Terry Gilliam’s Brazil reached screens in 1985, a United Kingdom and United States co-production written by Gilliam with Charles McKeown and Tom Stoppard. It runs 143 minutes and sits in two genres at once, comedy and science fiction. The tagline reads “It’s only a state of mind.” The film’s title is a trap: Brazil is not about the country and does not take place there. What it shows is a polluted, hyper-consumerist, overbearing, bureaucratic, totalitarian future assembled from pieces of the 20th century.
Sam Lowry and the Winged Warrior
Jonathan Pryce plays Sam Lowry, a low-level government employee stuck in a mind-numbing job and a small flat. He escapes through a recurring daydream in which he is a virtuous hero, a winged warrior, saving a beautiful damsel.
The story turns on a machine failure. An insect lodges in a teleprinter shortly before Christmas, and the device misprints a copy of an arrest warrant it was receiving. The warrant named suspected terrorist Archibald Tuttle. The man the state actually seized, and who died during interrogation, was Archibald Buttle, a cobbler. The source does not say what became of any case against those responsible.
Sam finds the mistake when he learns the wrong bank account was debited for the arrest. He goes to Buttle’s widow to return the refund. There he glimpses her upstairs neighbour, Jill Layton, a truck driver, and is astonished that she resembles the woman from his dreams. He tries frantically to approach her. She disappears first.
Jill Layton, Harry Tuttle, and the Mistaken Identity
Jill had been trying to help Mrs. Buttle establish what happened to her husband, and bureaucracy obstructed her at every turn. The state then marked her as an accomplice of Tuttle for attempting to report the wrongful arrest of Buttle. The source does not say how that designation ended.
Sam reports a fault in his apartment’s air conditioning. Central Services are uncooperative. Robert De Niro’s Tuttle unexpectedly comes to his assistance. He explains that he used to work for Central Services but left because he disliked the tedious and repetitive paperwork, and now illegally works as a freelance heating engineer. He repairs the air conditioning. When two Central Services workers, Spoor and Dowser, arrive, Sam has to stall so Tuttle can escape.
That sequence is the film’s clearest statement of what it is about. The system cannot fix a broken machine, a man who has left the system can, and the system’s response to being helped is to send men to stop it. Sam then discovers Jill’s records have been classified, and the only way to access them is to be promoted to Information Retrieval. To reach the woman from his dream, he has to climb the ladder he despises.
The Cast Gilliam Assembled
The film stars Pryce, De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin, Ian Richardson, Peter Vaughan, and Kim Greist. Helmond plays Mrs. Ida Lowry. Gilliam called her and said, “I have a part for you, and I want you to come over and do it, but you’re not going to look very nice in it.” Gilliam’s wife, Maggie, applied the make-up. Helmond spent ten hours a day with a mask glued to her face, and her scenes had to be postponed because of the blisters this caused.
Palin plays Jack Lint. De Niro read the script and wanted that role, but Gilliam had already promised it to Palin, a friend and regular collaborator. Palin described the character as “someone who was everything that Jonathan Pryce’s character wasn’t: he’s stable, he had a family, he was settled, comfortable, hard-working, charming, sociable—and utterly and totally unscrupulous. That was the way we felt we could bring out the evil in Jack Lint.” De Niro still wanted a part, so Gilliam gave him the smaller role of Tuttle.
Gilliam’s first choice for Jill Layton was Ellen Barkin. Jamie Lee Curtis, Rebecca De Mornay, Rae Dawn Chong, Joanna Pacuła, Rosanna Arquette, Kelly McGillis, and Madonna were also considered. Kim Greist got the part. Gilliam was dissatisfied with her performance and chose to cut or edit some of her scenes as a result. Pryce has called Sam Lowry the highlight of his career, along with Lytton Strachey in Carrington.
A Production Running Order
The plot’s order matters, so here it is set down plainly.
| Beat | What Happens |
|---|---|
| 1 | An insect jams a teleprinter before Christmas; a warrant is misprinted |
| 2 | Archibald Buttle, a cobbler, is seized instead of Archibald Tuttle and dies during interrogation |
| 3 | Sam Lowry finds the wrong bank account debited for the arrest |
| 4 | Sam visits Buttle’s widow with the refund and glimpses Jill Layton |
| 5 | Jill disappears; the state has marked her as Tuttle’s accomplice |
| 6 | Sam reports an air conditioning fault; Tuttle repairs it and escapes Spoor and Dowser |
| 7 | Sam learns Jill’s records are classified; promotion to Information Retrieval is the only way in |
What the Film Satirizes
The film’s satire of technocracy, bureaucracy, hyper-surveillance, corporate statism, and state capitalism has been compared to George Orwell’s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it has been called “Kafkaesque” as well as absurdist. Sarah Street’s British National Cinema, published in 1997, described it as a “fantasy/satire on bureaucratic society.” John Scalzi’s Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies, from 2005, called it a “dystopian satire.” Jack Mathews, a critic and the author of The Battle of Brazil in 1987, described it as “satirizing the bureaucratic, largely dysfunctional industrial world that had been driving Gilliam crazy all his life.”
The Orwell comparison is the easy one and the less useful one. Nineteen Eighty-Four is about a state that wants your obedience and your mind. Brazil is about a state that cannot even file your death correctly. The terror here is not ideological. It is clerical. A bug in a machine kills a cobbler, and the cobbler’s widow gets a bill. The torture is real, but so is the paperwork, and the film treats the paperwork as the more frightening of the two because it is the part nobody can argue with.
The Price of Getting What You Want
The film’s central mechanism is that Sam can only reach Jill by becoming more useful to the system that is destroying her. He needs Information Retrieval. Every step toward the woman in his dream is a step deeper into the machine.
Gilliam, McKeown, and Stoppard build the script on that irony rather than on jokes, though there are jokes. The tagline, “It’s only a state of mind,” is doing real work. It reads like a reassurance and functions as a threat.
Our Verdict on Brazil
Brazil earns 7.8 of 10. The film’s imagination is not in question. The teleprinter insect, the refund for a wrongful death, the freelance heating engineer who is the only competent man in the picture — these are the inventions of people who understood that dystopia is funny before it is sad.
What holds it back from a higher mark is the middle. At 143 minutes, the film spends a stretch of its running time on the mechanics of Sam’s ascent and the retrieval of Jill’s records. Gilliam’s dissatisfaction with Greist’s performance also shows in the finished film, since Jill is the object of the plot and not quite its subject.
That is the part worth weighing. Brazil is remembered for its machines and its masks, but its real subject is a filing error that kills a man and a refund that arrives as an apology. The satire lands hardest where it is quietest, and the film’s reputation rests on how completely it builds that world rather than on any single scene.
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