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THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE
Director: Terry Gilliam Cast: Adam Driver, Jonathan Pryce, Joana Ribeiro, Olga Kurylenko, Stellan Skarsgård, Jordi Mollà, Óscar Jaenada MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 2:12 Release Date: 4/10/19 (one-night engagement); 4/19/19 (limited) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 10, 2019 It's practically impossible to discuss co-writer/director Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote without bringing up the movie's storied and long-delayed production history. Basically, Gilliam had been working on it in some form or another for almost 30 years. There's a feature documentary about one disastrous attempt to actually shoot the thing, marred by the noise from a nearby military base and a flood that completely changed the terrain where major scenes were going to be filmed. Other, even less productive attempts followed. One doesn't need to know the back story of the movie getting to the screen, although it certainly seems as if the quarter-century headache is on Gilliam's mind in the final product. Who could blame him? Before we see a single image of the finished movie, some text proudly but cautiously—and, perhaps, even with a little preemptive apology—announces that, finally and about 25 years after it should have been released, here is Gilliam's take on the Don Quixote story. One almost expects the movie to break before we get to the meat of the story, either by accident or "by accident." The fact that the usually cheeky filmmaker doesn't even try to make that obvious in-joke shows just how adamant he is in finally getting an audience through the movie, if only to prove that he actually made a complete product. To assure anyone who might be skeptical of the movie's existence, this is a complete and finished movie. To further assure anyone who might be worried about how much the production troubles may have affected the filmmaker's attitude in the telling the story, this is, for better and for worse, definitely a Gilliam movie. It's inherently jokey, taking to task the hypocrisy of Hollywood and the influence of legend. In other words, it's a commentary on a whole bunch of thing, including—and not insignificantly—the very existence of this movie itself. Because Gilliam's mind is obviously working faster and on more levels than a simple narrative can contain, it's also a pretty ungainly movie, in which ideas are introduced and quickly dismissed for new ones. By the end, we've seen a lot of impressive setpieces and witnessed plenty of notions about the natures of myth, filmmaking, and reality itself. We're also left kind of fumbling to grasp a through line for everything we've seen and heard, so yes, it is a Gilliam movie through and through. Immediately, the movie begins as a commentary on itself and its troubled history. After a prologue and a scene of the eponymous hero rushing at a windmill that he mistakes for a giant, we discover that the sequence is only a movie, which is undergoing some significant production problems on location in Spain, within a movie that has become notorious for its problematic production history. The director on the project is Toby (Adam Driver), who is proclaimed—not by himself because he has sycophants for such puffery—as a visionary genius. Toby wants practical sets and life-sized models in order to realize his vision of the old man who believes himself to be an errant knight. There are obvious difficulties with this plan, but Gilliam and Tony Grisoni's screenplay quickly abandons the plot of a movie's production. The actual story, more or less, has to do with Toby being reminded of a student film about Don Quixote that he made about a decade ago, seeking out the non-professional actors who played the roles, and being reunited with Javier (Jonathan Pryce), a local shoemaker who played the delusional not-a-real-knight in Toby's earlier movie. Javier has become convinced that he is actually Don Quixote. A series of misadventures follows, with Toby playing the straight man to Javier, who believes that he sees evil enchanters and damsels who instantly fall in love with him everywhere (Driver, giving a farcical performance that never feels over-the-top, and Pryce, nobly sad and vice versa, make for a fine pairing). The main joke is that, while Javier is clearly delusional (doubly so, since he believes he's a delusional character), Toby is of a similar character. He refuses to take responsibility for any of his actions, from trying to have sex with Jacqui (Olga Kurylenko), the wife of the movie's chief financer (played by Stellan Skarsgård), to abandoning the cast of his student movie to terrible fates. Javier is psychologically broken. The man who played Sancho Panza, a role that Javier assigns to Toby in his present-day delusions, has died from alcohol abuse. Angelica (Joana Ribeiro), whom Toby promised would become a star, has been disowned by her family and has had a sordid history, which has led her back to Spain and to Toby. The filmmaker gradually becomes delusional in a more quixotic way, imagining terrorists hiding out in a refugee village and having dreams that seem far too real. The good news is that The Man Who Killed Don Quixote exists, and the bad news is that the movie seems unsure as to why it exists. In the end, Gilliam's ode to naïvely imaginative folly is itself an imaginative but much-too distracted folly. Copyright © 2019 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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