George Orwell got a lot right about the totalitarian future we’d be facing today, but it was Terry Gilliam who predicted just how hopelessly humorous it would all be. The writer and director is best known for the heightened whimsy of movies like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but each of his films, however cartoonish, harbors a jaded core.
Brazil might be his darkest: a zany riff on Orwell’s 1984, it could have stuck to loosely-connected sketches about the pitfalls of a near future. In early drafts, that’s exactly what it was, and it probably would’ve been easier to market. Instead, Brazil is just as serious as it is silly. It hopscotches from one genre into the next with abandon, flirting with tragedy and absurdity as it tells its cautionary tale. Gilliam’s ambitions might not have made sense to everybody when Brazil was released 40 years ago, but today, its warning couldn’t be clearer.
