Terry Gilliam builds worlds more crowded than anyone else's and has trouble walking his characters through them. When invention and story pull together, in Brazil and The Fisher King, he is as funny and as frightening as anyone; when they do not, the films run long.
Fi1m perspective
Something always interrupts. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) it is Gilliam's own animation, cutting across the knights whenever a sketch threatens to settle. In Brazil (1985) it is Robert De Niro's rogue heating engineer, turning a repair into a raid. In The Fisher King (1991) it is a station full of commuters who stop walking and begin to waltz. Gilliam does not trust a scene to stay one thing for long.
He came to films from the drawing board. He moved to Britain in 1967 and joined Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969) as its animator and one of its writers, and the Python features gave him solid, grubby worlds to work in: his production design on Life of Brian (1979) makes the squabbles look as though they belong to a functioning society. He co-directed Holy Grail with Terry Jones, went solo with Jabberwocky (1977), and through Time Bandits (1981), Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), The Fisher King and Twelve Monkeys (1995) kept building places that feel oppressive before anyone has explained them. Charles McKeown has co-written four of his films; Roger Pratt has shot three.
The worlds hold up. Jeffrey Beecroft's design for Twelve Monkeys and Mel Bourne's Manhattan in The Fisher King are places an already troubled person could drown in, and Gilliam is more interested in that helplessness than in the rules other directors of fantasy like to explain. He is also better with actors than the machinery suggests. Jonathan Pryce in Brazil, Bruce Willis in Twelve Monkeys, Jeff Bridges and Mercedes Ruehl in The Fisher King are all asked to stay quiet inside loud pictures, and they do. We laughed at the fuss Brazil makes over a man having his heating fixed, and then felt uneasy about why it was funny, because Gilliam had made the difficulty of getting a basic need met seem entirely plausible. He has said the film "was supposed to be a film about the world we were living in in the Eighties, but I just took things a little bit further."
The fault is that his appetite for invention is greater than his interest in moving the story on. Brazil runs 143 minutes and repeats effects we have already understood; Julian Doyle's editing makes the comedy frantic while whole passages barely move. Pratt's restless camera in Twelve Monkeys suits Cole's confusion and makes it hard to concentrate on Willis. The Fisher King finds another complication after a scene has made its point, and its humour, fear and tenderness arrive so close together that there is no time to recover between them. The animator's impatience, the thing that keeps Holy Grail moving, deserts him whenever he is fond of a joke.
The films since have arrived less often and with more trouble behind them, and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018) took decades to reach a screen at all. Start with Holy Grail, which at 91 minutes proves he can stop, and then Brazil, which at 143 proves he would rather not.
Biography
Terry Gilliam is an American-born British film director, screenwriter, animator and actor. Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles before moving to New York to work on the humour magazine Help! He relocated to London in 1967 and began creating animations for British television series including Do Not Adjust Your Set.
Gilliam joined the Monty Python comedy troupe and contributed animations and occasional performances to their television series Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969–1974) and subsequent films. He co-directed Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) with Terry Jones and went on to direct feature films including Jabberwocky (1977), Time Bandits (1981), Brazil (1985), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), The Fisher King (1991), Twelve Monkeys (1995) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). He received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2009.
