director
Terry Gilliam
screenwriters
David Webb Peoples
Janet Peoples
based
on the short film La Jetée by
Chris Marker
producer
Charles Roven
cinematographer
Roger Pratt
music
Paul Buckmaster
editor
Mick Audsley
cast
Bruce Willis (James Cole)
Brad Pitt (Jeffrey Goines)
Madeleine Stowe (Dr. Kathryn Railly)
Jon Seda (Jose)
David Morse (Dr. Peters)
Frank Gorshin (Dr. Fletcher)
Christopher Plummer (Dr. Goines)
Christopher Meloni (Lt. Halperin)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 129m
u.s.
release: December 27,
1995
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other terry
gilliam films
reviewed on this website:
- the
brothers grimm
- fear
and loathing in las vegas
- the fisher king
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James Cole (Bruce Willis),
the desperate hero of 12 Monkeys, has been sent from the
21st century -- say, around 2025 -- back to the twilight of the
20th century. His mission is to gather information about the
virus that will break out in 1996 and kill 99% of the world population
by 1997. Cole is supposed to arrive in late 1996, right before
the outbreak, so that he can discover how it started and deliver
his findings to his 21st-century employers, who will use his
information to begin research on a cure. (They don't expect him
to save the world from the virus; they know the outbreak is inevitable.)
But instead of landing in 1996, Cole lands in 1990, where, of
course, he starts raving about his mission and is locked up in
a mental hospital.
So far, this sounds a bit like The Terminator, in which
Michael Biehn dropped in from the future to do battle with a
robotic killer and was similarly waylaid by authorities who found
him delusional. But 12 Monkeys has a lot more going on.
The director, Terry Gilliam, specializes in fantasies that can
be viewed either literally or as the characters' own delusions
-- or, at least, as expressions of their psychological states.
Gilliam's cult classic Brazil is the obvious example,
but you can also see it in all his other movies: The Fisher King, his previous film, with
Robin Williams as the homeless man driven mad by his wife's murder,
who constructed an elaborate medieval fantasy out of his anguish;
Time Bandits, with the little boy who dreamed about visiting
storybook legends and came rudely back to earth, where his home
was in flames; and even Monty Python and the Holy Grail,
which Gilliam co-directed, in which the knights "rode"
not on horseback but on coconut halves they clacked together
to simulate the sound of hooves. 12 Monkeys is far from
the "Bruce Willis in Outbreak 2" thriller you
might expect, and overall it's Gilliam's best film since Brazil.
But all his movies are both brilliant and flawed (the brilliance
and the flaws are often inseparable), and in this case -- I never
thought I'd say this about a Terry Gilliam movie -- the flaw
is his over-attention to the plot.
12 Monkeys was written by David Webb Peoples (who worked
on the scripts for Blade Runner, Unforgiven,
and Hero) along with his wife Janet, taking off from the
1962 short La Jetée by Chris Marker. Judging from
his produced scripts thus far, I'd say Peoples has a gift for
structure; his themes come together with a neat click when you
mull them over later. I don't think Terry Gilliam was a wrong
choice for this tidy script -- he was probably the only right
choice, since the screenplay's concerns intersect so smoothly
with Gilliam's. But Gilliam's strength (and weakness, in terms
of narrative) has always been mess, chaos. He demolishes context,
replacing it with the nightmare logic of clutter; he puts baffling
things on the screen, and you don't know why you respond, or
how you respond -- you just do.
Gilliam, who started as a cartoonist
and contributed animated bits to Monty Python's Flying Circus
before he began directing, is a master of sour visual hardware-surrealism
(a klutzy label, I know, but Gilliam resists labels). His style
is best described as antique-futuristic (perhaps one reason that
his weakest film, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,
fell flat; it was just antique). 12 Monkeys has futuristic
trappings, all right, and when Gilliam cuts back to 1990 or 1996
he gives us his own baroque vision of modern craziness. But the
text itself isn't always fertile enough soil for Gilliam's inventiveness
to bloom. Visually, much of the movie is cold and brackish in
an undifferentiated way: 1996 doesn't look much worse than 1990,
and Gilliam doesn't show us much of the 21st century except the
junky interior of a prison, which Cole takes off from and keeps
returning to. The futuristic scenes in 12 Monkeys are
what Brazil might have been if it had never left the teeming
Ministry of Information building.
