The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2/5 Stars)

“Don Quixote” is a very old book. So old that it is often forgotten to be two books. The first book published in 1605 by Miguel de Cervantes is a purely comic work about a crazy person and his simple sidekick roaming the countryside on a quest to bring back the lost age of chivalry. The first book proved to be enormously popular, so much so that Cervantes had to write a sequel if only to circumvent the copycats that were pretending to write sequels in his name. One of the more fantastical conceits of the second book is that everyone in it has either read or at least heard of Don Quixote’s adventures from the first book. The result is that Don Quixote is looked at by the people he meets in a completely different light in the second book. He’s still crazy, but he is also famous and his fame lends him a weird credibility. It is not uncommon that an observer in the second book will relate that they cannot tell whether Quixote is crazy or very wise. But Quixote has not changed. It is only the observer’s view of him, clouded by fame, that has changed. Unfortunately, this interesting facet of Quixote has never been developed by any movie or TV show that has adapted the story.

There have been several adaptations of the original work, none of them particularly good or definitive. Orson started and failed to finish a Quixote movie. John Lithgow starred in a TV version in 2000. The most well-known is the musical “Man of La Mancha” from 1972. I don’t believe any of them were particularly funny, which is too bad because the first book of Quixote is hilarious. All of them instead dwell on the mistaken notion, only found in the second book, that there might be more to Quixote’s madness that lets on, that he may in fact be wiser than the rest of us. Terry Gilliam’s “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” falls into this trap too and once again we have a movie that errs on the tragic side of Quixote. “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” is about a present-day movie director (played by Adam Driver) who discovers that an actor he hired to play Don Quixote in a student film has since turned madman and now believes he is Don Quixote. This movie assumes the audience already knows everything about the books and many allusions are made to instances from them. However, most people won’t have read the books and there does not yet exist a definitive movie adaptation of them. Why didn’t Gilliam just make a straight adaptation? That would almost certainly have been a good movie in his hands. This one is a jumbled mess of irrelevant themes and distorted reality. And now we still don’t have a good Quixote adaptation.

It would be hard to describe the plot. The best parts involve Don Quixot. Jonathan Pryce plays the actor turned mad man with characteristic fervor and gusto. Less fun or interesting to watch is Adam Driver as the director. Movies about people who make movies belong to an oversaturated genre characterized by self-important indulgence. This one is no exception. Here, the director is beset by some sort of creative crisis and takes a vacation from an active movie shoot. He finds the madman who believes the director is Sancho Panza, a few implausible things happen, and they find themselves roaming the countryside as knight and squire.

Adam Driver is a terrible Sancho Panza. Unfortunately, this movie does not have anything that resembles a Sancho character. I say there will not be a good adaptation of Quixote until someone treats Sancha as an equally important character. To the extent they are filp sides of crazy. Quixote is a nobleman who spent way too much time reading fantastical books in his study and his ideas about the world are completely abstract. Sancho is illiterate, has never left his hometown, and thinks and acts in the most literal way possible. The odd couple relationship between Quixote and himself are the strongest comic element in the tale. What we have in “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” is a journey involving two people who think in the abstract, Quixote and a movie director. There is nothing funny about their interactions.

Where the movie falls furthest from the books is in the character of the Peerless Dolcinella of Tabaso. In the books, she is just a regular woman who works on a farm. This is really all she should be because Don Quixote, if you can remember, is a crazy person. Here, like previous movies, the role has once again been given to a tragically beautiful woman. Once again, this renders the comic potential of Quixote’s madness ineffectual. Much of the plot involves this Dolcinella and her interactions with the possessive jerky men in the film. I couldn’t really understand what was going on except to say that where it went hardly seemed related to where it was going. There is a memorable moment of cruelty that was as out of place as it was uncomfortable.

I guess something has to be said about Gilliam’s thirty-year effort to get this film made. Sometimes the story behind the movie makes watching it more interesting but this generally only happens when the movie’s backstory reinforces the themes of the movie itself. It helps watching Fitzcarraldo, a story about an obsessive person trying to do an impossible thing, with the knowledge that the director Werner Herzog unnecessarily went into the jungle to recreate this impossible thing because he too is an obsessive person. Do the horror stories behind the making of this movie make it more interesting? Well, not really. I could not point out in this movie where the influence of all the dramatic delays could be felt. In ways, the fact that it took thirty years to make this movie makes it worse. You’d think with all those delays, the script at least could be cleaned up and made coherent.

