Brazil is a 1985 dystopian black comedy film directed by Terry Gilliam and written by Gilliam, Tom Stoppard and Charles McKeown. Set in a decaying retro-futuristic society governed by paperwork, surveillance and malfunctioning machinery, it follows a minor civil servant whose attempt to correct an administrative error turns him into an enemy of the state. The film stars Jonathan Pryce, Kim Greist, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins and Michael Palin.
Despite its title, the film is not set in Brazil. Its name comes from “Aquarela do Brasil”, a 1939 song by Ary Barroso that appears throughout Michael Kamen's score. The cheerful melody repeatedly accompanies scenes of confusion, violence and institutional cruelty, becoming both an escape from the film's world and an ironic comment on it.
Plot
In an unnamed country “somewhere in the 20th century”, a dead insect falls into a government printer and changes the surname Tuttle to Buttle on an arrest warrant. Security officers seize the innocent Archibald Buttle instead of Archibald Tuttle, a heating engineer considered a terrorist because he repairs equipment without official authorisation. Buttle dies during interrogation, leaving the Ministry of Information with the unusual problem of having charged his family too much for his arrest.
Sam Lowry, a quiet employee in the ministry's Department of Records, is assigned to deliver a refund to Buttle's widow. Sam copes with his work and his status-obsessed mother by retreating into dreams in which he appears as a winged hero rescuing a mysterious woman. At the Buttle home he encounters Jill Layton, a lorry driver who has been trying to report the wrongful arrest and who resembles the woman from his dreams.
Sam accepts a promotion he had previously refused so that he can gain access to Jill's classified records. His effort to protect her draws him deeper into the machinery of the state. He also meets the real Harry Tuttle, played by Robert De Niro, who descends on Sam's apartment by rope and repairs its heating system while evading the government-controlled Central Services. As Sam attempts to escape with Jill, fantasy and reality become increasingly difficult to separate.
Production and design
Gilliam developed Brazil after Time Bandits and described it as part of a loose group of films concerned with imagination and escape. The screenplay combines the totalitarian surveillance associated with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four with the irrational bureaucracy of Franz Kafka. Gilliam at one stage considered the title 1984½, also acknowledging the influence of Federico Fellini's 8½.
The film's world is neither recognisably futuristic nor tied to a precise historical period. Computers use tiny screens and typewriter keyboards, ducts erupt through elegant rooms, and government offices occupy monumental buildings filled with obsolete equipment. Production designer Norman Garwood and set decorator Maggie Gray created an environment in which technological complexity produces inconvenience rather than progress. Gilliam used wide-angle lenses, miniatures, practical effects and crowded compositions to make the system appear enormous, unstable and faintly ridiculous.
Michael Palin plays Jack Lint, a friendly family man who conducts torture for the Ministry of Information. The casual contrast between his domestic manners and his occupation reflects the film's presentation of cruelty as ordinary administrative work. De Niro's Tuttle offers the opposite model: a man officially classified as dangerous largely because he acts independently and knows how the machinery works.
Battle over the ending
The European version of Brazil retained Gilliam's bleak conclusion, but its American distributor, Universal Pictures, considered the film too long and pessimistic. The studio prepared a substantially shorter version that removed much of the darker material and rearranged the ending to suggest that love had conquered the system. This version became known as the “Love Conquers All” cut.
Gilliam responded by arranging private screenings for critics and publicly demanding that Universal release his film. While the dispute was still continuing, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association named Brazil the year's best film and gave Gilliam its awards for director and screenplay. Universal subsequently released a compromise version in American cinemas, while Gilliam's longer cut became the version most commonly associated with the film.
Reception and legacy
Brazil received Academy Award nominations for original screenplay and art direction. Its combination of bureaucratic satire, grotesque comedy and elaborate retro-futurism developed a substantial cult following and influenced later depictions of oppressive institutions and dysfunctional technology. The film is often regarded as Gilliam's defining work: a story in which imagination offers the only convincing freedom, but not necessarily an escape.