My Favourite Christmas Movie: Brazil

My Favourite Christmas Movie: Brazil

Posted on Thursday December 11, 2008, 10:48 by Dan Jolin in Empire States

The thing about setting your movie during Christmas is that it’s hard to make Christmas incidental. As viewers, we can’t quite shake off that perhaps even miniscule tremor of excitement caused by the sight of light-bedecked fir trees or the jingle of sleigh-bells. Either that, or it just makes us groan, tense up and wait for the schmaltz to hit. Even so, some movies’ Yuletide-positioning tends to be overlooked, largely due to the (welcome) fact that they exist in a different genre, rather than the ‘Christmas movie’ genre itself: Die Hard, for example, or Terry Gilliam’s superb dystopian alterno-noir comedy, Brazil.

Which is a shame, in a way, as Christmas and all our instincts concerning anything connected with the holiday give Brazil so much. After an explosion and a mishap with a bug and a typewriter, the film presents a traditional seasonal scene: a family gathered in front of a tree while Mother tells a story of Santa coming down the chimney. With devious glee, Gilliam interrupts this portrait of wintry domestic bliss with a crack squad of faceless government stormtroopers cutting a hole in the ceiling and dropping down through the roof — heralded by sound of sleigh-bells, no less. They’ve even brought a sack: but this one is empty, and they promptly fill it with Daddy and whisk him away on sabotage charges (the result of said bug/typewriter mishap), leaving only his weeping children and traumatised wife with a receipt for the government’s ‘services’. The intention is clear: there’s going to be nothing Merry about this Christmas.

Much of Brazil is an attack on cold, blundering bureaucracy and the politics of paranoia, but Gilliam’s also concerned to some degree with consumerism (a hot Christmas topic, obviously), using the holiday to highlight the true cheapness of material gifts versus the deep value of imagination and love. Our hero, Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), wants to attain the girl of his dreams: he’s not interested in the thoughtless trinket his mother (Katharine Helmond)’s bought him (“something for an exec-u-tiiiive!” she trills), or even the promotion she’s irritatingly wrangled. Gilliam compounds his critique of Christmas shallowness with an edge into the grotesque: we hear of medical gift tokens, designed for ageing ladies of leisure like Sam’s mother, desperate for the latest cosmetic-surgery treatment. Later, we see a family friend, Mrs Tremain (Barbara Hicks), wheelchair-bound, hunched and wrapped in stained bandages, the result of “acid treatment” gone awry. Sam finds her during peak Christmas shopping hours in the lingerie department of a department store. Mrs Tremain holds up a lacy pair of knickers and squeaks “Picture me in these!”. Shortly afterwards a bomb goes off, blowing the entire lingerie section into gory smithereens.

Gilliam’s final insult to Christmas comes near the movie’s devastating end. Sam himself has been carried off in one of those sacks, and is due to be interrogated — tortured — for details of his non-existent terrorist connections. Unsurprisingly, Sam is losing his mind. In trundles his long-since-departed father’s oldest friend, Minister of Information Mr Helpmann (Peter Vaughn), dressed as St. Nicholas himself. Movie-cliché logic — bolstered by the presence of a jolly old man dressed in white-trimmed red — dictates that he’s bringing the greatest gift of all: freedom. Instead, Helpmann-Santa offers only the advice that Sam tell them everything he know, and that he should “keep your eye on the ball”, before trotting out a few more sporting metaphors. Then he’s off, to keep his festive appointment with some orphans.

Childish excitement? A deluge of schmaltz? Christmas in Brazil results in neither: simply an affirmation that as much shit happens during the Holiday Season as at any other time in the year. Any movie that tells otherwise is lying.