BEFORE: If there's any method at all to picking which films to review here - or which ones to include in Movie Year 2019 and which ones to put off until 2020 - the general rule is (or should be): which films am I most curious about? Sure, there are some that I feel I HAVE to see, ones that are Oscar contenders or the latest installment in a franchise that I've followed from Day 1, but the first step for me in WANTING to see a film is being curious about it.
For today's film, the curiosity factor is very high, possibly through the roof. And not just because I've been following Terry Gilliam's career since the days of "Time Bandits", and even before - listening to old (even at the time) Monty Python skits on RADIO, on the "Dr. Demento" show, back in the early 1980's. Jeez, before I even watched "Monty Python" on TV or VHS, I knew the routines because of a radio show, which makes me feel really old, like I'm talking about listening to the serial adventures of "The Lone Ranger" or "Little Orphan Annie" back in the 1930's. Thankfully, I'm not that old, even though it feels like it sometimes.
But at some point I watched that documentary, "Lost in La Mancha", about Gilliam's efforts to make this film, starting in 2002 with Johnny Depp in the lead role. If you're not aware, this was a production that was plagued by disasters, including, but not limited to, the following:
The first actor cast as Don Quixote, Jean Rochefort, spent 7 months learning English, and then had to drop out because of a double herniated disc.
On the second day of filming, a flash flood (in the Spanish desert, somehow) washed away some props and equipment and changed the color of the cliffs, making all footage shot on the first day unusable, because the cliffs wouldn't match.
The main set location in Spain was plagued with the noise of fighter jets, since it was so close to a military base. So it was tough to record audio due to all the noise, and everything shot needed to be re-dubbed.
Production halted after the first week of shooting, and didn't start up again until 16 years later. During that time, there were eight attempts to start production over, with various actors including John Hurt, Jack O'Connell, Gerard Depardieu, Michael Palin, Ewan McGregor and Robert Duvall.
An insurance claim (for the flood damage) followed in 2003, which paid out $15 million but caused the rights to the project to belong to the insurance company, and this led to six years of legal battles before Gilliam could re-start work on this film. By this time, the project had gained a reputation for being "cursed", and Gilliam directed other films while waiting for all the issues to be resolved.
Then, once the rights issues had been worked out, and another attempt was made to start production, John Hurt was cast in the Don Quixote role, only he died in January 2017 before shooting could start. Another producer got involved, but he didn't get along with Gilliam, started cutting the actors' salaries and making other demands, and then after leaving the project (after failing to provide the funds to film it), that producer sued for creative control, and lost.
After ALL THIS, I'm practically desperate to see this film, because I need to know the answer to the burning question - "Was it all worth it?" Tonight, I'm going to find out.
Adam Driver carries over again from "Paterson" to make three in a row (five appearances for the year so far for Adam, I think) and tomorrow I'll follow a different link.
THE PLOT: Toby, a disillusioned film director, becomes pulled into a world of time-jumping fantasy when a Spanish cobbler believes him to be Sancho Panza. He gradually becomes unable to tell dreams from reality.
AFTER: Well, it seems that something (relatively) coherent did come out the other end of the production (and legal, and financial) nightmare behind this film. That documentary, "Lost in La Mancha", showed a lot of production design elements, like storyboards and a SMALL amount of footage, and honestly it was all very confusing. So finally I can see where all those little elements fit into the story, like the giants, and maybe things make some kind of sense now - only they really don't, because the story is designed to blend "reality" with "fantasy", and by the end of the film, the main character is unable to tell the difference. Frankly, so am I. Like, I can tell there are dream sequences, but it's difficult to determine when they start and when they end. Maybe the audience isn't supposed to think about this too much, instead a better tactic might be to turn off your mind, relax and float downstream....
This is a common theme in Gilliam's work - most notably with "Brazil", which also featured Jonathan Pryce. He played a character in a futuristic Orwellian society who had increasingly frequent fantasies about being a flying, winged man in a suit of armor who rescues a beautiful young woman from terrible beasts that represent society, conformity, governmental control, etc. When he meets a woman who looks just like the woman from his dreams, he tries to find her and save her in a similar fashion, only to find out that she doesn't really need saving, and she thinks that he's crazy, part of the government machine, or possibly both. So his dreams are in conflict with reality, and in the end you could say they sort of blend together, and we're not entirely sure what the end result is - perhaps he went mad and only IMAGINED the happy ending, which confounded me at first, then I got a little older and realized that was the way the film needed to end, and the distributor who re-cut it to create a happy ending totally missed the mark.
Other films like "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen", "The Fisher King" and "The Brothers Grimm" also dealt with the erasure of the line between fantasy and reality, so you have to figure that this Don Quixote concept is right in line with where Gilliam wants to live and play. Even in "12 Monkeys", perhaps the definitive time-travel movie, the lead character has some doubt about whether he genuinely traveled back in time to save humanity, or whether he's gone insane and only imagined the future he came from. (And when he's back in the future, he wonders if he imagined his time in the past...)
