Brazil nuts are relatively large nuts coming from one of the most useful trees in the Amazon rainforest. It literally has 1001 uses from carpentry, health benefits, lubricants to flooring.

The 1985 Terry Gilliam film, Brazil, might be just as useful and is perhaps modern masterpiece. I realize that’s a bold comparison and a bold assertation. Here’s the thing: I might actually be understating it.

Now, this is probably in my top five films of all time, like fellow Universal film, Jaws. Unlike the fish film, this movie was expensive and did not (at least not initially) recoup its production costs. In fact, it was a flop in the box office while being a critical darling. Upon my recent rewatch, I was taken aback by how modern of a film it still appears to be. The themes it takes on just haven’t changed all that much despite the film being nearly forty years old.

The practical effects and eye popping set design, in particular, appear as fresh as the day they were made in the same lyrically fantastic world they create here. Even in 1985, you were wondering if this film was set in the future or the past. The devices seemed concurrently in the future and past with old fashioned typewriters hooked up to television screens (so small, they require a magnifying lens in front of them to be legible). The vehicles were a mix of old and new taste as were the outlandish fashions from ultramod to ferociously classic men in hats.

The basic plot, which is anything but basic, regards a clerical error at a bureaucracy that leads to the wrong person being detained and killed in a dystopian cityscape and one cog in the wheel’s machinery attempting to upset the apple cart. This is a film, very much, about being in the middle. I was surprised to hear that originally this film was conceived to have a younger protagonist, because the themes here ring so beautifully for the middle aged / middle management everyman that Jonathan Pryce plays so well here. He is literally in the middle being pushed and prodded from any and every angle possible. His mother wants him to be promoted and show more ambition while he has no such aspirations. His aspirations lead him to a “dream girl” who is mixed up in the merry mix-up at the center of the tale. His only real friend, Michael Palin, is led to play Judas and deny his friend by the circumstances that swallow up all, including a renegade heating engineer, Robert De Niro, who is literally consumed by the paperwork that permeates every part of this society.

Gilliam was surprised that conservatives have taken to the film, which he clearly framed as a criticism of right wing political tendencies. However, as our society continues to evolve, the right and left seem to becoming more similar than either side would like to admit. As the right took to banning books in the past, cancel culture has woke in the past decade to be just as large a weapon in censorship. While conservatives still believe in using the government to keep law and order and run a tight ship, the growth of government agencies clearly has grown under the liberal value in big government running peoples lives the way they want them to live it.

On this rewatch, I was taken by some of the propaganda posters:

Suspicion breeds confidence.
Don’t Suspect a Friend: Report Him.
Happiness: We’re All In This Together

Some of these sentiments ring particularly familiar coming off the great mask shaming pandemic of the past two years. Had I not seen this film in the theaters when it came out, I would swear it came out just the other day.

The satire of the government’s rebranding of itself as “Central Services” however, makes the commentary more global than I think was intended. Let’s face it, much of our criticisms of bureaucracy can be leveled just as easily to the health care system or any corporate entity. One of my favorite scenes has Ian Holm feigning arthritis so that he can’t sign a document while his employee picks up the pen and signs in his stead. Executive indecision and reluctance to act is a central theme that can right through the halls of government or an office building with similar amplitude of reverberation.

The notion that the government bills its citizens for their own incarceration and detention is one I could see many people backing in our current electorate, but these types of notions could truly come to some ugly consequences. As one guard says to a man about to be horribly tortured (at his expense):

Don't fight it son. Confess quickly! If you hold out too long you could jeopardize your credit rating.

It is great quotes like this that come to me at the most inopportune times. Add the Monty Python comedic love for confusion and double talk and you have a fantastically quotable film. Here’s some of my favorites:

What do you attribute the recent uptick in terrorist activity?
Bad Sportsmanship.

Give my regards to the twins.
Triplets.
Triplets? How time flies.

Sorry, I'm a bit of a stickler for paperwork. Where would we be if we didn't follow the correct procedures?

I assure you, Mrs. Buttle, the Ministry is very scrupulous about following up and eradicating any error. If you have any complaints which you'd like to make, I'd be more than happy to send you the appropriate forms.

This is information retrieval not information dispersal.

Santa: What would you like for Christmas?
Small child: My own credit card.

My complication has a little complication.


Literally every aspect of the film can be analyzed and reconstructed. Does the never ending building and construction reflect our modern belief that progress only is evident with physical structures? Is the plastic surgery subplot about how people reinvent themselves to either outrageous fortune or miserable defeat? Is the primary theme that impersonal machines, procedures and forms adapted by a bureaucracy unable to properly react to real emotions and feeling? Is the protagonists dreams of defeating a monolithic super samurai a statement on the nature of heroism in demanding freedom? Is freedom the escape from want and need in exchange for no privacy and plenty of paranoia?

Or is the movie really all about duct work? I say that because within the first few moments of film, we see how ducts are so important to “Central Services” and we see the ducts carrying energy and air, but also sewage and memos like those tubes at the drive up lanes at the bank. In one scene, Pryce, fed up with taking information from one department, processing it and sending it to the next, connects two of ducts together with a length of hose, which quickly overloads the system…to his joy and wonder.

I know this sounds like some pretentious A24 crap that leaves you wishing for an interpretive YouTube video after you finish…but unlike a garbage parable like mother! (which I still might think is the worst offender I’ve ever seen), you are left with actual questions that are worth asking but may not even deserve an answer.

In a world where everything is labeled, numbered, cataloged, with no freedom, no dreams, and omnipotent clerks, do we really deserve answers?