Sarah Polley has said that
making 1988's Adventures Of Baron Munchausen was "traumatic." After
watching The Madness And Misadventures Of Munchausen—a riveting, brutally
candid making-of documentary included on Sony's new double-disc DVD set—that
seems like an understatement. For a cast and crew saddled with a spiraling
budget, endless bad luck, and a sinister German producer who comes off like a
cross between Otto Preminger and Uwe Boll, making Munchausen was an experience to be
survived rather than savored. All the madness, drama, and waste did pay off
creatively, though not financially: Munchausen cost and lost a fortune.
But in the hackneyed parlance of show-biz, every dollar is up on the screen in
an exquisite cavalcade of wildly imaginative setpieces dreamed up by Gilliam
and production designer Dante Ferretti, who picked up the first of eight Oscar
nominations for the film.
A massive flop turned cult
favorite, Munchausen casts British stage actor John Neville as a legendary tale-spinner
who joins forces with precocious moppet Polley and reunites with his trusted
band of adventurers to save a city from Turkish invaders. Neville's
preposterous quest sends him spinning through fantastic worlds, from a lunar
wonderland ruled by the disembodied head of Robin Williams to the insides of a
sea creature to the subterranean lair of the Roman God Vulcan (Oliver Reed).
Munchausen presents its fantasist
hero as a glorious anachronism, a proponent of wonder in an age of reason and
rationality. In that respect, he mirrors Gilliam's gloriously old-fashioned cinematic
fantasia, which boasts a retro charm and craftsmanship unthinkable in our
CGI-addled era. A feast for the eyes, Munchausen solidifies Gilliam's
status as a crucial link between the cine-magic of Georges Méliès and the
homemade dream-worlds of Michel Gondry. The script is fortified with Python-esque
verbal humor, but it wouldn't take much tweaking to transform Munchausen into a silent film. Throw
in a naked Uma Thurman at the height of her nubile beauty, and you have a
rambling but irresistibly powerful illustration of what the film's terminally
practical villain (Jonathan Pryce) sneeringly refers to as "hot air and
fantasy."
Key features: The making-of, a less-compelling
but still engaging commentary from Gilliam and co-writer Charles McKeown,
deleted scenes, and storyboards.