The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2021: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018), directed by Terry Gilliam

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune - "Capricho arabe" by Francisco Tarrega

       In the year 1605 the novelist and poet Miguel de Cervantes released the first part of a story called (as translated to English) “The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha”. It told the story of an aging noble by the name of Alonso Quijano, who spends his days absorbed in the stories of knights in those heady days of chivalry. So infatuated is he with these fanciful tales that one day Alonso comes unstuck from reality and believes that he too is a knight, like Orlando, Lancelot and the rest. So he straps on a rusty set of armor, saddles up his old raggedy ass horse, grabs one of the local peasants to be his squire and sets off against the wishes of his family and friends to travel the countryside of Hapsburg era Spain as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, performing chivalrous acts of heroism and vanquishing wickedness wherever it might be found. Or to put it another, more realistic way, attacking inanimate objects and getting their asses kicked by almost everyone they meet. This was back in the day when the only known treatment for mental illness was severe beatings, you see.

       Don Quixote was quite popular upon its release, a sophomore hit from the part-time writer and full-time soldier and tax collector Cervantes, and in the years following its completion and release has gone on to become one of most popular and acclaimed books in the entirety of Western literature. Having read it myself some years ago I can say that it is a multifaceted novel; Farcical at first, yet quickly opens up into satire, and metafiction as the would-be knight runs up against a world several hundred years removed from the landed gentry. One interpretation is to view it as an allegory about the division of mental and physical labor in class society, upper class Quijano's obsession with this romanticized vision of the world built on fiction and ephemera ultimately causing his transformation into Quixote and his attempted clashing against the lower classes more material, grounded understanding of reality. Other interpretations are a tad more metaphysical, painting Quixote as this injection of optimism and wonder into a cynical and jaded world, as much a noble figure as he is a tragic one. Either way, while the focus on this blog is on silver screen adaptations of books around here, if I did cover books then Don Quixote would certainly get the recommendation.

       Speaking of film adaptations of books, if anyone were to adapt a story like Don Quixote, in turns a comedy and a tragedy, it would be Terry Gilliam right? The man built his film career on the fantastical clashing with the mundane with tragicomic results, Jabberwocky, Time Bandits, hell The Fisher King is essentially a riff on Don Quixote, it’s like the story was made for him. After reading the novel himself Gilliam thought so as well, and he immediately set about getting his vision of Cervantes’ story on screen. The year was 1990. He then spent most of the 90s trying to get it made, eventually starting production in ‘98, before being stopped two years later. Then he tried again in 2003, which didn’t gain much traction, and so on and on until 2016, when the planets aligned and he was finally able to complete the film I’m reviewing today. Given that filmmaking is a supremely laborious process in terms of time and money that has no guarantee of completion let alone recompense, as we’ve seen with The Thief and the Cobbler, and the fact that Gilliam has failed to make as many movies as he’s made, it is a small miracle that this movie exists at all. Is it an actual miracle though, or an ironic, genie’s wish kind of thing? I guess we’ll see.

       Finally released in 2018, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was directed by Terry Gilliam and written by Gilliam and Tony Grisoni and produced by a number of people (including Gilliam’s daughter Amy and Spanish director Gerardo Herrero) through a number of production companies (including Recorded Picture Company and Entre Chien et Loup). Adam Driver plays Toby, a filmmaker currently in Spain to make a film adaptation of Don Quixote. A process that isn’t going well, mainly because Toby is a narcissistic primadonna piece of shit who is never satisfied. As he is setting the stage to fuck his producer’s wife, Toby happens to stumble upon a bootleg copy of ‘The Man Who Killed Don Quixote’ -- a student film that he had made a decade prior, coincidentally enough in a village not too far from where they’re shooting. So he decides to visit, mainly because it gets him out of work and out of sight of his producer, but it’s not quite a nostalgic reunion. The man who played Sancho Panza is long dead from consumption, Angelica the unnamed village girl (Joana Ribeiro) left for Madrid in search of fame and fortune as an actress and never returned, and poor Javier the cobbler (Jonathan Pryce) now suffers from the same condition as the character he played; He believes that he is Don Quixote, the knight errant tasked by god to reignite the age of chivalry, and that Toby is his squire Sancho Panza. Toby doesn’t believe and promptly abandons the place, but after a series of events involving a fire, a Romani thief, and a shot police officer, Toby finds himself stuck playing second-fiddle to this holy soldier of gallantry, traveling the countryside in the search of evil to vanquish and feats of derring-do to accomplish. Which of course they don’t because Javier is an old man who believes he’s a 400 year old fictional character, but the longer Toby travels with ‘Don Quixote’ the more the places and people around him seem to shift and mold themselves to the knight’s worldview and the line between fantasy and reality seem to blur. Sounds like the perfect kind of atmosphere for an adventure!

