Terry Gilliam’s bloated if well-meaning riff on Miguel de Cervantes’s 17th-century novel has been “more than 25 years in the making and unmaking” according to its own title credits, its halting production owing to departing cast members, destroyed sets and failed financing. Cervantes’s book is about a batty old man who thinks himself a chivalrous knight, a series of witty metatextual jokes that unfold like comedy sketches. It’s no wonder the former Monty Python member was drawn to the source material.
Adam Driver is Toby, a sweary director haunted by a film he made about Don Quixote as a student. Shooting a Quixote-themed advert on location in rural Spain, near where he made his film, he decides to visit the nonprofessional actors he hired 10 years ago. This includes his Quixote, cobbler Javier (Gilliam’s regular collaborator Jonathan Pryce, finally the right age for the titular role), who appears to have absorbed his character’s delusions of grandeur. Not content with ruining one man’s life, Toby accidentally sets the town alight, and soon finds himself playing the role of Quixote’s foil, eye-rolling but devoted squire Sancho Panza; low, canted angles and fish-eye lenses emphasise his newly warped perception.
It’d be easy to map Gilliam on to Toby, a film-maker dogged by his artistic misfires and the mess left in their wake. Really, though, he’s Quixote, stuck in a noble past and wilfully disconnected from a present that jostles uncomfortably close.
