{"id":1600,"date":"2019-06-17T14:48:48","date_gmt":"2019-06-17T14:48:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/?p=1600"},"modified":"2022-07-21T15:54:02","modified_gmt":"2022-07-21T15:54:02","slug":"the-man-who-killed-don-quixote-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/index.php\/2019\/06\/17\/the-man-who-killed-don-quixote-review\/","title":{"rendered":"The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2019) Review"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce in The Man Who Killed Don Quixote<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Terry Gilliam has lost years of his life and large portions\nof his already questionable sanity to bring The\nMan Who Killed Don Quixote <\/em>to the screen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha<\/em> detailed his first attempt at producing the film in 2000 before it fell apart for one excruciating reason after another. The nearly two decades since–the ones we haven\u2019t seen documented on video (yet)– were just as troublesome: Gilliam had to fight and wait for years to regain the legal rights to his and Tony Grisoni\u2019s screenplay, he repeatedly secured and lost financing, actor John Hurt passed away shortly before he was supposed to begin filming the lead role and, to top it all off, Gilliam again lost the rights to the film after <\/em>it was already made–which caused him to lose both his U.S distribution and a future production deal at Amazon. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film was released for a single day in U.S. theaters on April 10, 2019, and is now (very quietly) available on DVD, Blu-Ray, and multiple VOD providers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bright side to it all, of course, is that after all those years of suffering, Gilliam finally has a film to show for it. But the big question is, was it worth it? For Gilliam, undoubtedly, as the film–with its in-your-face presentation of chaotic comedy, its whimsically warped brand of fantasy and its themes of contagious insanity–could belong to no one else. For better or for worse, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote <\/em>is quite obviously the movie that Terry Gilliam wanted to make.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But for everyone else\u2026?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fans of Gilliam\u2019s\u2014the ones who will view the film as a\ncompletion of what was started in Lost in\nLa Mancha—<\/em>will no doubt be thrilled, and they don\u2019t even have to see the\nmovie to feel that way. Just the fact that it exists already makes it a lovable\ncinematic underdog that refused to give up in spite of having every reason to. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While it\u2019s a worthwhile Gilliam entry, Don Quixote<\/em> doesn\u2019t quite rank with the greatest of his work, either. Fans seeking a masterpiece companion to Brazil <\/em>or 12 Monkeys <\/em>or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas <\/em>are most likely setting themselves up for disappointment. If fans are willing to accept the compromised version of Gilliam–the one who has had to settle on lower budgets and adjust to the digital world in spite of possessing completely opposite aesthetics–then they might find Don Quixote <\/em>to be one of his better recent efforts, ranking high amongst the likes of The Brothers Grimm, Tideland, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, <\/em>and The Zero Theorem<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Audiences going in with no previous knowledge of Gilliam or\nhis films will most likely suffer from scalp bleeding after all the head\nscratching they do while viewing it, however. Familiarity with his work and his\nstruggles in making the film enrich it to an almost necessary degree, which is\nas much a fault of Don Quixote<\/em> as it\nis a strength in Gilliam\u2019s auteurist approach to filmmaking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Gilliam tried to make the version of the film that was documented in Lost in La Mancha<\/em>, it was to star Johnny Depp as an advertising executive who time travelled back to the land and era of Don Quixote, then found himself swept up in the adventurer\u2019s exotic mindset. Gilliam and Grisoni rewrote that version of the screenplay, and the finished film now heavily reflects Gilliam\u2019s ongoing struggles and obsession to bring Don Quixote<\/em> to the screen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Adam Driver in The Man Who Killed Don Quixote<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The finished film now has Adam Driver portraying a filmmaker\non location in Spain for his latest production. When he comes across a bootleg\ncopy of an early film he made in a nearby small village many years ago, he is\nreminded of previous passions, obsessions and promises. Upon visiting the\nvillage, he discovers that the star of his early film, a local shoemaker\n(Jonathan Pryce), has fallen under the delusion that he is still the lead\ncharacter from that film: Don Quixote. And, to top it off, he believes that\nDriver is his long-lost and forever loyal sidekick, Sancho Panza.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Driver finds himself in a hairy legal situation\ninvolving his powerful producer (a wonderfully imposing Stellan Skarsgard), he\nis forced to go on the run with \u201cDon Quixote\u201d for a series of surreal and\ncomical misadventures. The deeper Driver\u2019s character goes, the more Don Quixote<\/em> clearly becomes a Gilliam\nfilm as Driver begins to experience and embody Gilliam\u2019s most personal theme of\nall: the inability to distinguish fantasy from reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where the film truly succeeds is in its early exploration of Driver\u2019s character and his relationship with Pryce\/Don Quixote. The early scenes are some of the film\u2019s strongest, featuring a prickly and soul-sick Driver desperately seeking passion and inspiration. Show business has sucked the life out of him, and he is a comically rundown victim of his own success and narcissism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Driver brings a dedicated and intense hostility to his performance,\nwound in such a tight ball of disdain that he comes across like a satirical\ncaricature of spoiled Hollywood talent. Gilliam has a great amount of fun\nexploring the pressure Driver\u2019s character is under, seeming to take an almost\nsadistic (or, perhaps, masochistic if viewed from the correct angle) delight in\nlingering and watching him squirm under Skarsgard\u2019s scornful and skeptical\ngaze.