The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2019)

rating: *****

the story: A young director finds himself thrust into the world of Don Quixote.

review: By some fortuitous twist of fate, I ended up reading Don Quixote by Cervantes, for the first time, not long before finally getting to see Terry Gilliam's torturously-gestated The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.  I don't think it's necessary to have read the book recently, but to have read it at all surely helps explain many if not most of Gilliam's subsequent creative choices for the film.  You might even say that Gilliam's film is a modern updating of the book.

I think the reaction of most critics to the film owes to their ignorance of the book.  I think the reaction of most critics owes to the fact that they really only know the story from the musical Man of La Mancha, whose fifty year existence is something of a drop in the bucket of the four hundred years the book has been in existence (Cervantes was a contemporary of Shakespeare).  Those critics may not know how much the musical departs from the book.  They might not even care.  They might really be convinced that Don Quixote is the story of an irrepressible dreamer.

It is, in fact, Sancho Panza's story.  Sancho is Don Quixote's squire, a peasant from the same neighborhood as the lord whose fortunes have been declining.  Most of the misfortunes that befall Don Quixote, in their subsequent adventures together, fall on Sancho more harshly.  Sancho spends the book doubting Don Quixote's sanity and going along with his flight of fancy mostly because he believes he'll end up with a higher station in life.  At one point he gets to play governor of an "island," something Don Quixote has been promising him as the most likely outcome of their time together.

But what is Sancho's story?  Well, it's much like Toby's.  (Meanwhile, the name of this character in Gilliam's movie is most likely derived from a namesake character in Tristram Shandy, a book inspired by Don Quixote and much later adapted into Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story, which takes a much more literal metafictional approach to adapting the source material.  Toby is also a supporting player in that story, and at least in the book, steals attention as shamelessly as Sancho.)

Toby is the young director played by Adam Driver.  Toby's career sort of peaked early when he made a student film, called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.  He discovers a DVD copy of it by chance, in the present, and he decides to return to the village where he filmed it.  There he comes across the cobbler (Jonathan Pryce) he'd convinced to play Don Quixote.  Only now, the cobbler believes he is Don Quixote.  It's a comparable development to how Cervantes first set Don Quixote on his path of knight-errantry.

But Toby is driven, like Sancho, mostly by ego.  Going on the road with Don Quixote has nothing to do with believing in his quest.  As with Sancho, Toby doesn't believe for a minute that the cobbler is really Don Quixote, and the audience is given a concrete reason to sympathize with him.  As in the book, the character of Don Quixote becomes the very colorful window dressing the story uses to follow Toby's doubt, and how by the end he begins to believe.

So in short, the musical is about belief, while the book and this new movie are about doubt.

Toby's life is complicated by the fact that the main producer (Stellan Skarsgard) of the commercial he had set out to make when he becomes plunged into the world of Don Quixote, is something of a tyrant.  (A character no doubt inspired by Gilliam's ridiculously complicated production history.)  And the producer's wife (Olga Kurylenko) keeps trying to have an affair with him.  And the girl Toby cast as Don Quixote's beloved Dulcinea has reentered his life as well, and keeps instigating him to look beyond his cynical outlook.  She disagrees that his student production ruined her life.  But their further relationship clarifies around the cobbler's adventures, and the story ends up coming full circle.

As I've said, most of the story beats in Gilliam's film come directly from Cervantes' book.  Most of Gilliam's films throw their main characters into bewildering journeys, and sometimes the bewilderment becomes the viewer's as well.  I think Toby provides a clear center, his perspective easy to understand, whether or not you see all the parallels with the book, the departures and many elements missing from the musical. 

It actually becomes ironic, that we're once again living in an age like Cervantes'.  A real argument could be made that what Don Quixote was really about was Cervantes complaining that his contemporaries no longer valued or understood the literature that he himself still cherished, which in his case as with his main character was chivalric fiction.  Critics today, by their bewilderment of this film, admit that they have no real knowledge of the book itself.  (Makes you really wonder when you read any review that claims, "the book was better.")  Gilliam's instincts are well-established.  His last movie, The Zero Theorem, was pretty straight-forward but a lot weirder by design.  He never sets out to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote weird for the sake of being weird (probably Tideland is the benchmark in Gilliam's work for that).  It's probably his most straight-forward movie ever!  Even The Fisher King makes you wait to find out what happened to Robin Williams.  Here you know everything you need to almost right from the start, and the story becomes, as with most stories, waiting to see how things turn out.

Driver is perfect as Toby.  I know there were many actors cast to play the character, and Don Quixote for that matter, over the years, but in the film as it ended up, it's difficult to imagine anyone else being able to lose himself in the role.  Johnny Depp, at the time he was cast, had yet to break out as a true character actor, and so still retained his dreamy persona, when not sporting scissors for hands.  Don Juan De Marco is an excellent example of Depp in his prime at that point in his career, and is similar to Don Quixote (a man who believes he is in fact the celebrated lover).  Driver is able to sell the ego-driven Toby, the would-be lover, and the man who becomes completely overwhelmed by his later experiences, and finally someone capable of taking on, yes, the impossible dream, without ever making any of it feel like a caricature.  It's a performance that needed to be grounded.  By all rights, it's a career-defining performance, in Gilliam's, at long last, career-defining film.

My favorite Gilliam movie, before this, was The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.  I'm still working on fully appreciating Brazil.  Arguably The Fisher King will remain his most accessible movie, and Twelve Monkeys will be the one the cool kids like.  But The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a movie he tried making for a quarter century, is quite literally a movie only he could make, in a career of movies only he could make.  We live in an age where the idea of the remake is anathema, even as we never quite scoff at mere adaptations.  But storytelling is always about retelling stories.  The best stories are those that continue to resonate, even if a few details have to be updated every now and then, because they are continuously relevant.  Gilliam includes Muslims and even Russians in his version. Muslims were in fact integral to Cervantes' version as well, and that's just one of the many ways Gilliam helps resurrect it.  I think Toby's arc, from being lost in his own life to allowing himself to be lost in someone else's, is the whole point.  In the movie, as in the book, there are characters who think they'll make things better by attempting to do so cynically, mostly so they can mock Don Quixote.  But what Toby discovers is that the better version of himself, the one he can live with, has finally cut himself free from doubt.  He no longer views Don Quixote as crazy.  This isn't an impossible dream.  It's about finally refusing to make compromises, and just doing something.  Somewhere along the way, the spontaneous Toby who made the student film stopped existing.  The course he set the cobbler on was the opposite one Toby took.  This is a story of how they meet up again.

Anyway, it's also a damn good film, beyond anything else.  You don't need to try and take life lessons from it.  Things work out for Toby.  The end.