Brazil (dir. Terry Gilliam, 1985). Gilliam’s most successful film is a mostly inspired combination of the delirious and terrifying bureaucracy of Franz Kafka (via Orson Welles’ paranoiac adaptation of The Trial) and the dark dystopian dreams of George Orwell. The stiff characters and icy dialogue are balanced with a surreal, biting humor that compliments Gilliam’s fondness for bizarre imagery and alienating mise en scène. However, Brazil, like much of Gilliam’s work, is flawed by jerky pacing and a fatal air of self-indulgence. The downright boring last third is barely salvaged by an ironic ending. C.
Freaks (dir. Tod Browning, 1932). Tod Browning’s Freaks is one of the greatest horror films of all time. Instead of succumbing to exploiting his cast of circus freaks, Browning employs the actors symbolically as the outer expression of inner human evil; if the freaks are disturbing, it is because we recognize their ugliness within ourselves. Meanwhile, the freaks themselves are moral and emotionally complex, a fact that emphasizes the “normal” characters’ shortcomings. Exposing and demolishing a variety of culturally constructed stereotypes, Freaks is a dense, potent inversion of the normal. A-.
