It would be a shame if Gilliam bowed out after finally completing this, the very epitome of the concept of development hell. First conceived in 1989 and only getting around to pre-production in 1998, the film suffered the deaths of two of its leads, the departure of numerous others, flooding destroying sets and no end of financial setbacks. It speaks well for the director's determination that he never gave up and it's consequently a pity that the fruit of so many years of toil is such a muddle.
The nominal storyline involves Adam Driver as a film director trying to make a commercial in Spain with a Don Quixote theme. After revisiting a nearby village where he shot a film about Don Quixote as a student, he finds himself sucked into a series of surreal episodes increasingly blurring the line between the story of the errant knight and reality, following an elderly local (Jonathan Pryce) who he cast as the titular character in his student film and now believes he actually is the character he played.
So far, so The Fisher King, and full licence for Gilliam to throw everything including the kitchen sink at us in terms of wild imaginings. Which becomes just too much, although ironically that actually ends up achieving the purpose in the sense that it becomes the story of a man on an obsessive quest, confused by the sheer weight of reality. The Quixote story becomes the Gilliam story. Perhaps he's got it out of his system at last.
5/10
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