25 years on, Gilliam finally defeats his windmill
‘Of the hallucinatory scrapes that ensue, tilting at windmills is only the start of it’
‘After everything Quixote has been through, 50 per cent feels like enough’
If, just for once, Terry Gilliam made a film whose production didn’t descend into chaos, would anyone be able to tell? The former Monty Python man is so drawn towards all things manic and haphazard, even if he worked under laboratory conditions, the result would probably look like someone staged a fancy dress parade on a farm, then set fire to it.
Yet even by Gilliam’s standards, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote has been an uphill fight on roller skates.
The film has been “more than 25 years in the making and unmaking”, as the opening credits note, and has left behind it a trail of flooded sets, collapsed financing, one-in-a-million mishaps, and an ever-changing cast. Rather sweetly, the film is dedicated to Jean Rochefort and John Hurt – two of its one-time leading men who died before it was completed.
And a legal fracas is still ongoing: when Quixote screened to critics at Cannes yesterday, in advance of its premiere tonight, it began with an on-screen disclaimer noting that the screening “shall in no way prejudice” the present squabble over rights.
Has the wait been worth it? Well, of course it has – because we can finally discover exactly what Gilliam has spent so much of his working life trying to pull off. Does it actually work? Not entirely – although Quixote’s fundamental not-workingness is, in an odd way, what the film is all about. It is the story of a filmmaker who creates something that won’t let him go, jostling him along on a shambolic wilderness quest with no clear purpose or end in sight. So even when the film feels like a circuitous, effortful mess, it’s often an intentional one – and for everything in the film that doesn’t quite connect, that element of self-portraiture, with the artist as sap, strikes a wistful chord.
Adam Driver stars as Tobias Grummett, a hotshot filmmaker known to colleagues as Toby, who is shooting an incredibly expensive Don Quixote-themed insurance advert on the plains of La Mancha. He is young but has the cynicism of someone well-versed in the business – a far cry from his still-younger self who came to Spain 10 years previously to shoot a black-and-white adaptation of Don Quixote as his graduation film, using a local, non-professional cast.
Back then, Toby gave the title role to a humble shoemaker called Javier (Jonathan Pryce), who after some initial reluctance immersed himself in the part to a Daniel Day-lewis-like degree. Now on Toby’s return he discovers Javier living in a caravan on the outskirts of his village, mentally unstable and convinced he is the living incarnation of Miguel de Cervantes’s questing knight.
Shortly after this reunion, a not-entirely-plausible altercation with local police sends both men fleeing into the desert, during which Javier comes to believe Toby is Sancho Panza, Quixote’s donkey-riding squire – and as they ride on together, fugitives from the law, Toby becomes caught up in Javier’s delusion, while work on his advert grinds to a halt.
Of the hallucinatory scrapes that ensue, tilting at windmills is only the start of it. In one typically haywire set piece, a rural community of illegal Moroccan immigrants transforms in Toby’s eyes into a Moorish fortress which is raided – perhaps inevitably – by the Spanish Inquisition. There is a line between anarchic and confusing, and Quixote can’t stay on the right side of it, but these sequences rattle along with slapsticky energy, eye-popping carnival costumes, and non-pc Pythonesque gags.
Women remain a Gilliam blind spot, from Joana Ribeiro as the purehearted love interest Angelica to Olga Kurylenko as a predacious blonde –
the wife of Toby’s sadistic boss (Stellan Skarsgård) – who is desperate to get the young director into bed.
It comes down to flimsy writing, which you sense may not have changed that much since Gilliam’s first draft of the script in 1989.
But other aspects of its burlesque of film-world mores ring truer, such as the miserable bowing and scraping to financiers: in this case, a maniacal Russian oligarch (Jordi Mollà). Driver and Pryce fling themselves at everything with beady resolve, just as Gilliam gives it everything he has.
Around 50 per cent of it sticks – and to pretend the film was any more successful than that would do a disservice to this director’s truly great films, not least Brazil. But after everything Quixote has been through, 50 per cent feels like enough.