       I wrote earlier that The Fisher King was Gilliam’s riff on Don Quixote, and ironically enough after watching The Man Who Killed Don Quixote I feel it’s a riff on The Fisher King with a metafictional semi-biographical ‘Don Quixote film about a director trying to make a Quixote film’ twist, which is in line with the Cervantes’ novel as the second part of that novel has the first part be an actual book in that world. Both films are about long-haired show biz douchebags who don’t have the healthiest relationships with women who stumble across quixotic figures who they inadvertently ‘created’, and then said figures intrude upon the douchebags' lives and over the course of the film push them towards a better direction. Gilliam stated that he read Don Quixote in 1989 and The Fisher King came out in 1991, so it was clearly on his mind at the time even if it wasn’t technically Don Quixote.

       The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is closer, not quite an adaptation but a metafictional twist on the story that devolves into a sort of Apocalypse Now fever dream. The Fisher King posited that the world could be a cold and indifferent place but didn’t discount empathy, but not so in the world of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Here the virtuous poor are punished for their good deeds, the vile rich are not only successful but thrive, and our protagonist goes through what could be described as an anti-arc. The original novel was cruel in its way, it is about a series of people beating up and mocking a mentally ill old man, but Gilliam seems to dive into that cruelty with an orgiastic, nihilistic glee. It patterns itself off of the books, even recreating scenes from the book, but since it’s not just an adaptation but a sort of metafictional commentary I’m not sure what that commentary is meant to entail. That the world is shitty? Rather than learning from tragedy and developing oneself as a person that it’s preferable to retreat into delusions and madness? Neither feel all that satisfying an answer, but that is about the only thing we’re allowed to do as we sit for two hours watching Adam Driver complain about stuff while never taking action. It certainly aims for the Pythonesque wackiness, and at times I’d say it succeeds, but on the whole it just comes off as morose.

       There’s no better example Gilliams misstep of excess than Joana Ribeiro’s character Angelica, the village girl from Toby’s student who dreams of stardom are scuppered and is subsequently pushed into prostitution. Prostitution by its very nature is a loathsome and dehumanizing practice that is better off in the trash, but Angelica can’t just be a prostitute; She has to have giant welts from getting the shit kicked out of her and lick shit off of people’s shoes, otherwise how would we know it’s bad? Similarly Toby’s moves to help her can’t just be out of a desire to stop abuse, because indeed Toby doesn’t really do anything to help people of any gender in this film, but because it’s within the context of a romantic relationship. Not an uncommon thing, which isn’t to excuse it, but then we get the added step of this entire romance being set up when Toby was a film student presumably in his 20s and Angelica was 15 (the irony of the Trump jab at one point of the movie is lost). Why?  Is the ‘naive country girl’ trope suddenly untenable if she’s of legal age? It’s not like they age up Adam Driver any besides giving him a mustache, so they lose nothing by just having them start at similar ages. Though I suppose if they changed that they’d have to make other changes, like giving the Romani a name rather than just listing him as ‘Gypsy’, and Gilliam had already spent almost three decades on this movie.