The Zero Theorem (2/5 Stars)

‘The Zero Theorem,’ is a much bigger movie in its advertisements. The production design provided by the endlessly inventive mind of its director, Terry Gilliam, after being crammed into a two minute commercial gives off the impression of a visual epic on the scale of his previous works Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Manchusen, and most recently The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnussus. In actuality much of the movie takes place within the main room of a decaying cathedral now inhabited by a recluse named Qohen Loeth (Christoph Waltz). There are a few other set pieces like a workplace and a street and a virtual reality beach, but other than that the locations are quite limited. It is a rather dramatic exercise in how to get as many visually inventive designs within the smallest amount of budget possible. Terry Gilliam is at the forefront of stretching the digital buck to its breaking point.

Unfortunately besides the production design, “The Zero Theorem” is not a particularly enjoyable film and given the absurdity of the production design in relation to the main metaphor of the film, it cannot be considered a good film either.

The film is supposedly set in a futuristic dystopia that mixes the cynicism of Blade Runner with the color palette of Speed Racer. It is a weird futuristic dystopia in that the technology is new and unfamiliar but also far worse than what we currently have today. Everything is way more complicated and far more annoying to use than it has to be. Take the computer/video game console that Qohen Loeth works on at his job. Not only does he have to manually pedal the thing with his feet, but the controller he uses looks like the worst idea Nintendo ever had went and ate all their other controllers. The good people at Apple who have dedicated their lives to making technology non–threatening for the general public should look on this movie with a sense of horror.

Gilliam did something similar to this in Brazil when he used warped technology (airducts to be exact) to actively demonstrate the oppression of a totalitarian government. But ‘The Zero Theorem’ is not a totalitarian dystopia but a consumerist dystopia run by a business named ‘Management.’ It is not at all clear why this business would want to actively oppress its customers with a terrible user experience. For all of this movie’s preachiness about the diminishment of the individual in a corporatized landscape, the most culpable villain here is problem Gilliam himself. He is the one that came up with all these profoundly annoying contraptions and he has a long history of treating human beings as cannon fodder for whims and jokes (see Monty Python).

His main character in this movie is especially pathetic. Played hairless and socially castrated by Christoph Waltz. What he wants is to be a recluse sitting next to a phone in his cathedral where someday he may get a call that will explain to him the meaning of his life. (Movies that dwell on the meaning of life generally give unsatisfactory answers and this one does not disappoint in its disappointment. Management has an answer to why they have assigned Qohen to work on the Zero Theorem, a theory that proves that there is no meaning of life, but again the production design of the movie argues against that explanation.) Qohen refers to himself in the royal first person and claims he is dying. It is a metaphor to be sure, but the metaphor is so obvious that it swallows up the viewer’s ability to think it deep. It is just there and might as well not be because the movie is not persuasive in its arguments.

A lot of things are here that might not as well be. Qohen attends a party with a host that is dressed in a fat tiger costume. There is no particular reason for the fat tiger costume. It is just another in a long list of visual gags that make the viewer titter in a ‘hey what is that doing there?’ vibe but in context are meaningless artistic choices. The character might have well been dressed up as a walrus or a unicorn or not dressed up at all. It does not lend anything to the story. Critics complain all the time about the arbitrariness of huge blockbusters but then give leeway to smaller independent films like this. Well, in my opinion the standards should apply to both. What we see on the screen should not merely be whimsical indulgences? They need to add or complement what the story is about. If this were a bigger film it would be bad. Being a small independent film does not make it any less bad.

There also must be noted that there is a female character (played by Melanie Thierry) that has the sad and far too common fate of having to somehow someway fall in love with an utterly unattractive and much older man. I suppose when you are in charge of a movie’s budget, one of the perks is that you can hire women willing to portray this sort of thing. The honest thing to do though is to make the character mainly interested in money too. 

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (4/5 Stars) February 4, 2010

Gilliam Goes CGI

There are perhaps only two American directors I can think of that employ visual styles that unapologetically engross whatever story is being told. The first and certainly more prolific is Tim Burton. The second and unfortunately consistently out-of-work director is Terry Gilliam. 100 years ago they would surely have been world famous painters or something. They are perfect example of my theory that all the best artists have left the still-life painting world and gone into movies. (I also happen to believe all the best poets have become musicians or screenwriters. (Sculptors have become bodybuilders, ha ha.)) I think Gilliam’s style can best be described as “Salvador Dali visits a junkyard.” Still that’s doesn’t do it justice. If anything, Dali is a very unaccomplished Gilliam who does art in really static and boring ways (and doesn’t use as much trash.) It’s not Dali’s fault he’s so inferior though. He just didn’t have the technology. Movies and CGI special effects in general allow artists such as Gilliam to go places a guy like Dali never could. This movie is also a perfect argument for my idea to clean out all the crap-art in the MOMA and just hang still frames from great movies for a change. 

