Terry Gilliam’s passion project was nearly 30 years in the making. That turns out to be more interesting than the film itself
AT LEAST it’s finished. Viewers may well be perplexed by Terry Gilliam’s “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote”, but they can take comfort in knowing that the 77-year-old director has got it out of his system at long, long last, after enduring struggles and setbacks which would have killed most of us. The film’s catastrophic production history is the stuff of legend—or the stuff of cautionary tale.
Having thought of adapting Cervantes’ classic novel back in 1989, Mr Gilliam began shooting it in 2000, with Johnny Depp and Jean Rochefort in the lead roles. That attempt lasted a week. Mr Gilliam was beset by so many problems that they filled a documentary, “Lost in La Mancha” (2002)—so there is no need to list them all here—but they included low-flying jets which drowned out the dialogue, a flash flood which washed away the props and equipment, and a double herniated disc which put Rochefort in hospital.
Several false starts and legal tussles later, Mr Gilliam finally shot “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” last year with Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce (pictured above) in the roles previously occupied by Mr Depp and Rochefort. The film is in now in French and Spanish cinemas “after more than 25 years in the making…and unmaking”, as an opening caption announces. It would be lovely to report that this seemingly cursed passion project ranked alongside “Brazil”, Mr Gilliam’s masterpiece, thus vindicating all those decades of blood, toil, tears and sweat. But the question the film leaves you with is: is that it? The disjointed, sporadically amusing farce onscreen feels so insignificant in comparison with the fabled behind-the-scenes saga that “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” should probably be included as a bonus feature of “Lost in La Mancha”, rather than the other way round.
What’s immediately striking is how flat and cheap it appears to be. When Mr Gilliam had a crack at making his film in 2000, the budget was $32m, and that, he said, was less than he needed. But when he returned to the film last year, the budget was only €16m ($18.8m) and, judging by the number of production companies in the opening credits, each of them must have chipped in a pocketful of loose change. It shows. Maybe the film’s drab visuals are appropriate for the story of someone who thinks he’s a heroic knight-errant but is actually a deluded old man who uses kitchenware for armour. But Mr Gilliam’s fans will lament the almost complete absence of his usual flights of fancy and darkly spectacular handmade special effects.
In the “Lost in La Mancha” documentary, for instance, we see the director planning a set piece in which Quixote has a sword fight with a troop of man-sized marionettes. In the new film, those puppets are nowhere to be seen. And in the Depp/Rochefort version, Mr Depp (pictured below) was to play an advertising executive who is magically transported back in time to the 17th century. The new version saves money by dispensing with the time travel.
Mr Driver plays Toby, an obnoxious, spoilt director who is shooting a Quixote-themed advert on location in Spain. In between takes, his boss (Stellan Skarsgard) hands him a bootleg DVD of a black-and-white student film of “Don Quixote” Toby made in the same area a decade earlier (but which he had apparently forgotten all about in the meantime). He revisits the village in the student film—clips of which, incidentally, look a lot better than the rest of “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote”—and learns that Javier (Mr Pryce), the gentle shoemaker who had the title role, has been under the illusion that he is Quixote ever since. Hours seem to pass before Toby and Javier are eventually reunited, but when they are, Javier decides that Toby is his portly sidekick, Sancho Panza. For a variety of painfully unconvincing reasons, they go trotting off together in search of chivalric adventure.
Setting the film in the present day may have been a budgetary necessity, but it results in some severe plausibility issues. The scenario rests on the conceit that in 21st-century Spain, you can break out of police custody, injuring two policemen in the process, and then wander through the countryside on horseback (or donkey-back) for days on end without being pursued by the authorities. This absurdity is acknowledged by the number of times Toby blurts “This is ridiculous” and “This is insane”, but it is still absurdity.
No one watches Mr Gilliam’s films for their rigorous logic, of course. And “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” does have pleasing traces of his patented eccentricity and cheek, if nothing else. But it seems as if he and his co-writer, Tony Grisoni, laboured over the screenplay for too many years, fiddling with different drafts until they could no longer remember which story they wanted to tell or which points they hoped to make. Whatever the reason, their muddled film lurches from lame puns to hamfisted political commentary, from dream sequences to imagery recycled from Mr Gilliam’s previous work. It does so without ever approaching a compelling narrative or a coherent thematic statement.
What is especially disappointing is that the director has always been drawn to dreamers who escape quotidian reality in imaginary worlds, and yet his Quixote isn’t just a supporting character, he’s a minor supporting character. Ultimately, Mr Gilliam seems less interested in Javier than he is in Toby’s efforts to persuade a Spanish beauty (Joana Ribeiro) to leave an abusive Russian vodka magnate (Jordi Molla). Leaving aside the film’s horribly retrograde depiction of women, which might have been less jarring in a 17th-century setting than it is in a modern one, you do have to ask what any of this has to do with Cervantes’ knight of the mournful countenance. To put it another way: why spend almost 30 years on an adaptation of “Don Quixote” if you don’t care about Don Quixote?