To analyze Brazil you have to look first at the director, Terry Gilliam, his style, background and influences all influence what is seen on screen. Gilliam had been driven crazy by the society he saw as bureaucratic and industrial to a degree that was dysfunctional to society. Gilliam creates a society that is driven by the machine where the state has all of the control thus taking away any sort of uniqueness about an individual as the focus is on control rather than individuality. Gilliam’s world reveals the pitfalls of a society determined to rely on machines in that the machines become unreliable and the people in the community themselves become robots, only doing what they are told.
Gilliam’s characters are placed in absurd circumstances in order to have them react in ways that aren’t realistic. This form, magic realism was one of the director’s favorites because it allowed fantastical and mythical elements to be placed in a realistic environment. We see Sam flying through the clouds and battling samurai in his dreams which is certainly fantasy, but when we enter the real world and watch a bomb go off in a restaurant and it’s as if the wreckage and noise has disturbed everyone’s meal. The price of a human life has been beaten out of these people.
By placing these elements within the film, Gilliam is able to unpack very real themes with humor, and while satire gets laughs the truth is that in real life the laughs turn to sorrows. Gilliam’s style allowed him to delve into very heady and deeply rooted issues within society while maintaining an audience’s attention throughout. If this picture were a drama we’d all be on the floor weeping or have to walk out because it would be too hard to watch. But Gilliam is able to keep us in our seats by placing very real issues in an absurd environment where we can stay in the midst of very real problems for just long enough that maybe, just maybe we can be awakened to see that we recognize these very issues day to day.
