An artist of uncommon visual eccentricity and conceptual audacity, Terry Gilliam may be cinema’s most inveterate fantasists. In film after film, he’s dedicated himself to celebrating the unbridled power of the human imagination—not to mention its ineluctable (and sometimes unwinnable) conflicts with the narrowminded powers that dominate our sublunary world. The very process of making his films often mirrors these struggles. By all accounts, the troubled production history behind The Adventures of Baron Munchausen does little to disprove this idea. What’s more, the film arguably comprises Gilliam’s clearest statement about the struggle between arbitrary authority and unfettered imagination.
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen opens in a nameless European city besieged by the armies of the Ottoman Empire. The time is the late 18th century, the “Age of Reason,” as a title card informs us. We’re soon introduced to the very personification of the era: the Right Ordinary Horatio Jackson (Jonathan Pryce), the town’s mayor, whose first executive action is to have a heroic officer (Sting) summarily executed for his act of bravery because it’s demoralizing to soldiers and citizens just trying to lead “unexceptional lives.” In a scathing critique of realpolitik, it’s revealed late in the film that Jackson and the Sultan (Peter Jeffries) have conspired the outcome of this latest skirmish for both their benefits.
While micromanaging the town’s affairs, Jackson attends a performance at the Theatre Royal, where a ragtag theatrical troupe mounts a production of—what else?—The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. The fabulist play within the film introduces characters, incidents, and even lines of dialogue that will recur later on in a more “realistic” register. Subsequent shifts between theatrical reality (what happens on stage) and cinematic reality (events that happen within a comparatively real space) may seem unambiguous, but matters aren’t quite that clear cut, as demonstrated by one bravura shot in which the camera pans quickly from a painted flat of the Grand Turk’s harem to a three-dimensional representation of it.
The elderly figure of Baron Munchausen (John Neville), who brazenly disrupts the play while levelling claims of misrepresentation, presents just such a blurring between reality and imagination. His complaint isn’t that the outrageous deeds the play depicts didn’t happen; it’s just that they didn’t happen “like that.” Therefore, the theatrical narrative remains beyond his control until he can take over the telling of it. In this way, the tale and the teller become one and the same. The baron’s subsequent tall tales—voyaging to the moon, where he encounters an uncredited Robin Williams’s disembodied head, meeting Vulcan (Oliver Reed) and Venus (Uma Thurman) under Mount Etna, being swallowed by a sea monster—comprise revised and expanded versions of vignettes originally shown in the stage play.
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is arguably Gilliam’s most visually dazzling film. Every single detail, from the flamboyantly baroque visual scheme, to the occasional sardonic sight gag glimpsed in the background, seems as though etched by the hand of a supremely talented draughtsman. It doesn’t hurt matters that Gilliam is more than ably assisted by a crack team of Italian film craftspeople: cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, set designer Dante Ferretti, and costumer Gabriella Pescucci. Their combined efforts lend the world of the film a grungy, unkempt feel, wherein Gilliam can give vent to his wildest flights of fancy.
The film’s final act pits the baron against Jackson’s remorseless bureaucrat. It’s hard not to see their conflict as mirroring Gilliam’s own well-publicized battles with studio executives. In fact, Jackson’s contemptuous dismissal of the baron’s entire raison d’être (“We must face facts. Not the folly of fantasists like yourself who don’t live in the real world”) sounds precisely like something a producer might’ve told Gilliam at some point. This adds yet another layer to the already brazenly antiauthoritarian moment when the baron disproves Jackson’s apocalyptic assertions about the Turks. This petty emperor’s drab new clothes are nothing more than a pack of lies: an almost universally relevant bit of political wisdom.
The film’s last shot of the baron saluting the townspeople from a nearby hilltop brings both teller and tale to a fitting conclusion, in which our titular character simply disappears from sight. From his first incarnation in a book published in the late 1700s, across the centuries and various mediums, the baron has been portrayed as an imaginary figure based rather loosely on a historical personage known for his unbelievable stories, thereby blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction every step of the way. In a very real (by which I mean entirely fictional) sense, the baron exists wherever his tale is told. If you don’t believe it, you can very easily try it for yourself at home. Just slip in Criterion’s gorgeous new Blu-ray of Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and see what happens. No lie.
Image/Sound
Criterion offers The Adventures of Baron Munchausen on separate 2160p UHD and 1080p HD Blu-ray discs. Both versions look truly stunning, but the HDR transfer improves in the anticipated ways on the legibility of fine details and broad range of color density, advances that are especially noticeable during the red-hued scenes in Vulcan’s foundry and the blue-tinted “belly of the beast” sequence. The extremely active Master Audio 5.1 surround mix sounds incredibly immersive, cleanly delineating different layers of dialogue and ambient effects, and elegantly boosting Michael Kamen’s gorgeous, at times rousing score.
Extras
The voluble and often hilarious commentary track from 2008 features Terry Gilliam and actor and co-screenwriter Charles McKeown riffing off each other about the conception and trouble production history of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. You could easily turn this track into a drinking game by doing a shot every time Gilliam describes some aspect of the filming as “a nightmare.” The three-part making-of documentary (also from 2008) features a variety of talking heads going over some of the same material, albeit in a sufficiently different manner to make it interesting, especially when you’re treated to the opposing viewpoints of producer Thomas Schühly, a figure much derided by the other participants.
There’s an intriguing featurette on scenes that never made it past the storyboard stage, including the original, much longer “voyage to the moon” sequence. In a particularly acerbic new extra, Gilliam reads and responds to original audience preview cards; attempts to market the film through equally absurd taglines and production videos are also included. Elsewhere, critic David Cairns provides an informative overview of Baron Munchausen in literature, film, and other mediums. An hourlong episode of The South Bank Show from 1991 offers a charming glimpse into Gilliam’s home life, while he reflects on his career. There’s Miracle of Flight, a short and quite funny animated film from 1974 that’s very Pythonesque. And, finally, there’s a leaflet with an insightful essay from critic Michael Koresky.
Overall
Gorgeously designed and fiercely imaginative, Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen gets a superlative new transfer and a bounty of (entirely true) extras.
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