4 Terry Gilliam Movies That Are Perfect From Start to Finish
Terry Gilliam seems personally offended by normal life. Give him an office and he fills the ceiling with ugly ducts. Give him medieval history and he sends a bunch of thieves through it looking for things to steal. Give him Las Vegas and somehow the place becomes even more deranged than Las Vegas. His movies have this wonderful refusal to behave properly, like he keeps looking at reality and thinking, surely we can make this stranger. Half the fun is realizing he usually can.
And I have a ridiculous amount of affection for that. Gilliam movies are the kind you show somebody partly because you need to know how their brain reacts. If they laugh at the right horrible bureaucratic joke or get genuinely sad. You immediately have more to talk about. His best work is chaotic, funny, angry, childish, ugly, beautiful, and sometimes all of those things in the same five minutes. Nobody else really makes movies that feel like his. These are four of his masterpieces.
4 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' (1998)
Journalist Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) drives to Las Vegas with his attorney Dr. Gonzo (Benicio del Toro) to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race, bringing along enough drugs to turn a simple assignment into several days of hallucinations, damaged hotel rooms, bad decisions, and increasingly desperate attempts to find whatever remains of the American Dream. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas barely pretends Duke is doing journalism after the first stretch. The assignment becomes an excuse to keep moving while both men chemically destroy any normal relationship with the world around them.
The movie is hilarious until suddenly it really is not. Duke walking into the hotel lobby on acid and seeing everyone transform into reptiles is still one of the funniest visualizations of a bad trip ever filmed. Gonzo sitting in a bathtub demanding “White Rabbit” while Duke realizes his friend genuinely expects him to throw a plugged-in radio into the water is something else entirely. Even the narcotics convention becomes perfect Gilliam absurdity, with two men carrying half a pharmacy sitting among cops discussing dangerous drugs. Underneath all that filth and screaming is a surprisingly sad movie about people who thought the 1960s were leading somewhere better and ended up in Vegas trying to remember what happened.
3 'Time Bandits' (1981)
Eleven-year-old Kevin (Craig Warnock) lives with parents far more interested in appliances than in anything he cares about, until six small thieves burst through his bedroom carrying a map stolen from the Supreme Being (Ralph Richardson). Time Bandits sends Kevin travelling through holes in time with Randall (David Rappaport) and his crew as they rob historical figures, encounter Napoleon (Ian Holm), Robin Hood (John Cleese), and Agamemnon (Sean Connery), and eventually attract the attention of Evil (David Warner), who desperately wants the map because it would give him control over creation.
There is so much childish joy packed into this thing that the darker moments almost catch you off guard. Kevin meets Agamemnon in ancient Greece and, for a little while, seems to have accidentally found the interested father he never had at home. Then the Bandits drag him away again because there is more treasure to steal. Gilliam keeps refusing the polite version of a children’s adventure. Robin Hood smiles pleasantly while his men punch poor people after handing them gifts. Evil spends his time complaining that God wasted creation on things like nipples and slugs. And the ending is unbelievably mean. Kevin gets home, his parents find a leftover piece of concentrated Evil, ignore his warning, touch it, and explode. Then the fireman who rescues Kevin looks exactly like Agamemnon. Imagine being a kid and getting handed that ending. Brilliant.
2 '12 Monkeys' (1995)
James Cole (Bruce Willis) is a prisoner living underground in 2035 after a virus has wiped out most of humanity and forced the survivors away from the surface. Scientists send him back through time to gather information about the outbreak, particularly a mysterious group called the Army of the Twelve Monkeys. 12 Monkeys keeps throwing Cole into the wrong years, where psychiatrist Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe) thinks he is delusional and unstable patient Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt) appears suspiciously connected to the group Cole has been sent to investigate.
What wrecks me about this one is Cole gradually realizing that the past feels more real to him than the future he is supposedly trying to save. He hears “Blueberry Hill” on the radio and becomes emotional because music itself feels miraculous after years underground. Kathryn slowly moves in the opposite direction, from diagnosing him to realizing that some of his impossible claims keep coming true. And sitting beneath everything is Cole’s recurring childhood memory of watching a man get shot at an airport. Eventually you understand exactly who that man is. The movie has been telling you the ending from the beginning and somehow that only makes arriving there worse. Time travel usually sells the fantasy that history can be corrected. 12 Monkeys makes you watch someone struggle desperately enough to believe it, then closes the door.
1 'Brazil' (1985)
Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) is a minor government employee in Brazil living inside a society where bureaucracy has swallowed almost every part of daily life. When a clerical error caused by a dead insect changes suspected terrorist Archibald Tuttle (Robert De Niro)’s name to Archibald Buttle (Brian Miller), an innocent man is arrested and killed by the state. Brazil follows Sam as he tries to correct the mistake, meets Buttle’s neighbor Jill Layton (Kim Greist), and becomes tangled in the same government machinery he has spent his life quietly serving.
This movie understands bureaucracy at a level that becomes funnier every time you have to fill out a pointless form in real life. Buttle’s widow is handed a receipt for her husband after officials effectively kidnap him from his home. Tuttle is treated like a terrorist largely because he repairs heating systems without completing the proper paperwork. Sam’s office is so badly designed that he and the employee next door physically fight over a desk through the wall. And yet Brazil eventually stops being merely funny. Sam retreats further into fantasies where he flies, saves Jill, and defeats enormous monsters, because imagination is the one place the system cannot reach. For a few beautiful minutes near the end, it looks like he has escaped for real. Then Gilliam shows us Sam still strapped to the interrogation chair, smiling because his mind has gone somewhere his captors cannot follow. I hate that ending. I love that ending. I have never stopped thinking about it.
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