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Driver\u2019s passionate bitchiness is a wonderful complement to Pryce, who tackles the role of Quixote with the appropriately dazed and fully committed theatrics of a madman who thinks himself a hero. The chemistry between the two actors is an extreme highlight of the film. A scene in which they take refuge in a cave provides the audience with the simple pleasure of watching them bounce off each other with a specifically glorious and reckless abandon that Gilliam has always had a knack for inspiring in his performers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film falters increasingly as the stakes rise and\nDriver\u2019s character falls deeper into Quixotic madness, however. The more\nbombastic and ambitious Don Quixote <\/em>becomes,\nthe less involving it continues to be. Gilliam\u2019s comically surreal, fantasy-driven\ntangents are enjoyable and inventive in their own right, but they also\ninterrupt the flow of the film and seem to work against its best qualities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The building relationship between Driver and Pryce abruptly plateaus before the film\u2019s last act and never builds to the heights the film needs for a truly fulfilling peak or conclusion. The script\u2019s overall haphazard structure successfully reflects the mindsets of its characters, but it\u2019s also exhausting and heavily dulls the film\u2019s potential emotional impact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the film\u2019s weakest subplots involves the rediscovery\nof a teenage girl (Joana Ribeiro) who Driver cast in his previous movie. In\npresent day, Ribeiro is a broken woman, shattered and scarred by the promises\nand dreams of stardom that a young Driver put into her head many years prior. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While there is fantastic potential to this narrative, it falls short when it presents itself in the midst of the madness that is already taking over the movie at that point. Driver and Ribeiro both deliver individually strong and committed performances, but their potential chemistry is never fully realized and remains lost in the surrounding noise. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The arc of Driver\u2019s character ultimately underwhelms, as neither Gilliam nor Driver are ever able to fully communicate or provide depth towards how he is affected by his relationships in the film. His character never comes to life with humanity, but I\u2019m not entirely sure he was ever supposed to\u2014perhaps he\u2019s simply meant to embody Gilliam\u2019s increasing cynicism towards the film industry and his inability to walk away from it. Perhaps he wasn\u2019t meant to learn anything from his ordeal and go insane because of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Terry Gilliam and Jonathan Pryce on the set of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

While this is a fascinatingly bleak conclusion to come to in the later stages of Terry Gilliam\u2019s filmmaking career, it\u2019s not developed or satisfying enough in Don Quixote<\/em> to make the film truly great on its own. If Gilliam had found a way to focus more on the relationships in his film (like he did in The Fisher King<\/em>) and less on frenzied dream sequences he didn\u2019t have the budget to fully support, Don Quixote<\/em> just might have ranked amongst the highest of his classic works. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After all is said, however, I still can\u2019t help but have a\ngreat deal of affection for this movie\u2014not necessarily for what it is on its\nown, but more for where it fits into Terry Gilliam\u2019s wholeheartedly\nindividualistic career. In spite of its rough edges, Don Quixote<\/em> still showcases its own Gilliamesque charm\u2014and a mess\ncreated by Gilliam is always a very special mess. No matter how disjointed the\nfilm gets, you never entirely lose the feeling that you\u2019re in the hands of a master\nof his own personal genre\u2026 You just have to forgive the fact that he may not\nhave the best tools at his disposal, anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gilliam is one of the last remaining auteurs. Some films, especially those later in the careers of the truest auteurs, simply need some pre-existing knowledge to be fully understood and appreciated. After some filmmakers spend a large portion of their careers developing their own cinematic vocabulary, they (knowingly or unknowingly) can often develop their own shorthand to avoid repeating themselves\u2014which can easily alienate new audiences. Though he\u2019s always been hit-or-miss with the mainstream, Gilliam\u2019s work particularly suffers today because it has to exist during a time that no longer respects or has the attention span for this approach.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Man Who Killed Don\nQuixote<\/em>, as it turns out, needed its twenty years of baggage in order for\nits quality to fully stand out. However flawed it may be, that quality–like\neverything else about Terry Gilliam\u2019s career–is still unlike anything else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GRADE: B<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Terry Gilliam has lost years of his life and large portions of his already questionable sanity to bring The Man Who Killed Don Quixote to the screen. The 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha detailed his first attempt at producing the film in 2000 before it fell apart for one excruciating reason after another. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1601,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1600"}],"version-history":[{"count":37,"href":"https:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3198,"href":"https:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1600\/revisions\/3198"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}