The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018)

Terry Gilliam’s passion project finally arrives on the big screen after decades of production limbo and a variety of aborted efforts to bring a “Don Quixote” film to completion.  The closest he came before was back in 2000, when he began filming with John Rochefort and Johnny Depp in the lead roles of Don Quixote and a not-really-Sancho Panza.  However, a series of mishaps, from environmental disasters to insurance snarls, as well as his lead performer in Rochefort falling ill with a severely painful prostate infection and herniated disc led to its derailment, with the only film he would get out of his source material being the 2002 documentary on the folly, Lost in La Mancha.

Many years later, Gilliam has finally made it to the finish line with his seemingly quixotic quest, this time with Jonathan Pryce and Adam Driver in the roles originally meant for Rochefort and Depp, and a new direction for the script that keeps the events in the modern day, in the guise of life imitating art imitating life, rather than of a man going back in time to the 17th century.  Driver is the main star, playing a hot-shot hothead director named Toby, who is attempting to shoot a commercial in Los Suenos (aka, “The Dreams”), Spain with elements of, you guessed it, Miguel de Cervantes’ epic, “Don Quixote”. He’s been down this road before, a decade prior, shooting it as a low-budget student film when he was humble and first getting his taste of the movie-making business.  He had the perfect Don Quixote for his film, a show repairman named Javier that he discovered and had to mold into some sort of actor.  Now, many years later, Toby sees the aftermath of what he left behind in the small village he once shot in, finding Javier now actually thinking he is the true Don Quixote.  What’s worse, he believes (and truly insists) that Toby is his squire, Sancho Panza.

From there, fiction becomes fact, as Toby finds himself on a wild ride in trying to corral Don Quixote to sanity, all the while he himself begins to question his own grasp on reality with a series of adventures that may or may not be a fantasy of his own.

Not surprisingly, this review of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is in keeping with the reviews for most of Terry Gilliam’s output: admirably visionary, but narratively confounding.  It’s a mess, but a glorious one that is never quite uninteresting, thanks to Gilliam’s penchant for ribald visuals and surreal comic developments that keep you curious, even when you’ve lost all hold on exactly what’s going on.  For much of the run time, it is actually thoughtful and fun, even if uneven, before finally succumbing to its director’s penchant for excess when given enough budget to explore his every whim.  The second half of the film goes all out into a lavish production with meticulous costumes, hair, make-up and sets, but without much interest in where the story may ultimately go.

In some ways, the film itself is a meta statement of its own making, from the quixotic quest to persevere in the face of perpetual failure, to the film about the filming of a “Don Quixote” adaptation, to the blending of the lines between fact and fantasy, sidetracked by a variety of conflicts that become consuming, until perhaps even Gilliam, in his obsessions, has lost track of which way is the right one to pursue. Soon, the characters that were set up in the beginning of the film all begin to act in ways not exactly in concert with what we’ve seen before in the hallucinatory and overly long climax, especially when a rich and powerful Russian vodka power player begins to fund lavish costume balls in the area, leading to the feeling that everyone has become infected with a malady that has them accepting roles to play that no longer represent a reality that can be easily snapped back to normalcy.  Religious elements are also drawn into the mix, as undertones become overtones between Christians and Muslims in various ways that are explained without being fully explored to any thematically satisfying way.

What’s better than the unfocused, but passionate material here are the performances, particularly by the humorously whimsical Jonathan Pryce, who played more of an every-man in Gilliam’s Brazil way back when, going full bore into his kooky character of the Spanish peasant turned errant knight, wearing a prosthetic nose piece only obvious if you’re adequately familiar with the actor.  Adam Driver is a terrific and versatile actor in his own right, but does labor with some of the material’s inconsistencies, particularly in his own character, leading to awkwardly handled moments such as an impromptu Eddie Cantor-infused song-and-act dance that seems out of place even in a film this absurdist, and a tell-tale sign that this is a film written and directed by a man nearly 80 years old for a contemporary young man just a few years out from making his student film.

Interestingly, whereas Gilliam initially had trouble getting the film made, not that he’s made the movie, he’s struggling getting it to distributors to get his movie shown to audiences, as there is a legal entanglement about who actually owns the piece (Portuguese producer Paulo Branco in particular has been trying to block its release), with Gilliam already losing his control over its destiny.  Amazon Studios dropped out of the distribution deal that would have sent the film to theaters in the biggest markets for Gilliam: the U.S., U.K., and Canada, picked up months later by Screen Media.  But what would a Gilliam film be without a share of background controversy?

The film is dedicated to Jean Rochefort and John Hurt, two of Gilliam’s Don Quixotes that were replaced in succession to continue the tradition, much like the Don Quixotes in the film itself.  That the elusive fantasy has now become reality, even if full of flaws and all, is the best thing one can say for Gilliam’s continuing to dream the impossible dream.

Qwipster’s grade: C-

MPAA Rated: R for language, sexual content, and violence
Running Time: 132 min.

Cast: Adam Driver, Jonathan Pryce, Olga Kurylenko, Stellan Skarsgard, Joana Ribeiro, Oscar Jaenada, Jason Watkins, Sergi Lopez, Rossy De Palma, Hovik Keuchkerian, Jordi Mollá
Director: Terry Gilliam
Screenplay: Terry Gilliam, Tony Grisoni