Your Dream Movies - Pick a movie, director, and star

Speaking of Gilliam, I’ve soured a lot on Brazil over the last decade, mainly around Jonathan Pryce’s Sam. In the 1980s there was a director working who had a much sharper eye for all sorts of toxic male bullshit, though, and he’d even directed an idiosyncratic dystopian film, albeit a very different, pastoral one. In other words, I want John Boorman’s Brazil.

I don’t think he’d necessarily be a good replacement for Pryce (too good looking) but I think of Gabriel Byrne’s performance as Uther Pendragon in Boorman’s Excalibur. Byrne had an energy—and sense of threat—that the rest of the film, as much as I respect Excalibur for existing at all, couldn’t quite live up to. Boorman and Byrne’s Uther is ambitious, past amorality and into immorality, a man of power whose big dream (having sex with Igrayne) does come true. Sam only has heroic flights of fancy, and while his fantasies are more straightforward good guy fantasies from what I remember they are still ones where he is in a clear position of power over a woman. Although it’s been a while, I remember thinking that maybe Sam’s ego-sex-power-control fantasy manifested pretty darkly: Sam ends up exhibiting some fairly threatening behavior. It’s a great performance by Pryce, but I don’t think Gilliam’s direction is emotionally aware enough to really explore that.

Boorman, though, I think could get there—Excalibur is very much about the intersection of desire, political power, and narrative, and you see themes from Brazil elsewhere in his work: the dark uses of chummy male cameraderie (Deliverance), deception and political opportunism (The Tailor of Panama), the disruption of human nature (Zardoz), ambiguous reality and antiheroics (Point Blank).