It's been three decades in the making but Terry Gilliam has finally done it! For so long, the spectre of cinematic death has loomed large over his project, but the fact that The Man Who Killed Don Quixote has been released at all represents a marvel of directorial tenacity.
It was certainly an ambitious assignment, made more so by some spectacular bad luck; illness, floods, financial difficulties and a number of other studio ailments. But finally it's here and it's wonderful to see Gilliam having the last laugh... even if his film isn't very good.
Quixote is unmistakably a Gilliam film, popping and fizzing with the ex-Python's eccentric grandeur. A testament to its lengthy gestation, the film runs the stylistic gamut of his back-catalogue; breathing the leathery pungency of Time Bandits, the derailed loopiness of Brazil and the woozy nausea of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
The story (confused as it is), operates as a fevered auto-biopic of a director's arm-wrestle with his art. Adam Driver plays Toby, an aspiring feature director who has been put out to pasture on a diet of advertising work. Cynical of his vocation and struggling for motivation, he relives his past through a chance job in rural Spain where his career began. The film blurs the lines between reality and fantasy as he reconnects with a village cobbler (played by the wonderful Jonathan Pryce) who thinks he is the famed Don Quixote de la Mancha. Toby's flirtation with Quixote's delusions leads them both down a comical path of madness and redemption.
Quixote's grand visual style is undoubtedly mesmerising, but unfortunately the writing bloats a production already struggling to support the weight of its troubled past, unduly hampering it with swathes of incoherence too bothersome to wade through. Indeed, when Driver exclaims midway through the film "This is insane!", I think he might've mistaken his line for a margin note.
