L'homme qui tua Don Quichotte

I don't know what people were expecting from this movie and I really don't get the low scores. This movie was fun, adventurous, well acted and above all else very different and unique, with a brilliant twist on the Don Quixote story. This film did not come out of Hollywood's movie spewing machine so I would guess audiences nowadays are too dumb to comprehend a good work of art. A metaphor. An analogy. An intricate story that blends fantasy and real, history and present, fact and fiction.

This film was wonderful and I smiled all throughout. It is similar to films such as Holy Motors (2012), The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) so if these ring a bell please give this film a chance. You will thank me later.

I rated it a 9 because so many people rated it so low and, honestly, it's at least a 7. Considering the fact I smiled all throughout the film I give it a 9 but objectively it as an 8.

Totally bonkers, dreamlike, vintage Gilliam and in the end even Lynchian weird. When it works it's brilliant, when it doesn't, it's baffling and sometimes boring. But even when the script doesn't work, the movie is saved by the incredible cast. It's among both Adam Driver's and Jonathan Pryce best work. Also, I'm in love with Joana Ribeiro.

The history of the making of this movie is ultimately more interesting than the movie itself. A disaster-prone adaptation of Don Quixote eventually gets made about a movie as a director sucked into the book's world. The script was rewritten, year after year, so it's surprising that the end result feels a little under-baked.

The film follows a director, Toby, who while filming the windmill scene from Don Quixote discovers a copy of a student film he made on the same topic. He goes in search of his actors, finds his lead has taken on the role permanently, and finds himself floating between reality and fantasy.

Toby is a fairly awful and destructive person, and to some extent the movie follows the trajectory of awful person gets a chance to look at his life. But that part isn't especially convincing. The movie is mainly notable for Jonathan Pryce's spirited take on Quixote, the decadence of the castle scenes, and the shifting realities. But while all these things are good on their own, they never quite fit into a cohesive drama. Joana Ribeiro is appealing as the damsel, but her motivations are murky and she always seems more plot device than fleshed-out character. And the ending is just lazy and unconvincing.

Parts of the movie are enjoyable, but at the end my reaction was a big "so what."

I've been tracking the interesting production history of this movie since I saw Lost in La Mancha, the intended behind the scenes documentary for the inevitable DVD release of Gilliam's first concentrated effort at bringing his version of Don Quixote to the screen. After the disastrous first week of filming led to Gilliam and his producers agreeing to shut down production, the insurance company ended up with the rights to the script, and Gilliam spent the next 15 years or so trying to get them back.

Once he finally did, he rewrote the script, and, from what I can tell, it was a drastic rewrite. Our purported Sancho Panza no longer falls through time, and it looks like the fantastic elements ended up getting reduced significantly. In the documentary, there's view of some suits of armor walking on their own that I was really hoping to see Gilliam work into the film, but alas, they did not make it.

Reviews began to come out, and they were largely what I would have expected. Gilliam's best days are behind him, especially in terms of critical opinion. It's largely self-inflicted after disasters like Tideland and The Zero Theorem, but critics aren't as enthralled with Gilliam as they used to be when he was putting out Brazil and Twelve Monkeys. Reaction to Don Quixote was largely mixed, but I ended up seeing Kyle Smith's review at National Review where he completely trashes the film (determining that Gilliam needs a studio to keep him focused, seemingly forgetting about the existence of The Brothers Grimm) and felt a bit dispirited. I'd been looking forward to this film for years, and I didn't want it to be bad.

Well, I think a lot of people are missing something with the film, because I kind of loved The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Gilliam probably would be helped by hiring writers with stronger senses of narrative structure and focus, but then something would get lost. Part of Gilliam's appeal, to me at least, is how he is willing to follow any random thought. Sometimes that fails, but often enough it succeeds, and I think it succeeds here largely because it's obvious that he both knows the original text by Cervantes, but he also understands it.

