Brazil is a 1985 dystopian science fiction black comedy film directed by Terry Gilliam and written by Gilliam, Charles McKeown, and Tom Stoppard. A co-production between the United Kingdom and the United States, the film stars Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin, Ian Richardson, Peter Vaughan, and Kim Greist.
The film centres on Sam Lowry, a low-ranking bureaucrat trying to find a woman who appears in his dreams while he is working in a mind-numbing job and living in a small flat, set in a dystopian world in which there is an over-reliance on poorly maintained (and rather whimsical) machines and where people found guilty of crimes are liable for the costs of their interrogation by torture. Brazils satire of technocracy, bureaucracy, hyper-surveillance, corporate statism, and state capitalism is reminiscent of George Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it has been called "Kafkaesque" as well as absurdist.
Sarah Street's British National Cinema (1997) described the film as a "fantasy/satire on bureaucratic society", and John Scalzi's Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies (2005) described it as a "dystopian satire". Jack Mathews, a film critic and the author of The Battle of Brazil (1987), described the film as "satirizing the bureaucratic, largely dysfunctional industrial world that had been driving Gilliam crazy all his life". Despite its title, the film is not about the country Brazil nor does it take place there; it is named after the recurrent theme song, Ary Barroso's "Aquarela do Brasil", known simply as "Brazil" to British audiences, as performed by Geoff Muldaur.
Although a success in Europe, the film was unsuccessful in its initial North American release. It has since become a cult film. In 1999, the British Film Institute voted Brazil the 54th greatest British film of all time. In 2017, a poll of 150 actors, directors, writers, producers and critics for Time Out magazine saw it ranked the 24th best British film ever.
Plot In a dystopian, polluted, hyper-consumerist, overbearing, bureaucratic, totalitarian future based on elements of the 20th century, Sam Lowry is a low-level government employee at the Records Department of the Ministry of Information, who frequently dreams of himself as a winged warrior saving a damsel in distress. One day, shortly before Christmas, an insect becomes jammed in a teleprinter, which misprints a copy of an arrest warrant it was receiving. This leads to the arrest and death during interrogation of cobbler Archibald Buttle instead of suspected terrorist Archibald Tuttle.
Sam discovers the mistake when he finds that the wrong bank account has been debited for the arrest. He visits Buttle's widow to give her the refund where he catches a glimpse of her upstairs neighbour Jill Layton, a truck driver, and is astonished to discover that she resembles the woman from his dreams. He frantically tries to approach Jill, but she disappears before he can find her. Jill has been trying to help Mrs Buttle establish what happened to her husband, but her efforts have been obstructed by bureaucracy. Unbeknownst to her, she is now considered a terrorist accomplice of Tuttle for attempting to report the wrongful arrest of Buttle.
Meanwhile, Sam reports a fault in his apartment's air conditioning. Central Services are uncooperative, but Tuttle unexpectedly comes to his assistance. Tuttle explains that he used to work for Central Services but left because of his dislike of the tedious and repetitive paperwork, and now illegally works as a freelance heating engineer. Tuttle repairs Sam's air conditioning, but when two Central Services workers, Spoor and Dowser, arrive, Sam has to stall to allow Tuttle to escape.
Sam discovers that Jill's records have been classified and the only way to access them is to be promoted to the Department of Information Retrieval. He had previously turned down a promotion arranged by his well-connected mother Ida, who is obsessed with the rejuvenating plastic surgery of cosmetic surgeon Dr Jaffe. Sam retracts his refusal by speaking with Deputy Minister Eugene Helpmann at a party hosted by Ida. After obtaining Jill's records, Sam tracks her down before she can be arrested. Sam clumsily confesses his love to Jill, and they cause mayhem as they escape government agents. They stop at a mall and are frightened by a terrorist bombing (part of a campaign that has been occurring around the city). Following an altercation with the government agents who have arrived at the scene of the bombing, he wakes up in a prisoner transport vehicle.
At work, Sam is chastised by his new boss Mr Warrenn for his lack of productivity. He returns home to find that Spoor and Dowser have repossessed his apartment. Tuttle appears in secret and helps him exact revenge on the two Central Services workers by filling their environment suits with raw sewage. Jill finds him outside his apartment, and the two take refuge in Ida's unoccupied home, where they share their first kiss. He falsifies government records to indicate her death, allowing her to escape pursuit. The two spend the night together, but in the morning are apprehended by government agents at gunpoint.
Sam learns that Jill was killed during his arrest. Charged with a number of crimes, he is restrained in a chair in a large, empty cylindrical room, to be tortured by his old friend Jack Lint. As Jack is about to start the torture, Tuttle and other members of the resistance break into the Ministry, shooting Jack, rescuing Sam and blowing up the Ministry building. Sam and Tuttle flee together, but Tuttle mysteriously disappears amid a mass of scraps of paperwork from the destroyed building.
