THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN
With John Neville, Eric Idle, Sarah Polley, Robin Williams, Oliver Reed, Uma Thurman, Jonathan Pryce, Winston Dennis, and Valentina Cortese.
With Cybill Shepherd, Robert Downey Jr., Ryan O’Neal, Mary Stuart Masterson, and Christopher McDonald.
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Part of what’s disconcerting about all of Gilliam’s movies, in fact, is the combination of metaphysical aspirations with small-scale slapstick, almost as if he were combining the contrary impulses of two other American directors who have spent most of their careers in England, Stanley Kubrick and Richard Lester. His Baron Munchausen, to take one example, is made up and often even framed to suggest the figure of Don Quixote, but it’s not a reference that carries much weight because he’s a comic-book Quixote without a Sancho Panza (unless the little girl who accompanies him on his adventures dimly qualifies). The film offers three separate views of hell–a war-torn European city, a red-hot (and anachronistically conceived) nuclear missile plant straight out of Hellzapoppin within the crater of Mount Etna, and the inside of the belly of a gigantic sea monster–but no single discernible thread allows us to link up all three. The film is also preoccupied with the aging baron’s proximity to death, but here again there’s a tendency to contradict or at least complicate this serious element with a certain nose-thumbing irreverence. In short, what Gilliam’s Kubrickian right hand lays on like a trowel, his Lesteroid left hand usually scatters, leaving the viewer to pick up all the pieces.
He even doubles the odds against his safety by insisting from the beginning on a certain amount of self-acknowledged artifice in both his story frame and his visual design. In an unnamed, besieged European city being torn apart by cannon blasts from Turks, a very Melies-like stage production of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (with charmingly and precariously floating and sliding backdrops) is being performed in a half-destroyed theater, when the real baron (John Neville) suddenly turns up, protesting the way he’s being represented and claiming to the skeptical crowd, “Only I can end this war . . . because I began it.” Promising to “reveal the true cause of the war,” he launches into an onstage monologue that leads straight into a flashback. But to confuse matters, his servants in the flashback–including Berthold (Eric Idle), who can run faster than a bullet, and Albrecht (Winston Dennis), who can carry all the sultan’s treasures on his back–are played by the same actors impersonating these characters in the stage production.
“A string of pearls without a string” –Sergei Eisenstein’s description of the writing of Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky–applies pretty well to most of Gilliam’s efforts in Baron Munchausen, although it must be added that some of these pearls prove to be fake as well as genuine. The superficial characterization of the main villain, Horatio Jackson (Jonathan Pryce, the hero in Brazil), as a “man of reason” who both licenses the theater and conducts the war in progress–an all-around bad guy–seems especially puerile. But given Gilliam’s unusual talent for peripheral detail (which he shares with Mad comics from the 50s), this is a movie in which there’s literally as well as figuratively more than meets the eye, and I look forward to seeing it again; I also suspect that it’s a work that will grow in stature in the years to come.
To its credit, Chances Are has very likable performances by Cybill Shepherd and Ryan O’Neal, both of whom seem to improve with age in the depth and range of their personalities, as they move beyond their ingenue origins (although from this standpoint, their costar Robert Downey Jr. still has a long way to go). I can’t really say too much about this movie because its principal pleasure derives from its labyrinthine plot twists, which can’t be described without giving them away. But I can make the point that any movie that depends this much on plot alone is likely to wind up being as disposable as Kleenex, and I suspect that a few years from now, when The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is being revived as a flawed classic, Chances Are won’t be much more than a dim memory.
