Mancha, Mancha Man

Terry Gilliam is a director who has courted disaster several times in making his movies. In some cases, there has been much debate over how much of the troubles were his fault -- see The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. In other cases -- such as the death of Heath Ledger during the production of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus -- the problems have been beyond his control. But never has Terry Gilliam encountered more trouble than he did making The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, starring Johnny Depp.

You've never seen The Man Who Killed Don Quixote? No one has. This cursed production was shut down after only a few days of filming, following a series of disasters you wouldn't think could occur in a few months. And presumably in anticipation of DVD "making of" features, the entire implosion was captured on film.

What results is a documentary, the "Unmaking of" of a film, if you will: Lost in La Mancha. As a narrative, it's a real triumph, because you could scarcely craft a story with such thematic resonance. Terry Gilliam is Don Quixote in this story. Denied the budget for his film in Hollywood, he rounded up one of largest budgets ever for an all-European film, and set out to make the film in Spain. As pre-production begins, we see him tell his department heads that they ought to reign him in when necessary. And then he goes on to ignore them and tilt at windmills.

There are some curses on the film that are out of Gilliam's control: the sudden illness of a major actor, flash flooding at an outdoor location where filming has only been partially completed. And yet you also can see that things weren't all that well planned out to account for even minor problems that would have been reasonable to expect, and you see Gilliam's stubborn refusal to accept any compromises to his vision. Some would say that makes him an artist of integrity, but in this documentary, it sometimes makes him look like a bit of a tyrant.

Indeed, it's a credit this documentary ever saw the light of day, and in this unvarnished form. Perhaps Gilliam was willing to let this all be seen, warts and all, in the hopes that it would generate interest and funding all over again for him to try to make the movie once more. (Which, supposedly, is gearing up to happen now, nearly a decade later, with Robert Duvall now taking on the role of Quixote.)

But while Lost in La Mancha is compelling to those interested in the filmmaking process, it's not the best documentary film on its own. The footage is all shot on handheld camcorders, and cobbled together in the roughest ways. It looks exactly like what it was surely intended to be originally: a DVD special feature. It may run movie length, but it doesn't look or feel like a movie.

If you can accept those terms, then the movie may hold some interest for you. And while it did hold some for me, I couldn't help but wonder if this tale of a movie's undoing might not have worked better as a nonfiction book, rather than going "meta" and becoming a movie itself. I rate it a C+.