       Joana Ribeiro does put in good work here, despite my reservations of the character, and if there’s one thing I’d praise about this movie it’s the casting. Jonathan Pryce was downright fantastic as Javier/Don Quixote, capturing the essence of the character effortlessly and intimately, just as Boris Karloff did for Frankenstein’s Monster and Basil Rathbone for Sherlock Holmes. Seeing him here one wishes that this was just a straight-up adaptation, as he knocks it out of the park every time he’s on screen. Of course then we wouldn’t have as much time with Adam Driver...which is bad? When Toby is at his most cartoonish fish out of water asshole I think Driver is at his best, it’s those moments where he attempts sincerity that fails to excite. He’s like a lankier Shia Labeouf.

       I’ll also give credit to the cinematography here in regards to the location shooting; We get a look at the beauty of the Spanish countryside and some of the ugliness, but the thing that gets me is the feeling of emptiness. Aside from when the film specifically addresses it all sense of time and space disappears, granting the film this atmosphere of surreality which aids in the metafiction angle. There’s also some special effects that look pretty good in spite of the obvious CGI. Not as much as you’d want given the possibilities provided by Quixote’s delusions, but it’s understandable given the hectic nature of the production and I don’t know how much a 16 million euro budget gets you in 2018.

       Maybe this movie got me in a bad mood today, but I’m going to say that if it weren’t for the scenes with Jonathan Pryce then this would fail to get the recommendation. The best formula for Gilliam seems to be equal parts darkness and whimsy, knife in hand and tongue in cheek. Time Bandits, Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King, Jabberwocky, though they could be said to have their own individual issues all managed the balanced act; Subverting the overly sentimental or lampooning the darker and more cynical. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote and by extension The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, which was covered a while back, don’t have that balance. They might have good actors or good special effects, some good scenes, but they get too bogged down by the weight of their own concepts and plots to be an enjoyable film. As I said the scenes with Jonathan Pryce are the highlight, but on the whole The Man Who Killed Don Quixote doesn’t get the recommendation. Congrats Terry Gilliam finally getting his movie made though, it’s more than I’ve ever gotten the opportunity to do.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2018: Animal World (2018), directed by Han Yan

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Mirai wa Bokura no Te no Naka", by Kaiji and the Redbound Cherries

       To be honest, I don’t take in much anime these days. It used to be, when I was a much younger nerd, that my days seemed to revolve around what came out of Japan. Games, Comics, their seemingly endless amount of naked lady pictures, and of course their most devious of all creations, anime. Yessir, the bulk of my formative years were shaped in part by that uniquely Japanese style of animation; the adventures of Son Goku and Yusuke Urameshi were far more visceral to me than Batman’s struggles with the Joker, and while I couldn’t tell you the rules of American football I could describe the system of equivalent exchange or discuss the symbolism of FLCL. Keep in mind that these were the days when anime was still largely niche, instead of mostly niche like it is now. If you wanted to see a show you had to either fervently hope it got dubbed and sent to the states, which if you’ve seen what happened to One Piece you know was a gamble, or you had to hope a traveling band of translators decided to make it a project and put it up on the internet, which posed its own set of problems. If you wanted to talk about anime, you either were lucky and your friends were into it as well or you were stuck with the kid who used Japanese honorifics in public conversation despite being whiter than the driven snow. And if you wanted to try the internet, well, it was still in the internet in those days, so you were better off hanging out with the guy in the Naruto headband.

As I said however, at a certain point I seemed to largely drift away from the thing that had once commanded my time. Part of it was just the process of growing up I suppose, budgeting time, moving on to other things, part of it was a lack of interest in the material coming, but however it is to be framed the fact was that at a certain point anime had become an afterthought. I watched maybe a few episodes of something and then would abandon it for months at a time, and the things I did keep up with were mostly for reasons of nostalgia. I just couldn’t find it in me to care anymore, of course that could describe me on any given day.

