The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989)

 The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989)

Baron Munchausen: You do believe me, don't you?

Sally: I'm doing my best.

Hieronymus Carl Friedrich Baron von Münchhausen (1720 –1797) had a rare blessing bestowed upon him, not unlike King Arthur and John Chapman (AKA Johnny Appleseed), he was a real person who looms large in our culture, yet all his sins are forgotten because his legend is so rich and full we don’t want it spoiled with messy realities; or as Münchhausen himself said (or supposedly said) “I have ever confined myself to facts.”

He was a distinguished soldier who, after his retirement from the service, became a businessmen with a reputation for honestly but was still better known for the great he pleasure took in telling unapologetically exaggerated stories of his adventurous youth battling the Ottoman’s for the Russian Empire. His reputation as a teller of tall-tales was so great that in 1785 librarian, scientist, and jewel thief Rudolf Erich Raspe “borrowed” them for his most famous literary work, “The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen” -- though it is unclear if any of Raspe’s tall-tales are in away way related to Münchhausen’s tall tales. Either way, Münchhausen seems to have not minded. (Raspe himself went on to inspire a larger-than-life fictional character, Herman Dousterswivel, in Walter Scott's 1816 novel “The Antiquary”). The stories were borrowed again, and embellished still further, when translated in German by Gottfried August Bürger in 1786.

So, the evolution of the tales of Baron Munchausen is really a celebration of our love of the marvelous, and an uncynical statement that we prefer that marvelous to cold truths any day of the week. This subject was irresistible to director Terry Gilliam, and his film version (one of a dozen or so dating at least back to the 1930s) embellished the wonderment far beyond what anyone has done before or likely to do ever again.

One of the joys of this film is not merely it's flawlessly eye-popping special effects extravaganza, delighting the audience with the demonstration of the impossible, but that it’s smug about it – it throws its own impossibility in our faces. This is not a Science Fiction vision telling us to expect this will really be some day, nor a historical film convincing us that this was the way the past really was. “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” tells us were being lied to, and then seduces us to choose bold face lies over illusions of truth. Tall tales are different than other fantastic fictions, in the adventures of the Star Ship Enterprise would never include an episode where one of the Baron's friends, the fastest runner in the world, speeds from Turkey to Spain and back in an hour to fetch a bottle of wine and save the Baron's neck. In “Star Trek” they’d “invent” a transporter technology to justify the impossible instead of just letting it be. Like the impossible needs to be justified! The Baron has an answer for that, “Your reality, sir, is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever.” There is tremendous freshness in all this, because spaceships and alien worlds are so abundant that they are now taken for granted, but once dusted off by Gilliam, castles and sultans and horses and knights, shine anew.

Gilliam described it the conclusion of a trilogy: "Time Bandits" (1981) was about childhood. "Brazil" (1985) was about adulthood. "Baron Munchausen" was about old age. Conscious of this, critic Hal Hinson articulated the film’s deepest accomplishment best, “As a director, Gilliam is a genuine novelty -- a fire-and-brimstone fantasist. His assault on the senses is relentless; he never lets up, never gives us a chance to catch our breath. Visually, the film...is miraculously, almost perversely dense...Gilliam's fantasies aren't light. His dream universe has gravity. If it's a place where men ride through the sky on cannonballs and sail to the moon, it's also one where the flesh sags.”

And wow, is it cluttered with this stuff.

The opening screen credits tells us the time is ''Late 18th Century, the Age of Reason, Wednesday.'' We are in a European city is under attack by the Turks, and doom is inevitable, but a theater group valiantly soldiers on. The troupe leader is Henry Salt, played by Bill Paterson, but of greater import to the story is his precocious daughter Sally, played by Sarah Polley.

If the barbarians at the gate were not enough, there are heckers in the audience. During a performance of a play about the fictional adventures of the always-truthful Baron Munchausen, an old man interrupts and claims to be Hieronymus Karl Frederick Baron von Munchausen and that the play-write got the whole thing wrong. He’s played by John Neville, who gives one of the films really standout performances, a perfect mixture of dashing and decrepitude, and as a man who has some experience with wonder, takes the film’s accumulating bizzarities with casual stride. The old man launches into his own version (and a long flash-back), with every word he seems more alive and virile as he explains how, as the result of a wager with the Grand Turk, played by Peter Jeffrey, he set in motion the events that led to the current crisis at the walls.

The interrupter is interrupted by cannon fire and Munchausen becomes a tired old man again. He goes backstage to meet death – quite literary, and death is an awesome and scary sight to behold. But Munchausen has already captured the heart of young Sally, and she stops the icy hand of the grim reaper:

Sally: Are you all right?

Baron Munchausen: Am I dead?

Sally: No.

Baron Munchausen: Blast!

Sally: Who are you really?

Baron Munchausen: [groans]

Sally: Baron Munchausen isn't real, he's only in stories.

Baron Munchausen: Go away! I'm trying to die!

Sally: Why?

Baron Munchausen: Because I'm tired of the world and the world is evidently tired of me.

Sally: But why? Why?

Baron Munchausen: Why, why, why! Because it's all logic and reason now. Science, progress, laws of hydraulics, laws of social dynamics, laws of this, that, and the other. No place for three-legged cyclops in the South Seas. No place for cucumber trees and oceans of wine. No place for me.

But Sally convinces him to go on living because in her naïve innocence she’s believed everything and is convinced only he can save the city.