Don Quixote is actually two books written ten years apart, and I've always preferred the second. The first is the famous one that includes the fight against the windmill and the slaughter of the army of sheep, but it's the second one where the real heart of the book comes through. To be honest, as I prepared to see the movie in the months up to its release, I never even considered the idea that Gilliam would approach that second half, but one of the trailers included a shot of a woman, dressed in medieval finery, saying, "This is going to be fun." I saw that and knew that Gilliam wasn't going to ignore the actual heart of the book.

Toby, a commercial director who's cynicism has overtaken him completely, is in Spain shooting an insurance commercial that has a take on Don Quixote. At dinner, a peddler has a copy of his student film for sale, a black and white adaptation of Don Quixote. He's fascinated by the journey back in time and decides that, since where he's staying is so close to where he had filmed that student project, he's going to take some time in the middle of the day to visit. He finds the place changed. The town feels less lively. The girl who played Dulcinea has vanished and her father is angry at Toby for it. And, most importantly, the old cobbler he had hired to play the titular role has gone mad and thinks himself to be the knight errant. Through a series of accidents and bits of craziness, Toby finds himself as Quixote's Sancho Panza, a role which Toby takes up reluctantly.

Fantasy and reality begin to mix (a common theme in Gilliam's work). First there are dreams that we and the character think are real for a time. Then come waking moments when reality bends (especially around a saddlebag of gold Toby finds on the side of the road). There are scenes that call back to moments in the book like when the citizens of the town find Toby and Quixote and challenge him to a joust as a knight in shining armor made of cut up DVDs reflecting the sun (which mirrors a similar scene in the book). They eventually come across a parade of medieval dressed people, and Toby doesn't know if it's real or not. Awkwardly, he acts as though it is, but the reality is somewhere in between. It's not that he's traveled back in time, but that these are modern people playing dressup. They're people Toby knows, including his boss's wife who are playacting at the behest of a Russian financier and vodka tycoon that Toby's boss is trying to win an advertising contract from.

And this is where the meat of the original book's second half comes in. In the book, Quixote and Panza are invited in by some rich people who have read the first half of the story (in universe, as they say, everyone's read the first half of the real world book) and decide to have some fun with the errant knight. Panza sees through it all, but Quixote gladly becomes the butt of every joke. Pretty much the same thing happens in the movie, and it works really really well. It culminates in Quixote mounting a mechanical horse with a blindfold on as he travels to the moon to fight the enchanter and then continues on to the sun. He's convinced it's all real, but everyone around him is merrily laughing at him, all except Toby.

And that's where the real heart of the movie is, because the movie's central theme is the role of wide-eyed optimism and the place of chivalry in the modern world. Yes, it may be out of place. Yes, the world we've created may naturally push it away, but there's still place for it. Quixote's place was to try to right the wrongs of the modern world, and when he dies a bit later, Toby can't seem to imagine a world without the old man, and the process of blending reality and fantasy continues until we end the movie with the most famous episode from the original book, the attack on the giants, led by Toby who has become Don Quixote himself.

Seriously, the movie is wonderful, I thought, but wonderful in a way that Gilliam is known for, which is unfocused storytelling with visual tangents that don't always go anywhere. However, the central two characters, Toby and Quixote, are wonderful, and the journey shockingly well realized within the messy box that Gilliam works.

I thought it was his best movie since Twelve Monkeys.

Terry Gilliam's long-gestating adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes's novel almost came to fruition in the early 2000s, before a series of mishaps forced production to shut down. Gilliam eventually managed to restart production and complete the movie. I should note that "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote" is not a direct adaptation of the novel; it depicts a present-day man (Jonathan Pryce) who convinces himself that he's the famous knight-errant, and that his erstwhile director (Adam Driver) is his squire.

You gotta love a Terry Gilliam movie (and yes, that includes the widely reviled "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"). As he often does, he turns out a surreal story with quirky characters. At times the movie is befuddling, with the viewer not totally sure what's real. It's not Gilliam's best by any stretch, but worth seeing. I hope to eventually see the documentary about the failed production of the movie's first attempt.