Sam stumbles into the funeral of Ida's friend, who has died following botched cosmetic surgery. He discovers that his mother now resembles Jill and is too busy being fawned over by young men to care about her son's plight. Government agents disrupt the funeral, and he falls into the open casket. Through a black void, he lands in a street from his daydreams and tries to escape police and monsters by climbing a pile of flex-ducts. Opening a door, he passes through it and is surprised to be in a truck driven by Jill. The two leave the city together.
However, this "happy ending" is a delusion: it is revealed that Sam is still strapped to the torture chair. Realising that he has been permanently driven insane after a frontal lobotomy, Jack and Mr Helpmann declare him a lost cause and leave the room. He remains in the chair, smiling and humming "Aquarela do Brasil" to himself.
Cast
Main cast
Supporting cast
In addition, director Terry Gilliam appeared in an uncredited cameo as the smoking man at Shang-ri La Towers.
Production Writing Gilliam developed the story and wrote the first draft of the screenplay with Charles Alverson, who was paid for his work but was ultimately uncredited in the final film.
At this point, the script had several elements in place but lacked structure. "The character of Buttle was called Timms and had no connection with Tuttle.... Jill was still the Timms' upstairs neighbour, but was a childrens' social worker and no relation to Sam's fantasy figure."
Gilliam next went to Tom Stoppard for script revisions which, according to Gilliam, "made sense of it all". For example, it's Stoppard who invented the confusion between Tuttle and Buttle that starts the whole plot. But then Gilliam felt that Stoppard "wasn't getting some of the characters right; he was losing their humanity.... So I brought Charles McKeown ... and we started reworking it." The final script is therefore credited to Gilliam, Stoppard and McKeown.
Brazil was developed under the titles The Ministry and 1984 ½, the latter a nod to not only Orwell's original Nineteen Eighty-Four but also to 8½ directed by Federico Fellini; Gilliam often cited Fellini as one of the defining influences on his visual style. During the film's production, other working titles floated about, including The Ministry of Torture, How I Learned to Live with the System—So Far, and So That's Why the Bourgeoisie Sucks, before settling on Brazil, relating to the name of its escapist signature tune.
In an interview with Salman Rushdie, Gilliam stated:
Gilliam sometimes refers to this film as the second in his "Trilogy of Imagination" films, starting with Time Bandits (1981) and ending with The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988). All are about the "craziness of our awkwardly ordered society and the desire to escape it through whatever means possible". All three movies focus on these struggles and attempts to escape them through imagination—Time Bandits, through the eyes of a child; Brazil, through the eyes of a man in his thirties; and Munchausen, through the eyes of an elderly man. In 2013, Gilliam also called Brazil the first installment of a dystopian satire trilogy, preceding 12 Monkeys (1995) and The Zero Theorem (2013), although he later denied having said this.
Gilliam has stated that Brazil was inspired by George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four—which he has admitted never having read—but is written from a contemporary perspective rather than looking to the future as Orwell had. In Gilliam's words, his film was "the Nineteen Eighty-Four for 1984". Critics and analysts have pointed to many similarities and differences between the two, an example being that contrary to Winston Smith, Sam Lowry's spirit did not capitulate as he sank into complete catatonia.
The film's ending bears a strong similarity to the short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce. The tragicomic tone and philosophy of the film bear many resemblances to absurdist drama, a genre for which Brazil co-writer Tom Stoppard is widely acclaimed.
Gilliam tried to get finance for the film from Handmade Films after Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979). It was rejected but the studio agreed to finance Time Bandits. The success of that movie enabled Gilliam to obtain finance for Brazil from Universal.
Casting Jonathan Pryce described the role of Sam Lowry as the highlight of his career, along with that of Lytton Strachey in Carrington.
Robert De Niro read the script and expressed interest in the role of Jack Lint, but Gilliam had already promised the part to Palin, a friend and regular collaborator. Palin described the character as "someone who was everything that Jonathan Pryce's character wasn't: he's stable, he had a family, he was settled, comfortable, hard-working, charming, sociable—and utterly and totally unscrupulous. That was the way we felt we could bring out the evil in Jack Lint." De Niro still wanted a part in the film after being denied the Lint role, so Gilliam offered him the smaller role of Tuttle.
According to Katherine Helmond, Gilliam called her and said, "I have a part for you, and I want you to come over and do it, but you're not going to look very nice in it." The make-up was applied by Gilliam's wife, Maggie. During production, Helmond spent ten hours a day with a mask glued to her face; her scenes had to be postponed due to the blisters this caused.
Gilliam's first choice for the part of Jill Layton was Ellen Barkin; also considered were Jamie Lee Curtis, Rebecca De Mornay, Rae Dawn Chong, Joanna Pacuła, Rosanna Arquette, Kelly McGillis and Madonna. Gilliam was reportedly dissatisfied with Kim Greist's performance and chose to cut or edit some of her scenes as a result.
Production design
Michael Atkinson of The Village Voice wrote, "Gilliam understood that all futuristic films end up quaintly evoking the naïve past in which they were made, and turned the principle into a coherent comic aesthetic."