It
is not just one of the earliest novels in publishing history. Cervantes’ Don Quixote is also one of the most self-referential,
postmodernist novels in the history of the form. In large measure, this is due
to the extended passages in the second published part, wherein the title character
disowns and protests the various apocryphal accounts of the delusional
knight-errant written by pretenders. You would hope that kind of dialogue between
text and reality would bring out the playfulness in Terry Gilliam, but he shows
surprising (and perhaps disappointing) restraint when it comes to the meta-ness
of his long-awaited Quixote (and maybe Quixotic) film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which opens tomorrow in New York.
Years
ago, Toby Grummett shot a student film adaptation of Quixote on-location in Spain. It made a bit of a name and
reputation for him, but he squandered it with his subsequent sell-out
commercial work. Now, he has returned to Spain to shoot a Quixote-themed
commercial for an ambiguous company owned by a Russian gangster. Alexei Mishkin
might be dangerous, but he represents good business for Grummett’s boss (a.k.a.
“The Boss”). Not surprisingly, the shoot does not go smoothly, so the frustrated
and disillusioned filmmaker just walks away when he realizes how close he is to
the town where he filmed his student Don
Quixote.
Alas,
the intervening years have not been kind to Javier Sanchez, the old cobbler he
cast as Quixote, and Angelica Fernandez, the young girl who played Dulcinea. The
association with Quixote has had a corrosive effect on Sanchez’s mind, leaving
him convinced he really is the chivalrous knight. In the case of Fernandez, Grummett’s
sweet talking convinced her she really could be a star, but instead, she wound
up as Mishkin’s kept (and abused) woman.
Frankly,
it is a little surprising there has not been more fanfare hailing the long-delayed
release of Gilliam’s notorious film. Surely, it must be the only film that had
a behind-the-scenes documentary (Lost in
La Mancha) released seventeen years before its theatrical opening.
Obviously, this is not the same exact Man
Who Killed Gilliam would have made back then, which is probably a shame.
The film we have is more than a little scattershot, particularly the third act,
which gets clumsily didactic. Nobody likes Russian oligarchs, but (Spanish
actor) Jordi Molla portrayal is a caricature of villainy well beyond any possible
reality.
Jonathan
Pryce is gaunt and convincingly addled as Sanchez/Quixote, but even more
importantly, he consistently conveys a keen sense of the man’s innate dignity. Joana
Ribeiro is easily the standout for her finely shaded, emotionally compelling
performance as Fernandez. Adam Driver is desperately manic as Grummett, but he
is as hit-or-miss as the film he appears in. Likewise, Stellan Skarsgard falls
back on his old bag of cliched tricks as the crass “Boss.” However, Olga
Kurylenko plays his lover Jacqui as quite the entertaining hot mess of a femme
fatale.
It
is always problematic when we find ourselves giving sensitivity lessons to
films, but it should be pointed out the generally preferred terms are “Roma”
(or “Rom”) and “Sinti,” rather than “gypsy.” More problematic, Gilliam never
really exploits the opportunities Quixote offers for playing games with
ostensive reality. Just consider the very premise, whereby Sanchez becomes
deluded into believing he is a literary character who is himself famously
deluded. That implies he is operating under two levels of delusion.
