The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (Terry Gilliam, 2018)

A few things need to be gotten out of the way. First, I'm not sure why this got such a horrid reception at Cannes. It's entirely possible, likely even, that the decades of legendarily plagued production on this film have created an aura of doom around it, or conversely, the sense that, now that it's finished, it had better be something astonishing. Astonishing it's not, but it is in fact quite good. At the same time, I find myself wondering what sort of reception an official Gilliam masterpiece like Brazil, or a popular success like The Fisher King, would received if it bowed today. 

I suspect that Gilliam's particular brand of mad-genius maximalism is very much out of style, radically at odds with a film world more amenable to modesty and restraint. More than this, I think that the concept of the (white, male) visionary, a role Gilliam proudly plays to the hilt, is passé at best and politically incorrect at worst. There's a reason that Werner Herzog (to cite one man in Gilliam's league) is praised when he turns outward into documentary, but humored far less when he returns to the grand gestures of his fiction filmmaking.

So what we have here is fairly straightforward. Toby (Adam Driver), once a young aspiring filmmaker, has become a director of commercials. A shoot takes him near the small town, pointedly called Los Sueños, where he made his student film of Don Quixote with village non-professionals. He discovers that participation in the film drove one man mad -- a cobbler (Jonathan Pryce) who now believes himself to be the real Quixote -- and set a young girl, Angelica (Joana Ribeiro), on the road to ruin.

There's a bit of condescension in Gilliam's idea that there ever existed a Spanish village so pure and unsullied that the mere making of a film could destroy their very way of life. At the same time, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is an interesting self-portrait, and a compelling meta-commentary on cinema, in the sense that the artform is seen as a destructive force. It inculcates madness, and this is only nominally noble. Cinema, by Gilliam's reckoning, is always on the side of money and creative confinement, and can never live up to our wildest dreams. And so when the commercial shoot and, eventually, Quixote himself are all manipulated by a vulgar Russian oligarch (Jordi Mollà) who is explicitly compared with Trump, madness is the only way out. 

Capital is always going to win, like the (actual) giant windmills that fleck the landscape, placed there by the Spanish power company. Gilliam's proposed resistance is a retreat into the imagination, and while this is not a particularly effective strategy for social change, it has been proven to generate utopian art. This is not a whimsical film. In fact, it is a testament to the beauty of failure. And that's the sort of message that's never an easy sell.