The story in this movie is kind of convoluted. Doctor Parnassus, played by Christopher Plummer, made a bet with Mr. Nick, aka the devil played by Tom Waits, that he could use his imagination to capture more souls (of apparently innocent passersbys) than the devil could. Doctor Parnassus won the bet and Mr. Nick granted him eternal life. Unfortunately, as all bets with the devil turn out, it was a blessing in disguise. Doctor Parnassus ages, he just never dies. 1000 years later he’s on the street accompanied only by his dwarf friend, played by Verne Troyer, begging for change. At this point a beautiful woman, played by the supermodel Lily Cole, walks by and Parnassus falls in love. Mr. Nick, always liking a deal, agrees to grant Parnassus his youth again so he can woo her in exchange for his first-born daughter at the age of 16 (again Lily Cole). Fast forward another 100 years (the movie doesn’t go chronologically by the way) to the beginning of the movie when Parnassus is at the centerpiece of some freak travelling show that hangs outside modern bars near freeway underpasses. He has an imaginarium that does crazy shit. His fellow travelling band members find a mysterious stranger named Tony, played by Heath Ledger, hanged somehow from the underside of a bridge. He’s got this lucky fife and has a plan to…

Well, whatever. Suffice to say that the story doesn’t really matter. Or should I say the story matters as much as the story in one of your dreams matter. It seems pretty vivid and real when you’re in it. Places, people, and things transform and transition into different places, people, and things quite seamlessly. But once you awake you can’t really remember what logic wound the whole thing together. Every thing blurs like a stream of consciousness. But I want to make the point that I wasn’t entirely bothered by this. I may not have understood what was going on some of the time but there was always incredible dazzling visual somethings to behold. This is one of those movies you can play muted on your TV during a party. I bet it would be a great conversation piece. (Is this supposed to be an acid trip? What the hell is going on??)

Stuff needs to be said about the imaginarium. How it works is this: A person walks into it and gets transported into a fantasyland created by the mind of Doctor Parnassus. This place will usually be tailored to the traveler inside. Like say a kid has a candy-land fantasy imagined for him. A wealthy woman has a fantasy filled with gigantic pearl necklaces, gold coins, and high heels. Etc. etc. Every single trip inside the magic mirror is something different and something special. At the end of the trip the traveler is presented with a choice between choosing the imagination of Mr. Nick (like say a shady bar or seedy inn) or of Dr. Parnassus (steep staircase to heaven, a bunch of transvestite cops dancing a show tune.) Whoever wins gets the traveler’s soul. Then there’s how Gilliam dealt with Heath Ledger’s death halfway through shooting the picture. All the principal on-set shooting had already been finished so all there was left was imaginarium scenes. Well, instead of just throwing in the towel because one of the major actors passed away, Gilliam just invented the idea that Tony’s looks are morphed by whatever imagination is being serviced in the imaginarium at that time. So each of Tony’s trip into the imaginarium produces a different movie star cameo: Johnny Depp, Colin Farrel, and Jude Law respectively (wow two good Jude Law movies in a week. I’ve stepped into the twilight zone). This works splendidly mostly because no logic is required in an imaginarium. The best thing about the imaginarium scenes though is that they are in CGI. What this does is offset Gilliam’s notorious penchant for real life grunge. What I’ve noticed while watching Gilliam’s many movies is how ugly (though very imaginative) the art direction is. (Ex. 12 Monkeys, Time Bandits, Monty Python). Fortunately it’s practically impossible to do something as realistic as dirty grungy trashy trash with CGI. So Gilliam was forced to design some beautiful art for a change. This movie proves he can.

The actors casted in this movie are like Gilliam works of art in themselves. Google Lily Cole, Verne Troyer (aka Mini-me from Austin Powers) and Christopher Plummer and see what I mean. All of them fit neatly in ancient surrealistic landscapes. Perhaps the best character though is Mr. Nick played by the rockstar Tom Waits. You should look that guy up on Pandora. He’s got a gravelly voice that bests Bob Dylan. The devil has never sounded so devilish. We had an especially poor collection of Supporting Actors in this year’s Oscar Race. Tom Waits was unfairly overlooked. Last but not least is Heath Ledger. His performance was the hardest to wrap my head around. If it had all been done by Ledger, it may have made more sense. But this is something I’m not about to hassle a dead man about. He did fine and the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a pretty good movie to go out on. It at least speaks to his very ambitious taste for interesting roles in fearless movies. He will be missed. Rest in Peace.