Then, from out of the blue, I discovered a show by the name of Kaiji. Based on the long-running manga series by Nobuyuki Fukumoto, Kaiji is nominally a story about gambling and literally an exploration of the human psyche on a epic scale. In true anime fashion there are no average stakes in Kaiji; when you win you are floating up in heaven and when you lose you are pulled into the depths of hell, devoting minutes upon minutes of time giving in-depth explanation of strategy and tactics, and just when you think things can’t get any more insane somehow the bar is raised. I can’t think of many shows anime or otherwise that has managed to get me so completely invested in what was going on, and right from the outset as well. To know Kaiji is to know despair as it turns out, which is what I love about it, and when I found out that there was apparently a live action adaptation of the Kaiji manga released this year made in China, I just had to check it out for myself. Sorry Battle Royale, maybe next year.

       Zheng Kai-si is a man at the end of his rope. Most of his time is spent loafing around playing games and daydreaming (or rather hallucinating) at his job as a clown mascot at an arcade, and most of his money is spent on his mother, who has been in a coma for years now. He can’t afford to keep his mother out of the hallway, he can’t afford to give his girlfriend Liu Qing the life he thinks she deserves, he can barely afford to live. In a fit of desperation he decides to mortgage his family’s apartment to his buddy Li Jun’s real estate company, only to find out that Li Jun hasn’t worked at that company in months. The truth is that Li has a bit of a gambling problem and that when the organization that lent him money came a callin’ he decided to scam Kai-si and saddle him with the debt (plus interest), which has ballooned so greatly that working 4 jobs for 30 years straight would just about pay it, as long as he didn’t have to pay for any hospital bills. However, when Kai-si meets the head of this shady organization, Anderson (played by Michael Douglas), he is offered a magnificent deal: There is a cruise ship by the name of Destiny that’s set to leave harbor soon, where a game is going to be held. If Kai-si join the game and win, he could win enough money to pay off his debt and more besides all in one night. If he loses, well… best not to think about it. Besides, as long as Kai-si wins, it doesn’t really matter what happens when you lose, does it? How bad could it be?

       Animal World is based on the opening arc of part 1 of the Kaiji series, known also as Tobaku Mokushiroku Kaiji, which would become the first 9 episodes of the anime series. To its credit it actually manages to hit the bullet points of the source material rather consistently, as well as more Fukumoto related bits like the cutaways to show the breakdown of strategies. It gives you a pretty good sense of what people liked about the original material, which isn’t always common when it comes to adaptations, and shows that Han Yan knows which side to butter his bread, so to speak.

       Of course this being an adaptation there are indeed changes from the source material, and in the case of Animal World those changes are numerous. Liu Qing is an invention of the film for example, as is the coma-ridden mom, Kaiji/Kai-si’s arcade job, or really anything concrete about his backstory. Michael Douglas’ character Anderson seems to be a combination of the characters Andou and Tonegawa from the original, while the character named Andou here seems to be relegated to a creepy looking side character. The shady organization also seems to reach a far larger scope than the Japan-centric Teiai Group of the manga, apparently managing to get its hooks into people from across the world. Even things that you wouldn’t think warranted changing ended up getting changed, like the name of the ship they end up on, Espoir in the original and Destiny in the film (and no, Espoir is not French for Destiny).

       Then there are the fantasy sequences, which are explained in the film as PTSD-inspired hallucinations. Fantastical imagery is actually in line with the original Kaiji, as FKMT uses it often to visualize character’s mental states. A character in the depths of despair might be shown being dragged down into a swamp for instance, or somebody on the upswing might be climbing the broad side of a mountain. To our director Han Yan, this has convinced him that he has carte blanche to just throw in whatever he wants whenever he wants. So you have the kind of classic Kaiji moments, and then you have characters literally becoming monsters every few minutes. I can understand the argument for throwing Liu Qing or coma mom into the story as adding an emotional core to the film (although the original story did fine without them), but who is the minutes long dream sequence with Kai-si fighting monsters on a train while dressed as a clown with more slow motion than a Zack Snyder wet dream for, exactly? Because as a Kaiji fan, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t for me or people like me.

