two technical awards, by-passing it for consideration as the best film, and offering no consolation nominations for writing, direction or cinematography. The film did get one major Oscar nomination for its original screenplay, as well as a technical nod for art direction, but it won neither of those awards, and was not nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, despite the fact that the field was weak in 1985 and the winner that year (Out of Africa) is the lowest-rated film ever to be so honored! History's judgment is that Brazil got one of the all-time hose jobs from those Academies. It now has the the second highest IMDb rating of any English-language picture made in 1985. Since the one higher-rated film is a pure entertainment picture, while Brazil is an exceptional artistic achievement, it now seems that Brazil should have received the Best Picture Oscar that year.

So it goes.

Tough luck, Gilliam.

Top-rated 1985 films in English. Oscar nominees shaded.