In 1990, the institutionalized Cole meets two people important
to his 1996 destiny: Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), an imbalanced
wacko (even his eyes are crooked) with dozens of conspiracy theories,
and Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), a psychiatrist who
studies the "Cassandra complex" -- the delusion that
you have seen the horrors of the future and can do nothing about
it because no one will believe you. Dr. Railly tags Cole as a
textbook Cassandra; Jeffrey looks at Cole and recognizes a kindred
spirit. Gilliam bounces us back and forth between three time
periods, and the movie gets a bit too clever and plot-centered;
the plot is just elaborate scaffolding for Gilliam's delusion
theme.
In 1996, Cole kidnaps Dr. Railly,
who gradually begins to believe him, and they try to track down
Jeffrey, who is now an animal-rights activist turned terrorist
-- part of an underground group called the Army of the 12 Monkeys.
Jeffrey is rebelling against his dad (Christopher Plummer), an
eminent virologist; Cole suspects that Jeffrey plans to steal
a virus from his father's lab and uncork it, killing off the
humans and letting the animals take over. There are also flashbacks
that might be flash-forwards -- they're flashes, anyway, and
they hint at something dark. 12 Monkeys isn't hard to
follow, but sometimes it seems that too much of Gilliam's energy
is spent trying to keep things clear for us, taming the wild
time-tangle of the plot. In a simpler plot (and Brazil
really had no "plot"), Gilliam is free to tear the
fabric of logic and stitch the tatters into a crazyquilt all
his own. 12 Monkeys is more like individual, dazzling
quilt squares that Gilliam shows you one at a time, so that you
don't get confused.
Yet within those squares, Gilliam is free to doodle and embroider.
In this movie and The Fisher King, he disproves once and
for all the old, false charges against him as a graphic artist
who lets humans recede into the design. It might be a coincidence
that the three main characters here correspond almost exactly
to three of the main characters in The Fisher King, and
Gilliam's actors here deliver performances of comparable depth.
Bruce Willis (like Jeff Bridges' self-hating shock-jock) is wounded
and vulnerable; Madeleine Stowe (like Mercedes Ruehl's strong,
responsible video-store clerk) is low-key and logical until circumstances
force her into angry action; and Brad Pitt, in the Robin Williams
holy-fool role, is a revelation -- this is his second solid performance
of 1995, after Seven,
and I'm daring to hope that his blank-stud days are behind him.
Watching him pose and pout over candelabras and horses in Legends
of the Fall or Interview
with the Vampire, you'd never dream Pitt had this Gilliam-esque
wingnut in him. As in his other films, Gilliam calls time-out
so that his characters can pause to appreciate pop culture --
Fats Domino, Hitchcock. This is where Gilliam's soft artist's
heart comes out: Unlike Quentin Tarantino, Gilliam doesn't drop
pop-culture references for a goof or a tickle, but to illustrate
art's redemptive power.
Again and again, Cole finds himself up against people who don't
believe his story; after a while, he himself doesn't believe
it, and resigns himself to the fact of his delusion. 12 Monkeys
flips back and forth after this -- the movie, unlike Brazil,
doesn't end with an icy "And it was all in his head after
all" parting shot -- but the idea of Cole faltering in his
mission and thinking it's all a mind trick is uniquely unsettling,
as I'm sure Gilliam means it to be. It's a common metaphysical
dread that, say, Angel Heart fumbled: What if everything
that seems to be happening to you -- the life you experience
as reality -- is in fact your delusion? Terry Gilliam, as a primarily
visual fantasist, must place singular importance on his senses
-- not only his eyes and the way he sees, but his whole set of
artistic antennae and what they pick up.
Well, what they pick up is
pretty strange: Gilliam's art doesn't look like anyone else's.
Artists who scare us with stories about unreliable perceptions
are really inviting us into the way they perceive things, and
letting us know how lonely and frightening it feels to look at
the world and see what no one else sees; this, I think, is the
true heart of 12 Monkeys, despite the plot apparatus.
All artists have their delusions, and the lucky artists -- the
geniuses -- can forge imagination from delusion. In 12 Monkeys,
Gilliam's images -- a mental patient in a tux and pink bunny
slippers; a lion prowling atop the ruins of the city; the barcodes
tattooed on Cole's grimy flesh; the metal-intestinal hell of
buildings crammed with air vents -- tweak parts of you that you
didn't know were there. And this, as I said, in a plot-heavy
movie that gives him comparatively little room to doodle. Gilliam
has taken on a conventional Hollywood sci-fi thriller with big
stars and turned it into his own rough beast. 12 Monkeys
confirms his status as the leading movie fantasist of his generation.
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