Worse things than windmills for Gilliam
By BJ STREW
Scene Movie Critic
Anyone who has seen either "Brazil" or any Monty Python knows full well that Terry Gilliam is a brilliant icon of frivolity. The Minnesotan has churned out an array of fanciful, grand films with box-office success running a pretty paltry gamut between zilch and middling — and that's being charitable.
The few tanks that come to mind are "13 Monkeys," "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen," and "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," Gilliam's last project before this tumultuous three-ring fiasco, a long-planned attempt to commit the Don Quixote tale to celluloid. In "Lost in La Mancha," directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe have managed to carve an appealing documentary out of the nonstop catastrophe Gilliam endured in the process. The scale of this calamity, as it steadily and almost farcically gains momentum, swells to madcap proportions as Gilliam confronts increasingly daunting obstacles with thundering NATO jets disrupting shoots, his main actor's herniated discs, a deluge.
From the outset, the production seemed doomed to fail, sharing the fate of Orson Welles' own jinxed Quixote project. Gilliam himself carps about this so-called jinx, edging painfully close to pretension along the way. The parable of Philoctetes applies here, though instead of a wound and a bow, Gilliam has creative genius and daring — stigmata to studios fixated on bottom lines whose Troy is the box office.
Little of the movie in production is shown to us — studio brass pulled the plug less than a week into shooting. Treating the viewer to a host of production meetings, "Lost in La Mancha" waxes pedestrian at times. Interviews on the set and after the fact are fairly illuminating, if tedious at times. Gilliam lobs the viewer a few gems with ironic smiles hiding his acute frustration and chortles of incredulity.
Many will find that Fulton and Pepe force the issue in areas, overemphasizing parallels between Quixote and Gilliam until they invite the audience's dismissal for seeming either too contrived or too insulting to their intelligence, Nevertheless, the quirky director exudes the air of the scatterbrained, visionary genius, neither grating and nor severe.
The swan song for Gilliam's project arrives, unbelievably, in the form of a flash flood in rural Spain, amid a roaring tempest. While often engaging, the documentary fails to elicit much sympathy for Gilliam and the project. After all, a slew of Quixote adaptations already exist and there was little indication Gilliam's stab at it would surpass them. Despite its downfalls, "Lost in La Mancha" is a frank and often uproarious film about the nightmare from which directors and studio execs wake in a cold sweat wondering how, in the name of all that is good and sacred, things could get ever that bad.
All Scene Stories for Thursday, February 13, 2003
