Benefit
Bluelighter
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, released in 1988, was a financial failure. It's $46 million budget and notoriously combative director created costly delays and there were apparently some internal studio conflicts that turned the whole thing into a mess. It has, over the years, faded into relative obscurity. Most people today probably wouldn't recognize it, even though it was one of the most expensive films of the 1980s.
Despite all that, the film is good. It's very good. Terry Gilliam has a singular talent for these whimsical, satirical farces; his command of this particular style is so absolute, so profound, that his films end up with an almost lyrical quality. The social satire is sort of incidental in Baron Munchausen, the story of an aged hero known for his tall tales, and takes a back seat to the main thrust of the film, which is basically an old fashioned adventure narrative.
The Baron is a semi-mythical figure plucked from the annals of Russian folklore; he travels to the moon, escapes the belly of a sea monster, dances and drinks with Gods, rides cannonballs and engages in the pursuit of various other odds and ends. His travelling companions are the world's fasted man (Eric Idle), the world's strongest man, a midget with lungs so powerful he can stop an army with his breath and a sharpshooter with eyesight so good he can shoot a target 900 miles away. Of course, the conflict within the film is the impending spectre of old age and how it affects the Baron and his friends who are not what they once were.
Gilliam and many of his Monty Python production cohorts created fantastic set pieces for the films; the effects, though they might look a tad dated, are still spectacular in many scenes; the Baron's arrival on the Moon and his descent from the Moon (he's perched for a time on this eerily beautiful celestial sphere) are especially impressive visual compositions.
It's a shame that this movie is fairly obscure. Gilliam's films are special because there is nothing else like them. They are so wonderfully bizarre, so flippant when it comes to convention, yet they are never (or rarely ever) so bizarre as to alienate the viewer (a typical pitfall of the anti-conventional filmmaker). He can cleverly and shrewdly satirize the world we live in without being afraid to descend into slapstick when it's called for. Baron Munchausen is lighter fare than Brazil, but no less important in establishing Gilliam as one of the best directors of modern cinema.
