Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) works in the Department of Records at the Ministry of Information. It’s a low-level job, but Sam is happy in his job and actually likes not being the center of attention. That way he can spend his time daydreaming. In his dreams he is a winged superhero who saves a beautiful damsel in distress. In his dreams he is a hero.
Society, as a whole, is divided into the haves and the have nots. The government is bureaucratic, highly structured and focused on consumerism. People are not important, but paperwork is. Sam is a cog in a wheel. His mother, Ida Lowry (Katherine Helmond), is a well-known member of high society and has a lot of sway with the government. She wants him to have higher aspirations and has talked the powers-that-be into offering him a new posting in Information Retrieval. Sam turns the job down.
There have been some explosions in the city being perpetrated by terrorists who want to take down the government. When an actual bug gets caught in a printer the result is a blip in an arrest warrant that results in a man named Archibald Buttle (Brian Miller) being arrested for terrorism instead of an Archibald Tuttle (Robert De Niro). The Buttle’s neighbor, Jill Layton (Kim Greist) tries to unravel the red-tape and get her neighbor released. All this does is bring her to the attention of the police. Sam sees her at the Ministry of Information and realizes that she is the woman in his fantasies.
When Sam has a problem with his heating and cooling system he calls Central Services. They basically ignore him. Sam is visited by the suspected terrorist, Tuttle. Tuttle was a former Service employee who hates paperwork and now works on his own. Tuttle fixes his system. Two Central Service employees, Spoor (Bob Hoskins) and Dowser (Derrick O’Connor) show up while Tuttle is still there. Sam stalls to allow Tuttle to sneak away. Spoor becomes suspicious.
Sam decides to help Jill by accepting the job at Information Retrieval. He tries to falsify Jill’s records to clear her, but he ends up being labeled a terrorist himself. Sam ends up creating more attention to himself as well as to Jill by causing destruction and mayhem everywhere.
“Brazil” was released in 1985 and was written and directed by Terry Gilliam. It is a British and American science fiction fantasy dark comedy film with some steampunk influences.
The movie is a black comedy version of Orwell’s novel “1984”. There’s a lot going on here, most of it chaos and absurdity, dysfunction as standard operating procedure. Confusion is added with symbolism and some surrealistic satire making it one strange movie and very much ripe for its cult. There are some Art Deco visuals that invoke stylized Nazi-esque images. These images carry over into the farcically depicted inept government requirements and workers. When you think of dystopia, you think of the Third Reich. These images contrast interestingly with the dream sequences that have more of a Salvador Dali appearance.
The title of the movie really has nothing to do with the film. It is actually named after the film’s title song, “Aquarela do Brasil”, usually referred to as just “Brazil”, by Ary BarrosoIt. The lyrics to the song invoke a carefree dream life which is what the main character lives in when he is not forced to deal with his real dystopian life.