All of this leads us to Toby, a director working on a shoot in Spain who stumbles across a copy of his old student film, which was a version of the Don Quixote story. Through flashbacks we see that Toby cast Javier, a local cobbler to play Don Quixote, and an underage barmaid to play a female role. When he learns that his current shoot (a commercial that coincidentally also features a Don Quixote theme) is very close to where he made his student film, he gets the crazy idea to track down his old stars, to see if they're still alive, and how they've fared. It's not good, the guy he cast as Don Q has gone completely mad and believes himself to really BE Don Quixote, and he now recognizes Toby as his "Sancho Panza". Since Toby's in trouble for both sleeping with the producer's wife AND wanted on a trumped-up arson charge, he decides to hang out in the Sancho Panza role for a few days.
This leads to a variety of strange encounters, one of which is the young girl from his student film, who ran off to the big city shortly thereafter, trying to find work as an actress but instead found only "escort work", and is now a kept woman, in the employ of a Russian vodka executive, who coincidentally is being courted by that producer whose wife Toby slept with. The young girl, Angelica, is now a woman, but she's in a terrible situation, and in need of some rescue herself.
There's a lot more to this story, but since there are notable dream sequences, it can be hard to state for sure what "happened" here, or didn't happen. Like Toby/Sancho and Javier/Don Quixote take refuge within a community that seems inviting, only they learn that their hosts are Muslim, and possibly even terrorists. But after falling asleep, they appear to wake up back in the 17th Century, with Spanish guards raiding the village looking for enemy Moors, or something. This turn of events is most likely a dream, but is that really the answer? The time period seems to get muddled a few other times, and sometimes these could be fantasies, and other times they appear to be modern people partaking in some kind of fancy 17th century costume party.
Another time, the pair encounter what seems to be a real medieval knight, and this leads to a jousting match between Don Q and the knight - but again, this was more cosplay, as Javier's friends were dressed up as people from the 17th century in an attempt to get him to come back to reality by playing into his fantasy. Umm, wait, what?
I think sometimes a director gets stuck on a bad idea - or let's just say "an idea", because at an early stage it may be hard to tell if it's going to turn out bad or good - and they HAVE to get it out of their system, because they're not going to produce any BETTER ideas until they have a chance to make THIS one. I've seen it happen to other directors that I know personally. (BTW, I did meet Terry Gilliam one time at a book signing, where I got his autograph and then put him in touch with MY boss, who Terry wanted to meet.) How else am I supposed to explain the film "The Zero Theorem", which was horrible, yet came from the same director who made "Brazil", "12 Monkeys" and "Time Bandits", which are three of my favorite films of all time? And then what about "Tideland" and "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus", another couple of stinkers that Gilliam directed after the initial attempts to make "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote" failed?
OK, so nobody knows where any inspiration initially comes from, but let's say it came to the director in a dream, or it's a dream that he's had for 29 years to make this film. We all know that in someone's dream, they play all the characters, or all the characters represent some aspect of that person's self. So there's possibly a little bit of Terry Gilliam in all of these characters - the central character is a film director who's made some mistakes in the past, so that doesn't seem too unlikely. And then the other lead is an insane man who think's he's on a crusade, though it's a futile, useless one and he's very delusional about its importance. That doesn't sound too far off the mark, either - Gilliam was very quixotic himself in all attempts to get this film made. Gilliam is therefore part Don Quixote, part Sancho Panza, part Toby and part Javier.
I forgot to mention above that when production finally DID start on this film in 2017, and the film got shot (and you just KNOW that was a very tense shoot, because of everything that had gone wrong before...) after it wrapped, Terry Gilliam made a fake Facebook announcement about having accidentally deleted the finished film. (Somewhat impossible due to all the safeguards inherent in post-production these days, but perhaps he was trying to make light of the potential downsides of digital filmmaking methods). Hey, anyone who can make jokes about something like that, after going through development hell, might possibly have his head screwed on right after all. So I'm really looking forward to seeing what Gilliam does next, now that this is finally out of his system.
Also starring Jonathan Pryce (last seen in "Woman in Gold"), Stellan Skarsgard (last seen in "Dogville"), Olga Kurylenko (last seen in "The Death of Stalin"), Joana Ribeiro, Oscar Jaenada (last seen in "The Losers"), Jason Watkins (last seen in "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason"), Sergi Lopez (last seen in "Pan's Labyrinth"), Rossy de Palma, Hovik Keuchkerian, Jordi Molla (last seen in "Criminal"), José Luis Ferrer, Ismael Fritschi, William Miller, Will Keen, Paloma Bloyd, Jorge Calvo, Mario Tardon (last seen in "Risen"), Antonio de la Cruz, and the voice of Terry Gilliam (last seen in "Concert for George").
RATING: 5 out of 10 gold Spanish coins
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