The Man Who Killed Don Quixote

Synopsis: Toby (Adam Driver), a director of TV commercials, is in Spain making his latest ad when he stumbles across a copy of his student film about Don Quixote which was shot in a nearby village. Curious, he goes to the village where he discovers that the man he cast as Quixote (Jonathan Pryce) many years earlier has since come to believe that he is the hero of Cervantes' novel.

Although Terry Gilliam is a director with as many misses as hits on his C.V. it is never because of lack of ambition. Looking over his roller-coaster career one can only say that it must be exhausting being him. Indeed in this regard his latest offering one which as he is nearly eighty years old, may well be his last, is a very personal reflection on his life in film.

Gilliam has long been trying to film the Cervantes novel with its iconic hero, a man who like Gilliam himself, refuses to accept mundane reality for what it is but rather transforms it with the fervour of his romantic imagination.  As the title suggests, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is not and this is very much Gilliam, a straightforward transposition of the novel but rather a tangential interpretation of it.  

Gilliam and co-writer Tony Grisoni have reworked the material from the original film to incorporate their failed 1999 attempt,  an attempt which was to star Jean Rochefort and Johnny Depp and whose sorry production history was portrayed in the 2003 documentary Lost in La Mancha. The result is a loose-jointed, time-bending narrative, one that is punctuated with slapstick antics and eventually wrapped in the kind of Baroque spectacle that recalls the films of Peter Greenaway, through which one can discern a satire of, and meditation on, the seductive power of film and the film-making industry.

As the director’s Swiftian alter ego Toby, aka “The Man”, Adam Driver plays his role with gusto whilst Jonathan Pryce does a marvellous job as Quixote, the vitality of their interactions surmounting the erratic  nature of the story of a man trying to make amends for the unintended trouble he instigated when as a young idealistic film-maker he filled the isolated villager's head with impossible dreams.  Production designer Benjamín Fernández and cinematographer Nicola Sancho Pecorini  make the film, which is far from being a cheap production, look very good.

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is so evidently self-referential (the less patient would say self-indulgent) however that without a director’s commentary much of the intended meaning will be lost, at least on a single viewing. As such it will be of interest to Gilliam fans. Those unfamiliar with the director’s work may well be struggling to make head or tail of this chaotic, highly idiosyncratic film.

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