The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE - Alacran Pictures
The film that killed Terry Gilliam? Not quite. After thirty years of stop-start production, the feature with the world against it has finally taken shape. The American-born Python emerges back on to screens with a gloriously messy totem to his infamous career.
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote follows Adam Driver’s Toby, a delightfully slimy commercial director, who returns to rural Spain after leaving a breadcrumb trail of broken promises in his wake ten years prior. There, he runs into a shoemaker (Jonathan Pryce) believing himself to be the mythical Don Quixote de la Mancha, and the two embark on a voyage across the countryside that will see the lines of fantasy and reality blur4. Gilliam has always been an uncompromising filmmaker, and this is his vision through and through. From the closure of the first act, the director submerges his audience in a solution that is half-grounded, half-conceptual, and lets them sink .
These two states are indistinguishable from one another. Establishing a world mythical in presentation, imbued with a prevailing sense of grandeur, is likely his greatest - arguably innovative - achievement in this project. Nicola Pecorini’s cinematography captures surreal vistas to support this, only let down by uninspired camerawork that proves more reminiscent of a courtroom drama than a sweeping epic.
Driver and Pryce populate this quixotic dreamscape with chemistry that oozes charisma and childish glee; the former is a pseudo-antagonistic auteur, and the latter a pantomimic madman driven by his own delusions. Neither could carry this narrative without the other, just like Quixote would never survive without Sancho. Pryce, however, balances the comic and tragic elements in a performance that feels like he has been waiting for since Brazil.
Much like Orson Welles’ recently restored opus, The Other Side of the Wind, this film seems to be Gilliam reflecting on his career. By demonstrating how Driver’s character struggles adapting Cervantes’ novel – harassed by executives and agents, condemning CGI which, here, is distractingly fake – Gilliam very openly has his say on the joys and pitfalls of the filmmaking process; where better to express such thoughts than the film that came damn close to breaking his heart?
This seems like an experience that may frustrate or even infuriate audiences. The way the film explores the fantastic is uncharted, while Toby’s soliloquies break the immersion and his journey as a whole could appear pointless. A vast majority appears nonsensical, even messy, but this is how the bulk of Gilliam’s work has always been - proper madness. Complete and utter madness, but a perfect end to the modern cinematic parable of the time Terry Gilliam adapted Don Quixote.
THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE is released January 31st 2020
