In association with

Brazil [1985]
from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
starring Jonathan Pryce, Kim Greist, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm
directed by Terry Gilliam

Features:

• Anamorphic
• PAL
• Widescreen

Editorial Review:

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 unravelling this bureaucratic glitch, he himself winds up labelled as a miscreant.

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. --Jim Emerson

If Franz Kafka had been an animator and film director--oh, and a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus--Brazil is the sort of outrageously dystopian satire one could easily imagine him making. In fact it was made by Terry Gilliam, who is all of the above except, of course, Franz Kafka. Be that as it may, Gilliam captures the paranoid-subversive spirit of Kafka's The Trial (along with his own Python animation) in this bureaucratic nightmare-comedy about a meek government clerk named Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) whose life is destroyed by a simple bug. It's not a software bug but a real bug (no doubt related to Kafka's famous Metamorphosis insect) that gets squashed 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 unravelling this bureaucratic tangle, he himself winds up labelled as a miscreant. 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. --Jim Emerson

On the DVD: Brazil comes to DVD in a welcome anamorphic print of the full director's cut--here running some 136 minutes. Disappointingly the only extra feature is the 30-minute making-of documentary "What Is Brazil?", which consists of on-set and behind-the-scenes interviews. There's nothing about the film's controversial release history (covered so comprehensively on the North American Criterion Collection release), nor is Gilliam's illuminating, irreverent directorial commentary anywhere to be found. The only other extra here is the ubiquitous theatrical trailer. A welcome release of a real classic, then, but something of a missed opportunity. --Mark Walker

Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0

• Some will like this, I didn't
  Fans of Gilliam will find much to keep them happy here. There's nightmarish, dystopian imagery in spades, dream sequences are lavish and the finale is really quite masterful.
  The problem however, lies in the rest of the film. The humour kept me interested for about the first 30-45 minutes, after which it starts to wear a little thin. The same can be said about the plot - it starts out snappily enough but becomes seemingly endless in the latter half of the film. Logical ending points give rise to yet... more info

• In short.
  Genius.
  Don't know what films you one-starers saw or what world you live in.

• A True Classic
  More than 20 years after I first saw this film I still like it, which is not the same as saying that I entirely enjoy watching it. There are particular scenes I can always vividly recall, Robert DeNiro's subversive plumber character swooping off into the night, and later on vanishing in a swirl of wind-blown newspaper. These things are always a matter of taste, and to my taste this is a 5-star film.

• don't waste 137mins of your life on this!
  I tried to watch the movie until the end, really I did. But when my other half thought revising was more interesting than eating candy & watching this film, what more can I say, it was rubbish!
  It just seems to spin off into the writers mind far too much with no real direction at times, so much so you can FF through whole scenes & not actually loose any of the story line.
  At the end rather than thinking at least I can say "I've watched it", I was left feeling, "why did I bother" and "I'll... more info

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