Late 1990’s Gilliam: A Re-Appraisal by Craig Hammill

Visionary director Terry Gilliam’s career has been as labyrinthine, strange, and unexpected as many of his movies.  

Most peg Gilliam’s highpoint and masterpiece as the 1985 dystopian sci-fi satire comedy Brazil. And then, common wisdom goes, after the difficulties and underperformance of 1988’s fantastical fairy tale (and masterpiece) The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Gilliam more or less had to become a director for hire. 

He always managed to get his voice into his work one way or another but he rarely had the freedom of his 70’s and 80’s period (which includes all his Monty Python work and the wonderful time travel family (?) film Time Bandits). 

Last week we screened two of Gilliam’s mid to late 1990’s works: the time travel mind-bender Twelve Monkeys (based on the famous 1962 Chris Marker French short film La Jetee) and 1998’s Johnny Depp and Benecio Del Toro starring Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Here Gilliam managed an adaptation of the supposedly unadaptable Hunter S. Thompsen novel about a debauched drug and alcohol fueled weekend in Vegas in the late 1960’s. 

What struck this programmer was how solidly crafted both movies were. They hold up remarkably well. They are sturdy ships able to weather the squalls of time and taste.

The stories are tight and well told. The material is dense and difficult yet Gilliam finds, mines, and stays true to the souls of the original works. 

Watching Twelve Monkeys and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, One realizes that in many ways Gilliam is working diligently to prove the wags wrong.  He’s making entertainments that bear his imprimatur yet come in on budget and recoup their production cost. 

Twelve Monkeys which stars Bruce Willis, Madeline Stowe, and Brad Pitt, was made for $30 million and grossed $170 million. With this and Gilliam’s previous effort The Fisher King starring Robin Willams and Jeff Bridges, one might imagine Gilliam felt he was building a bridge back to being a unique yet commercially viable filmmaker.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas unfortunately was made for $18 million but only grossed around $14 million in its first run. Still this programmer remembers being blown away by it upon release and twenty five years later, it still stands as possibly Gilliam’s strongest post-1980’s work.

One striking thing about both movies is how in control and deliberate Gilliam clearly is with the material.  As if to once and for all silence the clamour and chatter of Gilliam as a difficult and irresponsible filmmaker, the director actually tends to underline and focus in on his themes.

In Twelve Monkeys, it’s actually striking how clearly Gilliam is working to develop the theme and ambiguity of whether Bruce Willis’s character James Cole is actually a prisoner from the future sent into the past or whether Cole is actually suffering mental health issues in the present. The movie is so well-constructed and developed that the final tragic scene-telegraphed from the beginning (as it was in the original French short)-has the clarity of an undisturbed calm mountain spring.

We can see, understand, and follow everything.  This is quite a hard feat to pull off for any story let alone one that deals with time travel, discordant time jumps, and the uncertainty of perception.

In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Gilliam related in interviews at the time that the studio was open to having the late 60’s novel updated to the 1990’s. Gilliam ultimately felt, however, it HAD to be set in the late 1960’s with Vietnam, Richard Nixon, and the tumult of America as the backdrop to have any resonance whatsoever. Otherwise it would just be a movie about two out of control men-children on a drug and alcohol bender whose toxic behavior ultimately might seem more meaningless than emblematic of America’s own split-personality and inability to reconcile its disparate parts.

For this programmer, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the FOURTH Gilliam masterpiece (along with Time Bandits, Brazil, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen). It fully commits to the Dante’s Inferno hellishness of the weekend in Las Vegas. 

The viewer feels like THEY ARE ON DRUGS along with the two main characters. Yet, simultaneously, the viewer also is able to be outside the altered perception to see just how ridiculous the characters AND all the sober characters around the high characters are.

Fear and Loathing ultimately is about how one kind of madness begets a counter-madness. The madness of a pointless war in Vietnam that many Americans felt they had to support to show their anti-communist bonafides tore the country apart, killed hundreds of thousands if not millions of people on both sides of the conflict, and plunged America into a kind of numb 1970’s hedonism to dull the pain of looking itself in the mirror.

So characters like Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo get blotto on crazy drugs as an insane reaction to the insanity.

What’s amazing about Gilliam’s movie is HOW clearly and effectively it relays this message both in form and function. Maybe too effectively.

This programmer remembers being in a movie theater in 1998.  When the acid kicks in for our main characters (which is almost immediately at the start of the movie) and the visuals reflect the verisimilitude of an acid trip, one audience member got up and ran out shouting “No. Not again man. No way man. I can’t do this.”

Like so many things in art and life, Gilliam’s own filmography has proven to be far more protean than it seemed during the moments of individual release. Time has a way of changing all things and often bringing things into relief that were murky in the moment because of the noise and hurly burly of expectation, current events, etc.

With twenty five plus years to let the mud kicked up by all us thrashing fish settle, we can see clearly now the strength of Gilliam’s 90’s work, especially the two movies cited here.

Gilliam would go on in the 21st century to direct a number of movies including the fascinating if strange and uneven Tideland. He would also find solace and expression more in live theater and opera than in cinema.

Sadly, in a way, Gilliam’s story is the story of so many voices in cinema in these too often strange and disheartening times.  Movie studios just don’t seem to want to make movies anymore. And so restless creative souls like Gilliam’s have had to find other outlets.

But Terry Gilliam has always been a visionary with a distinctive voice and a passion for cinema. It’s a joy and a revelation to revisit what once seemed like “work for hire” movies only to realize they contain some of Gilliam’s absolute best work in his career. 

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.