I originally intended to write about Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen last October, back when I didn't know that the blog was going to become a permanent feature and I was trying to write primarily about notorious flops. It didn't make the grade, however, because people just didn't seem to hate it enough. Sure, it was big and expensive, and sure, the box office take wasn't great, but I actually had trouble finding somebody who didn't like it in a quiet sort of way.
Just so we're all on the same page, this would be because Baron Munchausen is absolutely bloody brilliant.
Gilliam is one of those directors I always feel I should enjoy more than I actually do, possibly because most of his films aren't actually that enjoyable. At his best, he's a visionary; Brazil was an astounding piece of cinema. It was also, however, painfully bleak, a film I was glad to watch once and set aside forever. The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus and The Brothers Grimm were both messy to the point of being embarrassing, with only Time Bandits capturing the manic zest of his work with Monty Python.
Munchausen, however, is a joy from the first shot to the last, every frame packed full of the sort of glorious intricacy that can only be achieved with old-school physical effects. True, it's long, and it rambles sometimes, but that's half the pleasure of it - the loosely episodic structure means that if one setting or group of minor characters doesn't appeal to you, another will be along within ten minutes or so. There's an appearance from a young Uma Thurman, while the even younger Sarah Polley shines as one of the least annoying child characters in cinematic history.
In the end, however, it all revolves around the character of the Baron himself, a legendary teller of tall tales. At the start of the film he appears within a city under siege, unwittingly intruding on a play about his own life. Of course, the players have the facts all wrong, and of course, he has to correct them. What follows is a layered narrative where the audience is never sure what is real and what is story, as the Baron fights the Turks, the Angel of Death, and (as embodied by Jonathan Pryce) the forces of logic and bureaucracy. As played by veteran actor John Neville, the Baron is a roguish figure, charmingly irascible and utterly irresistible to women of all ages. It is the Baron's stories that give the city's inhabitants the courage to question authority, and in an ending of heartbreaking poignancy, to discover that the enemy outside the gates might not be what they had thought.
I could go on, of course, but I'd rather not, not when the film contains so many hidden delights. Instead, watch it yourselves, and be transported.
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