       Which brings us to the major problem with Animal World in my opinion, which is pointless excess. Nothing is allowed to just be normal in this film it seems, it all has to be grim-dark and badass, in the 14-year old boy sense of the term. So Andou isn’t allowed to just be a man in a black suit and sunglasses, he has to be this tattooed weirdo with no eyebrows. The Destiny can’t just be a cruise ship, it has to look like it was built from the remnants of an oil rig. Oh, and it wouldn’t be Kaiji is we didn’t inject a meaningless 15 minute long chase scene right in the middle like this were the fucking Life of Brian. Even the damn cards used in the games aren’t allowed to just be cards, they’ve got to be covered in gold leaf and overly elaborate design like you pulled it out of Harry Potter’s asshole. What’s the point? The way that Kaiji was done was fine as it was, proven by the fact that it’s a renowned series that has several adaptations. It pushed the boundaries of believability, but FKMT always kept things down-to-earth enough that the problems and the drama were on point. Here in Animal World, where you can’t even show the concept of time with an image of a watch packed with grinding gears, where it feels like someone slapped a Guillermo del Toro filter on a screenshot from 300, everything feels so ludicrously over-the-top that it just feels tiresome to watch at a certain point. Just smoke a joint or something and calm the fuck down Han Yan, turning a comic book about gambling into some kind of Michael Bay bullshit isn’t going to solve anyone’s problems. I’ve already got enough problems as it is anyway.
   
I’m also not overly impressed with the quality of the acting here. Generally speaking it’s fine, but at points I wonder if Han Yan decided to make Kai-si ‘crazy’ because Li Yifeng only has about three expressions. In a series that is mired in drama, in scenes where we are supposed to be seeing the heights of emotion, Li doesn’t seem able to hit the high notes, so to speak. The actress who plays Liu Qing might be even worse, having only one expression compared to Kai-si’s handful, but since her importance to the plot is minimal I suppose it doesn’t matter that much. I don’t know if Michael Douglas is bringing much to the table either besides star power, but then again I believe this is first time I’ve ever actually seen him in a movie, so I can’t really judge his performance off of his previous work. He may have played a better vaguely menacing villain in another film, I don’t know.

I will admit though, that for a film that smothers the audience in CGI and slo-mo, it doesn’t look too bad. The monsters and special effects look nice and the action sequences, while superfluous, are choreographed and edited well, and are easy enough to follow. I’ll also note that during the moments when it’s not trying so hard I actually grew a bit fond of Animal World’s aesthetic. It reminds one of that period in the swingin’ 90s where movies were grimy as all hell and it looked like everything was dripping with tetanus, like 12 Monkeys or The Basketball Diaries. I can appreciate a director who appreciates my personal aesthetic.

I find myself then at a crossroads. There is a lot of dumb stuff in this movie, and if it ever got a sequel (which the ending does set up for), it seems like it would be going down an even dumber direction. On the other hand I am a huge Kaiji fan, and while the movie does become tiresome at points I don’t think I ever became straight-up bored. So do I discard it for the mess it made, or do I commend it for its creativity? Do I denounce it as a shoddy imitation of something I love, or praise for its unorthodox approach at adaptation? It’s a question I’ll answer immediately in the next paragraph, but believe me that it took a couple days to consider. I’m that dedicated to the job.

In the end, I think I’m giving Animal World the recommendation. Thinking over things, the fact that it managed to entertain me rather consistently across two hours (some movies can’t do it in half that) is ultimately what pushed me to the ‘stupid but fun’ side, in spite of the director’s hyperactive approach to storytelling. You should check out the source material as well obviously, as the manga and to a lesser extent the anime are the definitive versions, but pop this in (or click on it, because I believe it’s netflix exclusive) and you’ll probably have a fun Halloween night. Insert witty closing line about taking a gamble on this movie here.