Brazil (1985)

"This boxed set is a revelatory chunk of Hollywood history.  Entertainment Weekly
"Fans should be beating down the doors and spending all their grocery money to get a copy.  Laserdisc Newsletter

Editor's Note BRAZIL is Terry Gilliam's masterpiece. Cowritten by Gilliam, playwright Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown, the cult-favorite film is set in a futuristic society laden with red tape and bureaucracy. When a bug (literally) gets in the system, an innocent man is killed, leading mild-mannered Sam Lowry (an excellent Jonathan Pryce) to reexamine what he wants out of life. He decides to fight the totalitarian system in his search for freedom--and the woman he loves. The terrific, offbeat cast features Robert De Niro as a renegade heating engineer; Katherine Helmond as Sam's ever-younger mother; Michael Palin as a government-sanctioned torturer with a distaste for upsetting the status quo; Bob Hoskins as a vengeful Central Services employee; Jim Broadbent as a wacko plastic surgeon; the wonderful Ian Holm as Sam's nerve-ridden, pitiful boss, afraid of his own signature; and Kim Greist as the rebel Sam falls for. The look of BRAZIL is relentless, overwhelming, and outrageously spectacular. Giant monoliths rise from the street; government offices are a network of computers, pneumatic tubes, and narrow hallways built with Nazi-like precision; and apartment complexes are a maze of washed-out grays and numbers, all frighteningly uniform. The terrorist explosions actually bring color into this dull, monochramatic world. BRAZIL is a nightmare vision of the future, yet also hysterically funny and incisive, one of the most inventive, influential, and important films of the 1980s.

	Bob Hoskins
	Ian Holm
	Ian Richardson
	Jonathan Pryce
	Katherine Helmond
	Kim Greist
	Michael Palin
	Peter Vaughan
	Robert De Niro
	James Acheson - Costume Designer
	Terry Gilliam - Director
	Roger Pratt - Director of Photography
	Julian Doyle - Editor
	Michael Kamen - Musical Score
	Arnon Milchan - Producer
	Patrick Cassavetti - Producer
	Norman Garwood - Production Designer
	Charles McKeown - Screenplay
	Terry Gilliam - Screenplay
	Tom Stoppard - Screenplay

In this darkly comic view of the coming future, bureaucratic cog Sam Lowry dreams of escaping the totalitarian machine that society has become. He fantasizes about joining a beautiful woman flying through the clouds, far away from this world. One day he glimpses a female truck driver who resembles his fantasy and he attempts to win her love--but he ends up being dragged into the underworld of antigovernment terrorists and radicals. Terry Gilliam's vision, both expensive and expansive, resulted in a battle with studio executives over the lack of commercial potential of the darkly humorous, but often grim, material that was reedited for theatrical release without the director's approval.

"Have a nice day. This has not been a recording."----Central Services phone operator to Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce)

"You can't make a move without a form."----Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro) to Sam

Rolling Stone
"...Gilliam creates this dehumanizing universe with demented wit, sane anger and the most eye-popping visuals since METROPOLIS..." 12/14/1998 [/23

Entertainment Weekly
"...Landmark retro-future tragicomedy..." -- Rating: A 11/15/1996 p.85

New York Times
"...BRAZIL, a jaunty, wittily observed vision of an extremely bleak future, is a superb example of the power of comedy to underscore serious ideas, even solemn ones....Ambitious visual style..." 12/18/1985 p.C22

Los Angeles Times
"...It's a knockout..." 06/10/1992 p.F7

Total Film
"...It's rich in irony, steeped in surrealism and touched with genius....Easily one of the greatest movies of the '80s..." 07/01/2003 p.129

Sight and Sound
"...Hugely inventive..." 08/01/2003 p.66

Entertainment Weekly
"Gilliam's belief in the evil of banality is on full display here, made all the more dazzling by Norman Garwood and Maggie Gray's Oscar-nominated art direction." -- Grade: B 07/08/2011

Chicago Sun-Times 7 of 10
Just as George Orwell's 1984 is an alternate vision of the past, present and future, so Brazil is a variation of Orwell's novel. The movie happens in a time and place that seem vaguely like our own, but with different graphics, hardware and politics. Society is controlled by a monolithic organization, and citizens lead a life of paranoia and control. Thought police are likely to come crashing through the ceiling and start bashing dissenters. Life is mean and grim... The movie is very hard to follow. I have seen it twice, and am still not sure exactly who all the characters are, or how they fit. Perhaps it is not supposed to be clear; perhaps the movie's air of confusion is part of its paranoid vision. There are individual moments that create sharp images (shock troops drilling through a ceiling, De Niro wrestling with the almost obscene wiring and tubing inside a wall, the movie's obsession with bizarre duct work), but there seems to be no sure hand at the controls. The best scene in the movie is one of the simplest, as Sam moves into half an ofice and finds himself engaged in a tug-of-war over his desk with the man through the wall. I was reminded of a Chaplin film, Modern Times, and reminded, too, that in Chaplin economy and simplicity were virtues, not the enemy. - Roger Ebert