I write this post at the risk of being trite. Lists of “important” movies are all the rage these days on blogs and, although I agree that many of the movies appearing on those lists are good, I don’t feel that many of them are important. As I considered this question on my way home from work I had to conclude that most films are simply entertainment and nothing more. Some are more thought provoking than others. Some can turn a shitty mood into a great mood and vice versa. Virtually none of them, however, change the way you think or act. Brazil directed by Terry Gilliam is one of the exceptions to this and it bears the distinction of actually becoming more significant as time goes by.

I’m not going to run down the entire plot. In a nutshell Brazil is about a low-level bureaucrat named Sam living in a bleak totalitarian state at an unspecified point in the future. He dreams about being a angel-winged knight who fights off brutal monsters to save a girl who he assumes is a figment of his imagination. This assumption is shattered when he meets a taxi driver who’s a dead ringer for his dream girl. He abandons his low-profile monotonous lifestyle to pursue the girl and, naturally, the government doesn’t appreciate this and takes the kind of action that you would expect a totalitarian police state to take.

From this point on there are spoilers. I keep going back to this movie in my head. The film concludes with Sam in a catatonic state after having been tortured in a government facility by a friend of his. His mind has retreated into a permanent dream state in which he’s living happily ever after with his dream girl, the taxi driver. In reality, she’s been shot and he’s been arrested and subjected to the aforementioned torture. There’s little I can write about it that hasn’t been written before. Needless to say it’s an excellent film no matter what genre in which you attempt to place it.

Brazil reminds me to question the nature of happiness as it relates to ambition, complacence, and conformity. It reminds me to never become one of those people who come home from work every day and do little other than sit on the couch and watch television (someday soon I will attempt to analyze how people fall into that rut.) The realization in the final scene that the previous “happy ending” segments of the film have all been imagined by Sam is one of the ONLY moments in any film that I can truly classify as “scary.” I can’t quite pin down why it’s so disturbing (the interrogator’s mask is scary enough in its own right!) Perhaps it’s because I’m afraid that the real-world corporate drones and bureaucrats will win out in the end, leaving the Sam Lowrys of the world under the heel of their boot. We’ll see.