STUDIO: Sony
RELEASE DATE: April 8, 2008
STARRING: John Neville, Eric Idle, Sarah Polley, Uma Thurman, Oliver Reed, Jonathan Pryce, and Robin Williams (uncredited)
WRITTEN BY: Charles McKeown and Terry Gilliam
DIRECTED BY: Terry Gilliam
FEATURES: Audio Commentary with Director Terry Gilliam and Co-Writer/Actor Charles McKeown
"The Madness and Misadventures of Munchausen" Documentary
Storyboard sequences
Deleted Scenes

At a cost of nearly $50 million, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen was far over budget and one of the most expensive movies to date, when released in 1988. It’s also the film on which its notoriously ambitious director, Terry Gilliam (Brazil, 12 Monkeys), managed to evade many of the studio’s usual restrictions and follow his muse just about as far as it would take him - for better and for worse. But due to studio personnel shake-ups, the film was grossly underpromoted and bombed at the box office, despite an epic, adventure-heavy storyline and positive reviews for its limitless imagination and visual splendor. Twenty years later, a new edition DVD allows us to examine this beautiful mess with some much needed perspective.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen starts in an unidentified, European city under Turkish attack during the Age of Reason. Although surrounded by a battle, a theatre troupe is putting on a play about the exploits of one Baron Munchausen. They’re soon interrupted by a sword-wielding, elderly man, in full military dress, who claims to be the Baron himself (respected, English stage actor John Neville). He begins telling the audience his own stories, but is cut short by an assault on the theatre and then decides it’s his duty to save the city. So he ventures out in search of assistance from his old gang of oddly talented associates, including a man of superhuman strength, one of limitless lung capacity, a marksman with infallible aim, and the world’s fastest fellow (Eric Idle). His journey takes him to the ends of the Earth, thrusting him into some absurd situations: a card game in the belly of a sea monster, tea with the Gods in the mouth of a volcano and a dance with Venus (Uma Thurman) in a ballroom of waterfalls. He even visits the Moon, where he spars with its king, played by a script-bending and uncredited Robin Williams. But with the Grim Reaper (literally) hot on his heels throughout, the aging Baron seesaws between displays of great courage and thoughts of giving in to death. Tagging along with him is Sally Salt (Sarah Polley, at eight years old), a stowaway whose family lives in the city and remains in danger. An unusually pure and innocent character in Gilliam’s universe, she’s intent on keeping the Baron inspired and focused.

The film is based loosely on the tall tales surrounding the European folk hero Karl Friedrich Hieronymous von Munchausen, a German baron who fought the Turks and was famous for embellishing wildly when relating his many accomplishments. And like the stories from which it takes inspiration, within Gilliam’s movie, it’s never clear which adventures the Baron has lived and which are figments of his overactive imagination. In fact, it goes further and keeps us guessing as to which events are taking place in the present and which are retellings as the Baron remembers them. And visually, the film is careful to paint all such scenes with the same, dreamlike palette. From the art direction to the effects, from the costumes to the makeup (all of which were nominated for Oscars), Gilliam always reaches one step beyond that which we’re used to seeing. After all these years, Munchausen still looks stunning. It holds up, in part, because its look comes not from digital effects - which can quickly date a film - but from ambitious, physically constructed set pieces, contraptions and creatures that don’t really require any modern upgrades.

True, the plot is convoluted and at times, confounding. Ok, much of the irreverent humor, reminiscent of a sloppier Monty Python (of which Gilliam was a member), falls flat. And yes, for a film built on childlike wonder, 127 minutes feels unsuitably lengthy and slaved-over. Yet despite all this, the film succeeds because Gillian’s imagination is, as always, working overtime. Just when those issues threaten to dull the movie, along comes another fantastic sequence, more fanciful and outrageous than the last. The movie is far from perfect, but its willingness to try anything, in order to continually outdo itself, keeps us engaged from start to finish.

The Twentieth Anniversary Edition DVD celebrates the milestone with appropriate fanfare. The accompanying documentary is one of the best added features I’ve seen. It manages to track down nearly all of the primary players involved with the making of this film, each adding their own take on the grueling Italian shoot, which was plagued with bad luck and a lack of studio support, nearly falling apart numerous times. Some of the stories are whimsical, some painful, and a few even conflict with one another, leaving the truth fittingly undetermined. At seventy plus minutes long, it also goes deep into the nuts and bolts of budgeting and producing a film, which is downright fascinating. Audio commentary from Gilliam and co-screenwriter Charles McKeown is included as well. Gilliam, though known for taking his work very seriously during the process, takes it surprisingly lightly in retrospect and it’s a blast to hear the two of them revisit things. Some serious observations and insights are made here and there. But for the most part, the two joust playfully, alternately crediting and blaming one another for the film’s successes and failures. And upon watching the movie’s open-ended, puzzling climax, both openly admit to no longer recalling what, if anything, it was intended to "say." Funny. One complaint I do have is that it doesn’t sound as though the audio has received any improvements. There are a moments - whether the result of poor sound design, awkward writing or just thick accents - when I can’t quite make out what a character is saying. But that’s a minor complaint, especially considering it’s unlikely that clearer dialogue would streamline the film’s purposefully nonsensical storyline anyway.

Like most of Gilliam’s films, Munchausen is meant to be about the magic of the cinematic experience. Beyond that, not much else is dictated for us; it’s as if he expects our imaginations to meet his halfway. That sort of movie stands as an anomaly in a modern industry that is frightfully cautious in terms of allowing its filmmakers to take creative and financial risks. It’s rare that a visionary such as Gilliam gets to see his ideas come to fruition. In fact, budgetary clampdowns would subsequently foil his attempts to complete two other ambitious projects: Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (the last of which was detailed in the documentary, Lost in La Mancha). It’s for these reasons that The Adventures of Baron Munchausen feels like a film worth treasuring today, more than ever.