Baron Munchausen has baggage. It has a reputation as Gilliam’s Folly, a stinker that at the time it was the world’s biggest turkey. And it has to be said, it is an inconsistent, sketchy film with an ending that makes no sense. But Munchausen has a warmth and charm rarely seen in modern cinema, and even one of Gilliam’s failures is far more interesting than the majority of Hollywood cinema.
Munchausen picks up where Brazil left off – it is a story where the enemy is not the enemy at the gates, in the siege of a Mediterranean city, but the enemy is plodding, unimaginative by-the-book bureaucracy. Ironically enough, this has a modern resonance in our post 9/11 society: who is more destructive and dangerous - the mysterious foreign hordes, or our own fear-mongering government?
But the film is a creative, imaginative delight, with spectacular design, set pieces which you expect from a Gilliam film. What you don’t normally expect from Gilliam is the sheer quality of the acting – everyone is superb, with the exception of Robin Williams playing Robin Williams. John Neville is wonderful as the lead – despite being in his 60s when filming, his transformation in age depending entirely on his mood is entirely convincing, and Sarah Polley’s Sally is a child lead who is utterly delightful – only if half of her skill here had been split between the three leads of the Harry Potter films! The show is almost stolen by an unrecognisable Oliver Reed playing Mars, the God of War as a rough, blustery Yorkshireman doting on his trophy wife, Uma Thurman.
To finish it’s interesting to note that a shot Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is lifted directly from Munchausen. As Saruman addresses his Uruk-hai hordes from Isengard, the camera pulls back from his face, and keeps pulling back through the massed army till we realise the scale of it. Jackson accomplishes his shot with green screen and CGI. With Gilliam, it’s all real. And that’s what makes the difference.
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