Freelance Subversion: Time Bandits

With Life of Brian out of the way, Terry Gilliam had partially unshackled himself from Monty Python. He was unable to bring his masterpiece Brazil to the big screen, but he was free to focus on his own movies. He’ll come back to Python in 1983 for The Meaning of Life, which is the movie most influenced by the Pythons’ solo careers, but from now on, he’ll be an artist in his own right rather than just the Monty Python cartoonist. Gilliam is Python’s Peter Gabriel, the member who goes off and does weird, antagonistic art for an audience who knows his new stuff better than his Python work (granted, he splits Peter Gabriel duties with the equally wayward John Cleese). When he does return to Python, it’s like an old novelist reuniting with his college buddies. He doesn’t have a Spamalot moment, infusing one of his old hits with some new clever, fun bits. From this point on, Terry Gilliam is a forward-looking director.

At least in theory. Gilliam can’t stop himself from co-writing a movie with Michael Palin. And it’s hard to blame him. Aside from being a notoriously lovely chap, Palin is Python’s second best writer. Time Bandits benefits enormously from Palin’s influence. It’s consistent in character, theme, plot, and tone, an enormous leap in quality from Jabberwocky. While Time Bandits explores a lot of the same ideas as Jabberwocky, it feels more like a movie you can show your kids for fun than one you’d show them as punishment. For the first time, Gilliam directs a classic on his own terms, rather than splitting duties with Terry Jones (like in Holy Grail), or feeling like he’s putting a demo reel on the big screen (Jabberwocky).

Time Bandits has an all-timer of a premise (a step up from Jabberwocky, which only narrowly has a premise). Kevin, a young boy in the English suburbs, is whisked away from his miserable life by six dwarfs who are fleeing their boss — who is God  — after stealing a map that allows them to travel time and space. Unlike the Doctor who stole a Tardis and ran away, the dwarfs aren’t interested in seeing the wonders of the universe. They don’t even know the history of the universe they helped create — Napoleon and Agamemnon are unfamiliar names to them. The dwarfs only want to rob the whole universe blind. The cosmos is their Treasure Island — damn the safety of the young boy in their care.

Like its predecessor, Time Bandits scoffs at the idea of heroes. Kevin, ostensibly a fairy tale hero, is more interested in his books and violence than human suffering (as poor Shelley Duvall and Michael Palin find out). The dwarfs are mostly sociopathic upstart criminals. Ian Holm’s Napoleon is too busy giggling at violent puppet shows to accept Castiliogne’s surrender. Robin Hood (who of course is John Cleese) is a phony leading a gang of gratuitously violent Merry Men. Even Sean Connery’s Agamemnon, the only person who treats Kevin with any kindness, casually orders summary executions and leaves Kevin alone in the end. The people in charge aren’t going to save Kevin from mortal danger, or show him how to be a man. Time Bandits is mean — the movie equivalent of running into a museum and tipping over statues.

But Time Bandits’ most galling target is the greatest hero in fiction — God himself, or the Supreme Being, naturally played as a fusty schoolmaster by theater deity Ralph Richardson. In Time Bandits’ Gnostic mythos, the creation of the world was, as Randall the dwarf puts it, “a bit of a botched job, you see. We only had seven days to make it.” God delegated the creation of greenery to the dwarfs (making them another set of venal bureaucrats in the Gilliamverse). You can definitely see the similarities to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy here — an experimental world goes wrong, a protagonist is uprooted from banal contemporary English life and transported across the cosmos with the non-help of a lousy textual guide. Life of Brian never treated God and creation with this kind of disdain.

Evil, of course, is much worse. David Warner plays Evil as a mildly insecure but ferocious technology nut (like Hitchhiker, digital watches come up). He’s something of a Tolkien villain, betraying Gilliam’s Luddite tendencies with a deference to banal technological progress. The horror of Good, to Gilliam, is its utter toothlessness against Evil; an unwillingness to appreciate the thrills and possible adventures of the universe. Kevin is wide-eyed with amazement at the world around him, something none of the adults seem to appreciate.

Gilliam is a romantic at heart, a lover of adventure with little regard for the human consequences (as we’ll see in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen). Time Bandits is great fun, and Gilliam’s first good movie, but it’s not saying much beyond “the world is a bit shit, isn’t it?” Maybe his next movie will have a little more to say. Time Bandits, like its MacGuffin, is a map to the big holes in the world. But really, if that’s not what you want from a Terry Gilliam movie, you probably should stop reading this series.