Freelance Subversion: Jabberwocky

Part 1 of a look at the movies of Terry Gilliam. 

In 1977, the members of Monty Python are in a weird space between Holy Grail and Life of Brian. Michael Palin and Terry Jones have just made their successful first series of Ripping Yarns, while John Cleese is in between series of Fawlty Towers and in the process of divorcing Connie Booth. Eric Idle has done Rutland Weekend Television, is getting ready to do a Rutles movie, and has hosted Saturday Night Live. Meanwhile, Graham Chapman, the Python who notoriously fared worst as a solo act (despite being the group’s best actor), is getting ready to write, produce, and star in a comedy film called The Odd Job which is so obscure that I’d never heard of it until I checked Wikipedia five minutes ago.

Meanwhile, Terry Gilliam attempts to start his solo directing career with Jabberwocky. Unfortunately for him, his first solo movie gets marketed in America as Monty Python’s Jabberwocky. Gene Siskel’s scathing review of Jabberwocky seizes on that aspect of the marketing when he declares the movie “suitable for those who like unfunny comedies.” Certainly if you watch Jabberwocky as a comedy, you’re going to have a miserable time. The jokes only make up about half the movie’s runtime, and many of them jut out awkwardly from the bits where the plot happens. Some of the jokes are very good — the scene where King Bruno promises his daughter the west tower only for the tower to immediately disintegrate is a knee-slapper. The whole ending is a very solid and incredibly bleak joke. But Gilliam didn’t do himself any favors by starting his solo career with another jokey medieval fantasy film featuring Michael Palin, Terry Jones, and Neil Innes (nor does he ever seem to learn his lesson). Add some executive incompetence and bad marketing into the mix, and it’s remarkable that Terry Gilliam has directed 11 more movies since Jabberwocky.

But Gilliam has been a terminal contrarian his whole life. He’s not so much box office poison as a commercial suicide bomber. Starting his career with a bleak anti-comedy that makes Holy Grail look like a glamorous vision of the Middle Ages is just what we expect from him. Jabberwocky is an extremely grimy and bloody fairy tale with crepuscular lighting that could well have influenced David Lowery’s The Green Knight. The skeleton of many of Gilliam’s later movies are here. Jabberwocky looks at the same fables that Disney treated as escapist and goes “gee, wouldn’t you hate to live in this kind of story?”

The protagonist, a cooper’s son named Dennis (played by Michael Palin), lives in a time of knights and monsters, but he’s more interested in stocktaking than adventures. He spurns the beautiful Princess who falls in love with him for a fat girl who couldn’t care less if he got eviscerated by a Jabberwocky (spoiler warning: Gilliam’s gender politics will never improve). He becomes the story’s hero purely by accident, and when he gets the fairy tale happy ending, it’s a nightmare for him — the antithesis of the tedious middle-class life he really wants.

That ethos is where the Lewis Carroll influence really shines through — the perspective of “don’t fables reflect our nightmarish adult world?” And it’s one all the characters buy into. The royalty have no interest in the wonders unfolding around them. The peasants are gluttonous, selfish, and insane. And the knights in shining armor don’t seem to have any kind of identity whatsoever. Everybody has a fairy tale on their doorstep, and they ignore it in favor of tedious adult bureaucracy.

It’s a bit miserable. The joy Gilliam’s later movies derive from fantasy isn’t quite fully formed. That approach which falls somewhere between Jan Švankmajer and Hieronymous Bosch won’t really show up until his next movie. Jabberwocky wants both fairy tale life and the adult world to be miserable. This isn’t a problem as such — in Brazil and The Fisher King, we’ll see Terry Gilliam treating escapism as both crucial and toxic. But in Jabberwocky, he’s still figuring out how to articulate the central argument of his career. The result isn’t totally awful. The good jokes are there, the Jabberwocky itself is a great bit of monster design, and some shots could easily be mistaken for Rembrandt paintings. But we’ll have to wait until his next movie to see Gilliam’s self-contradicting, bizarre, frustrating, and ultimately self-critical worldview on full display.