When the screen opens upon Terry Gilliam's new extravaganza, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which, according to some reports, has cost as much as $75 million, the audience is confronted with a peaceful panorama of tents of Turkish forces laying siege to a nameless European city.
"The Late 18th Century," superimposed titles announce somewhat grandly.
Next, even grander: "The Age of Reason."
Then, "Wednesday."
Terry Gilliam knows that nothing validates reality as much as specificity.
Quickly the camera sallies forth to find rapid-fire images of death and destruction--falling bricks and structures, various explosions, fresh red wounds everywhere, bodies squashed like insects under thumbs, smoke and dust covering everything like a huge scrim. The Turks are using cannons whose mouths have gargoyles' features engraved around their openings, from which spew forth balls of fire. Back at the site of disaster and destruction, the camera swoops around in long, vertiginous takes as if it were the eye of God on a binge. And you realize that there's more filmmaking in the first five minutes of Baron Munchausen than there is in endless hours of most current movies.
Ages of Reason
As in most Ages of Reason, which of course each age assumes it is, the world has pretty much gone haywire. Why this particular war is going on is never fully explained (in fact it's not explained at all, though from where Gilliam places his camera, it's clear that the cannons are sexually inspired), but it's very clear that the Turks are the aggressors and intent upon winning, while the besieged city is gamely coping the best way it can.
The elected official, the Right Ordinary Horatio Jackson (Jonathan Pryce), a puffed-up bureaucrat who speaks in a retentive adenoidal accent, has one of his soldiers (Sting in a tart cameo) executed for bravery above and beyond the call of duty. Peering over his spectacles, the pedantic Jackson explains that such bravery is very demoralizing for the average solider and orders the brave soldier executed. And, of course, as insane as such reasoning is, it actually makes perfectly good sense. It makes good sense bureaucratically.
In one scene, some of the average soldiers and average townsfolk are huddled rather unwillingly in the bombed-out Theater Royal, where the Henry Salt Players are in the muddled midst of putting on a production of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. You get the feeling that the audience is staying in the theater simply because it's safer there than outside--a thought perhaps typically paranoid of theater people.
A former, let's say charter, member of Monty Python's Flying Circus, Gilliam was and still is first and foremost a man of the theater. This is why he makes such wonderful films: He knows that the theatrical is where imagination thrives. In both Time Bandits (1981) and Brazil (1985), his two previous directing credits, Gilliam has been drawn to both highly theatrical settings and people. Time Bandits was a
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