The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
Original post date: 26 January 2019
Rating: ✭✭✰✰
So here’s another one of those quickie movies that someone just threw together during a weekend or two. Ha! If you know anything about this film, then you are aware it is the poster child for filmmaking production hell. As documented no fewer than 16 years ago in the film Lost in La Mancha, this movie would wind up taking Terry Gilliam nearly three decades to complete. Think about that. This flick was conceived more or less around the same time as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In 2000 the great Jean Rochefort was to be Quixote and Johnny Depp the filmmaker he takes to be his Sancho Panza. In 2010 it was to be Robert Duvall and Ewan McGregor. In 2015, it was John Hurt and Jack O’Connell. In the end it is Jonathan Pryce and Adam Driver. (The film is dedicated to the memories of Rochefort and Hurt.) And how fitting that it is Pryce, who had the lead role in Gilliam’s 1985 masterpiece Brazil. For a film that deals with multiple levels of meta-narratives, how perfect that the reality around the making of the film was so perfectly… quixotic? Indeed, I could fill up a lot of space here just ruminating on the meanings of the film’s very existence. So what about the actual movie itself? Could it ever live up to a full generational timespan of expectations? In a strange way, it appears that Gilliam knocked out his artistic triumphs in his 40s (Brazil) and his 50s (Twelve Monkeys) and now, in his late 70s, has gone back to belatedly make his necessary self-indulgent student thesis film. That is not really as much a criticism as it probably sounds like. After all, the story is about a filmmaker on a disaster-plagued shoot in Spain being confronted with his decade-old student work and being spun into a surreal journey through the meaning of the Quixote story and his own shortcomings. (There are lots of humorous references to the film’s troubled production history, mostly from the mouth of Stellan Skarsgård as Driver’s overbearing producer.) The movie feels like a throwback to certain comic/absurdist European films of the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed it is fairly Fellini-esque in its obsessive focus on the filmmaker and in its myriad fantastic touches in exploring his psychology. Given that it’s Gilliam, though, it nearly feels strangely low-tech, when contrasted with his animation work and his earlier movies with bigger budgets. Make no mistake, there are still the whimsical and fantastical touches, but they are all real-world. No CGI here, and it’s just as well. Bright spots include Pryce (of course), Portugal’s Joana Ribeiro as the former innocent whom Driver feels he must save, and Spain’s Óscar Jaenada as a furtive gypsy who keeps popping up at the strangest times. Gilliam was always destined to have his crack at Quixote—no artist and no source material belong together more—but it is a let-down that there isn’t more to it. Also, it does not help that Driver’s character is not very likeable, not even by the end. Still, I would not have missed this for the world. To watch this movie—with all of its amazing history—is to become, in a way, part of literature oneself.
Rating: ✭✭✰✰
So here’s another one of those quickie movies that someone just threw together during a weekend or two. Ha! If you know anything about this film, then you are aware it is the poster child for filmmaking production hell. As documented no fewer than 16 years ago in the film Lost in La Mancha, this movie would wind up taking Terry Gilliam nearly three decades to complete. Think about that. This flick was conceived more or less around the same time as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In 2000 the great Jean Rochefort was to be Quixote and Johnny Depp the filmmaker he takes to be his Sancho Panza. In 2010 it was to be Robert Duvall and Ewan McGregor. In 2015, it was John Hurt and Jack O’Connell. In the end it is Jonathan Pryce and Adam Driver. (The film is dedicated to the memories of Rochefort and Hurt.) And how fitting that it is Pryce, who had the lead role in Gilliam’s 1985 masterpiece Brazil. For a film that deals with multiple levels of meta-narratives, how perfect that the reality around the making of the film was so perfectly… quixotic? Indeed, I could fill up a lot of space here just ruminating on the meanings of the film’s very existence. So what about the actual movie itself? Could it ever live up to a full generational timespan of expectations? In a strange way, it appears that Gilliam knocked out his artistic triumphs in his 40s (Brazil) and his 50s (Twelve Monkeys) and now, in his late 70s, has gone back to belatedly make his necessary self-indulgent student thesis film. That is not really as much a criticism as it probably sounds like. After all, the story is about a filmmaker on a disaster-plagued shoot in Spain being confronted with his decade-old student work and being spun into a surreal journey through the meaning of the Quixote story and his own shortcomings. (There are lots of humorous references to the film’s troubled production history, mostly from the mouth of Stellan Skarsgård as Driver’s overbearing producer.) The movie feels like a throwback to certain comic/absurdist European films of the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed it is fairly Fellini-esque in its obsessive focus on the filmmaker and in its myriad fantastic touches in exploring his psychology. Given that it’s Gilliam, though, it nearly feels strangely low-tech, when contrasted with his animation work and his earlier movies with bigger budgets. Make no mistake, there are still the whimsical and fantastical touches, but they are all real-world. No CGI here, and it’s just as well. Bright spots include Pryce (of course), Portugal’s Joana Ribeiro as the former innocent whom Driver feels he must save, and Spain’s Óscar Jaenada as a furtive gypsy who keeps popping up at the strangest times. Gilliam was always destined to have his crack at Quixote—no artist and no source material belong together more—but it is a let-down that there isn’t more to it. Also, it does not help that Driver’s character is not very likeable, not even by the end. Still, I would not have missed this for the world. To watch this movie—with all of its amazing history—is to become, in a way, part of literature oneself.
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