He agrees to do just that but to do so, he must reunite with his superhuman companions: Berthold, played by Eric Idle, the world’s fastest man, Adolphus, played by Charles McKeown, a sharpshooter with extraordinary eyesight, Gustavus, played by Jack Purvis, a little person with extraordinary hearing and tremendous lung capacity, and Albrecht, played by Winston Dennis, the world’s strongest man. To find them, he must first escape the hopelessly surrounded city, which he does in a feat the proves the most believable of all his accomplishments during the film -- he stitches together a balloon made out of ladies' undergarments and flies away.

Sally: You look different, younger.

Baron Munchausen: I always feel rejuvenated by a touch of adventure. For heaven's sake, don't you get any younger or I'll have to find a wet nurse.

Recovering each of his companions is an adventure in-of-itself. Oh! the wonders that unfold. He meets a few Gods, like the Goddess of Love Venus, played by Uma Thurman, who makes a great entrance in a half-shell, and the God of War played by Oliver Reed, who is both imbecilic and explosively jealous (literary explosive).

He travels to the moon to meet those greater than Gods -- the giant King, played by Robin Williams (listed in the credits as Ray D. Tutto, huh?). He provides the film’s second really standout performance, channeling all the magic anarchism of his standup into a truly bizarre character. Both he and his Queen, played by Valentina Corteseas, have detachable heads able to spin off into the sky on their own. Why? Well as the King explains, in hilarious pidgin Italian, he’s fleeing his carnally obsessed body, "I've got a galaxy to run, I don't have time for flatulence and orgasms."

Their escape from the moon, again necessitated by the Baron inspiring jealousy, is one of the most wondrous sequences, they return to Earth by climbing down through the void, using the same two lengths of rope again and again, the markings of a celestial globe gracefully sliding behind them.

Oh, what else?

Well, there’s a sea monster so huge that after the Baron is swallowed by it, he finds a community of people living quite comfortably in the extra space in its belly. There's the waltzing in the air bit. The battle with the Sultan’s troops. Ah, there’s just too much to list.

And though the technology in 1988 was nowhere as advanced as it is now, there can’t be even ten films in the intervening years that approach this one’s visual magic. Gillam’s background as an animator, model-maker, and live theater director are evidenced in the complete command of every composition, and the tactile-ness of every invention. And his collaborators behind the camera are more in evidence than those before it, like Fellini's longtime cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, production designer Dante Ferrettihas who would become favored by Martin Scorsese and shape films like “Gangs of New York” (2002), and Richard Conway who at the time of this production had just come off “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (1984) and surpasses that previous accomplishment.

As the episodes unfold, it seems that everywhere the Baron goes, someone wants him dead -- but they are all very good natured about it. You know they’ll be fast friends again come the next encounter. The only really villainous villain is a bureaucrat named the Right Ordinary Horatio Jackson, played by Jonathan Pryce, who is so stern in his insistence on maintenance of the unremarkable that he has one heroic soldier, played by Sting, put to death for being extraordinary heroic.

It’s in the conflict between the Baron and Jackson that the film’s satire is most explicit, and I’ve got to admit, those elements don’t work so well. The club-footed propaganda against the ideals of the Enlightenment do nothing but demonstrate the Gilliam, who has lived his whole life lived in liberal Democracies founded on Enlightenment ideals, and reaping the benefits from both their wealth and stability, slept through those classes in graduate school that explained what the Enlightenment actually was (notably, he says this film takes place in the Age of Reason, but all the internal evidence suggest its actually takes please 100 years later). This film is decidedly anti-Hobbes, more clearly pro-Voltaire, but remember, Hobbes, lacking much in a sense of fun, was a man regarded by his intellectual circle and friends, while Voltaire betrayed his stunning intellect by being cruelly adolescent in all his relationships, mistreating every woman who loved him and every child he sired.

Less philosophically, would it be fair to say that a filmmaker who has cast himself as the savior of magic over the tyranny of the analytical thinking and chooses to make his case through the high technology of cinema is maybe a little bit self-deluding and pompous?

The studio seemed to think so, and this proved to be a problematic production of legendary proportions, damn near ending Gilliam’s career. There were charges of over-indulgence, chaotic shoots, dangerous conditions, and out-of-control cost over-runs. Budgeted originally at $23.5 million it reportedly ballooned to $46 million, which would make it one of the three or four most expensive films ever made. (Gillian has convincingly countered at least some of these charges. According to him, he was promised a budget of $35 million, but then the was a shake-up in the studio and they reneged on $10 million of that promise, and even though he went over that slashed budget, it was nowhere near $46 million.)

The studio then punished this hugely expensive investment with a very limited release and marketing, dooming it to commercial failure despite its accomplishments being almost universally hailed by the critics.

But Gilliam’s not blameless in the film’s difficulty finding an audience.

All three films in his loose trilogy, even his acknowledged masterpiece “Brazil” (which was similarly abused by distributers, but far more successful), suffered from Gilliam’s inability to edit his own vison judiciously. "Baron Munchausen" is a truly rare and bi-polar achievement, I’m certain that there is no other film in history that undeniably had such sore-thumbs passages of confusion and (I have to admit it) boredom that will none the less remain forever treasured by all who watch it.

Hal Hinson again, “Legend has it that Baron Munchausen could swing his sword above his head so fast that he wouldn't get wet in the rain. Gilliam hasn't kept dry, but he's done some heavenly sword work.”

Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtdc4DOKXDY&fbclid=IwAR2_th6XNV1AGtvn6whcvr1oZ_j4qxLrXUZiUQFjRQ1o2Q3mno9-edSUvYQ