40 years later, Brazil is as prescient as ever
Rewatching Brazil in 2025 — nearly four decades after its release — it's hard to understate how well this movie holds up. Wildly inventive at every turn, Gilliam's satirical vision of a cruel and violent bureaucracy rings eerily true of this political moment. The film finishes a weeklong run at New York's Film Forum with a new 4K restoration, which you can also get on Blu-ray. (And honestly, the non-4K version of Brazil that you can perennially stream on The Criterion Channel still looks great too.)
A lot of that has to do with Gilliam's hysterical dystopia — Mad Men by way of Wolfenstein. Brazil also imagines a hyper-efficient future that never made the leap to digital. Pneumatic tubes shoot paperwork between offices; seas of typists clack forward the cogs of an industrial machine. Everything in this world is an Orwellian/Kafkaesque melange of forms and stamps and obtuse processes.The experience of watching Brazil is at once being impressed by how it looks while also being horrified by what's depicted. The ominous cityscapes have wonderfully art deco touches, yet the gargantuan buildings cast long, haunting shadows; many of the sets take inspiration from Nazi iconography, complete with gigantic eagles and massive lobbies guarded by stormtroopers. Also, look at this logo:
Isn't that the best movie logo you've ever seen?
A perfectly cast Jonathan Pryce inhabits Sam Lowry, a mid-level bureaucrat. He lives in a small apartment, complete with dysfunctional Rube Goldberg gadgetry that ends up pouring coffee on his toast. (The film has no shortage of Gilliam's adoration of slapstick, a carryover of his Monty Python days.) Lowry's mother and friends push him to be more ambitious. Yet he resists the rat race, turning down a promotion to a much more prestigious branch of the government simply because he isn't interested. In this dystopian world, oppressed by the hierarchical structures of capitalism, the only hero is a slouch.
A fantastical/horny dream plotline is the most Lowry gets activated, and as he chases down the culprit for the Tuttle and Buttle mix-up, he encounters several different departments foisting the blame off on other offices. 'Information Transit got the wrong man. I got the right man,' says one bureaucrat. 'The wrong one was delivered to me as the right man; I accepted him on good faith as the right man. Was I wrong?' There is no accountability in this government, and characters act with self-interested careerism in mind over any semblance of morality. After Buttle is killed, Lowry has to deliver a receipt to his widow.
Earlier this year, as part of the Trump administration's attempt to deport undocumented immigrants, ICE illegally deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He was sent to El Salvador before the government admitted it had made an error. Then the agency backtracked, claiming it had never made a mistake. In response to calls to return Garcia to the US, the Department of Homeland Security claimed it had no authority to do so.
The deflection of responsibility, the ludicrous reasoning, the deferential loyalty to the state — these are the things Terry Gilliam satirized in Brazil. Most science fiction films emphasize the dangers of technology; Gilliam saw the sinister machinations of bureaucracy. Watching Brazil 40 years later, it's even clearer what we were being warned about. Some of that clarity is literally the 4K restoration. But even through all of Gilliam's gags and elaborate sets, we see all the twisted incentives that eventually normalize fascism.
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