Review: THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE

Toby Grisoni is having a bad day. He's shooting a commercial in Spain along a Don Quixote theme but it's not going well. Spiky and contemptuous of everyone around him, he drags the gravity down in his director's chair with the realisation that his idea was wrong and the expensive shoot in Spain was wasteful hubris. That night he is reminded of a student film he made in the area, also with Don Quixote as a character, and plunges into a bout of intense nostalgia blended with guilt: he should have kept his integrity and developed his vision as a filmmaker. When he returns to the site of the earlier film he finds the town depressed and wounded from the experience and there, in a threadbare tourist attraction based on his student film, is the cobbler he cast as the Don who believes he is Don Quixote. Reality is about to get very slippery.

This film comes with a lot of baggage. A title card tells that this film was in some form of production for decades and is only now ready to be shown. Anyone who has seen the affecting documentary Lost in La Mancha will nod at the words. Terry Gilliam's attempts to realise his vision of Cervantes' epic met with repeated disasters of production, of financing, and then, at the eleventh hour of this release, of licencing. It's taken a struggle of the scale that Gilliam favours for all his films' moments of truth. The entire fabric of this film is woven with this history and its director's observations on the hazards of filmmaking and storytelling. This film is made not just by but of Terry Gilliam.

Toby's toxic narcissism signals his need for transformative redemption. We are given its vehicle early in the Xavier/Quixote character whose madness draws the younger man out of himself. But the journey is a long one and Toby's deliverance will be long and hard won. None of this will be a spoiler to anyone who understands the fable clearly signalled at the early scenes in this film. It is, in fact drawn and stated so clearly that we can easily relax and let the Gilliam wonders roll on.

Roll on they do and at first there's an unease to how uncontrolled some of the action is which can leave it feeling draggy and bloated. This is kept to the second act and the development of Toby's relation with whatever form of reality he encounters lightens and speeds up toward a very lively final act.

Don Quixote is a tale of deceptive appearances and the importance of a strong moral core to navigate the giants and enchanters of delusion. The Don seeks to return the chivalry he has read about to the age of venality and iron he lives in. The novel is a massive two volumes of incidents, related narratives and philosophy but it does keep to its arc. In the end it doesn't matter that the Don has seen windmills as giants or that he thinks his nag of a horse is a mighty charger his insistence on virtue in his earthy world is unshakeable. Jonathon Pryce plays the cobbler Xavier turned modern Don Quixote for all its worth in a richly drawn script. He effortlessly traverses the divide between staring madness and genuine wisdom and it is a joy to guess how close to the surface the old cobbler might be at any time, how the role feels so good it might as well be his real self. It is a masterful performance.

This film stands or falls on his interaction with Toby/Sancho. At the end of a string of near miss casting of this role that included Johnny Depp and Ewan McGregor Adam Driver is given the film's toughest gig. It's tough because it's thankless. Toby has to tag along and repeatedly dig himself and Don (as he calls him) out of scrapes maintaining a sarcastic narcissism that could turn us off him and kill the whole movie in a few lines. This comes close to happening more than once as Toby is pressed to make ethical decisions that might serve to illustrate his character or conveniently move the narrative. In such moments I found myself getting annoyed at him and wondered how the film was going to live with him in it for its sizeable run time.

Gilliam and his co-writer Tony Grisoni (yep, he almost put his name on his lead character) give Driver the all important flashbacks to his days as a hopeful and energetic student with ideas and convictions, even putting the younger and older Toby in the same scene. This lets us know that under the brittle contempt of his relations with other humans as a careerist commercial director there is a longing for this earlier version of himself and the possibility of reconnection with him. Driver chooses nuance to give this to us and is redeemed as a performer before his character faces his redemption. I wonder if many will recognise this when Pryce's bravura turn is so eclipsing.

And attention needs to be afforded to Joana Ribiero as Angelica who takes the agency given her by the screenplay to a high strength. From the ingenue of the flashbacks in the student film to the world weary possession the world has made her, leaving a smouldering anger that feels ready to take its turn. She is essential to the tale.

For a film with more than its share of directionless setpieces that do little but repeat the state of play The Man Who Killed Don Quixote comes through. Most poignantly, it serves as both a triumph of Gilliam's self-belief and a sobering message about the ravages of a committed creative life. There will be more than a little autobiography in the industry figures on screen and that weighs heavily. But then there is Gilliam at his most deft and fleet footed as he delivers scenes whose reality can turn on a single line.

His films have been hit and miss with me. Brazil and 12 Monkeys still wow me. Tideland depresses me. And there are those that leave me cold, often the ones done for money like The Brothers Grimm. Time Bandits has passionate fans but I'm not among them and Jabberwocky will only ever be Monty Python without the jokes. So, if I buy a ticket for a new Gilliam movie it's always with a qualified hope. Well, it pleases me to report that like The Fisher King or Munchausen, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is one of his most delightful.