BRAZIL: Revisiting Terry Gilliam’s Retro-Futurist Masterpiece

When reality is too dour to find any joy in it, one can easily slip into the realm of fantasy; in a world where one feels helpless to change anything for the better, one can easily succumb to far-fetched dreams of being a hero. Such is the premise of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, the darkly absurdist tale of an office drone who engages in mind-numbing bureaucratic work by day and dreams of saving a damsel in distress by night; it’s when the line between reality and fantasy starts to blur that his life begins to fall apart. A new 4K restoration of the revised director’s cut of Brazil—142 minutes long, with Gilliam’s preferred ending—reminds us that the film’s satirical depiction of everyday life in a dysfunctional dystopia remains powerfully prescient, not to mention stunningly imaginative, forty years after its original theatrical release.

Man’s Crisis of Identity in the Latter Half of the 20th Century

The world of Brazil is a retro-futurist vision inspired by the stylized aesthetic of German Expressionist epics like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the cynical mood of Hollywood noirs like John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon. This is a world where the architecture is hugely oppressive, the atmosphere is heavy with fog, and pneumatic tubes are the message-carrying machines of choice. Ever-present posters urge people not to suspect their friends, but to report them; if you are deemed to be a criminal, you’re liable for the costs of your arrest and torture.

This is the world where we meet Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), a low-level employee at the Ministry of Information who keeps rejecting his plastic-surgery obsessed mother’s (Katherine Helmond) efforts to get him a promotion; he’s content to keep living life at a standstill if he can keep escaping into the vivid dream world where he is a winged warrior fighting to save a beautiful woman from a fearsome samurai. His old acquaintance, Jack Lint (Michael Palin), is his exact opposite: successful, sociable, and so lacking in scruples that when a superior calls Jack’s wife by the wrong name, he immediately starts referring to her by the wrong name, too. Jack is an interrogator, which in Brazil means he tortures people for a living; in one memorable scene, he casually enters his office in a blood-spattered apron, washes his hands, and then sits down to play with one of his young daughters, chatting with Sam as though nothing out of the ordinary has happened—and from his point of view, that’s true, which makes it all the more disturbing.

One day, a bureaucratic error results in the wrongful arrest and death of an innocent man named Archibald Buttle, mistaken for suspected terrorist and freelance heating technician Archibald “Harry” Tuttle (a devilishly good Robert De Niro). When Sam goes to Buttle’s widow to give her a refund check for her husband’s arrest, he catches a glimpse of her beautiful neighbor, truck driver Jill Layton (Kim Greist): a dead ringer for the literal girl of his dreams. Sam’s dogged pursuit of Jill leads him to accept the proffered promotion so that he can find out more about her, but in the process, he gets tangled up in a dangerous web of conspiracies and lies—and in the real world, it’s not so easy to be a hero.

Party Political Broadcast

In many ways, the inventive visuals of Brazil are a live-action extension of the animations Gilliam pieced together during his Monty Python years, full of eye-catching little details and absurd action that borders on slapstick. For instance, the high-priced restaurants and the elegant people who patronize them look like advertisements torn from a vintage magazine…that is, until the food arrives in the form of unappetizing-looking piles of colored paste that we’re told taste like steak. When a terrorist bombing occurs during dinner, a decorative screen is put in place by an apologetic server so that the diners will be spared the sight of blood; however, they can still hear the screams.

In scenes like this and so many others, Brazil straddles the line between horrifying and hilarious. The film’s needle-sharp script, co-written by Gilliam with frequent collaborator Charles McKeown and acclaimed playwright Tom Stoppard, urges the audience to laugh while also reminding us that this world isn’t that far removed from the one we currently live in, and exactly what are we going to do about that? Cinematographer Roger Pratt uses light and shadow to create an ominous atmosphere that pervades the film, as well as wide angles that emphasize the overwhelming nature of the establishment and the relative insignificance of the individual.

As Sam, Jonathan Pryce is the ideal everyman, painfully relatable in his frustration with the endless little annoyances of everyday life and his reliance on a rich fantasy life to survive. The film takes its title from Ary Barroso’s 1939 song “Aquarela do Brasil,” which recurs throughout the soundtrack as a musical embodiment of the escape that Sam and others like him seek from the endless paperwork and surveillance of the regime. But escape is no way to change anything; it’s only when Sam allows his dream persona to bleed over into his waking life that he finally summons the courage to challenge the status quo. The other side of this coin—the embodiment of just going along and doing one’s job, striving to be part of the status quo at all odds—is Jack Lint, perfectly played against type by Gilliam’s fellow Python Michael Palin in one of the great villain performances in science-fiction cinema history, oozing with nefarious charm.

Conclusion

Gilliam’s preferred ending to Brazil is bleak and bitter, yet because of that, it feels all the more realistic; it’s an uncomfortable reminder that happy endings are so much harder to find in the waking nightmare of the real world than the fantasy realm of our dreams. It’s almost impossible to imagine the film ending any other way, but this wasn’t the first time studio executives failed to comprehend the power of what was presented to them, nor will it be the last.

The 4K restoration of the revised director’s cut of Brazil begins screening alongside select 35mm screenings of the original director’s cut at Film Forum in New York on August 1, 2025.