The Man Who Wasted an Opportunity
[Light spoilers for The Man Who Killed Don Quixote]
I don’t want to be too hard on Terry Gilliam.
The guy’s obviously gone through a lot in his attempts to adapt Don Quixote for the past nearly 30 years, and it’s evidently a miracle The Man Who Killed Don Quixote even made it to theaters for me to see. And it’s fun, it’s interesting in places, it has lovely performances, and I think it thinks it’s saying something about the nature of identity and storytelling and filmmaking. It’s about a commercial director who once made a student film about Don Quixote, who travels to the same village years later to learn that the man he’d plucked from shoe-making obscurity to play the lead is now convinced he is the medieval knight, and recruits the director as his squire, Sancho Panza. “Wow, that’s meta,” I hear you say. The thing is, it’s not nearly meta enough.
If you’re unfamiliar with the story of Don Quixote, the original is a novel by Miguel de Cervantes from the early 1600s about a scholar who reads too many chivalric romances and decides to go knight-erranting as Don Quixote. He sees the world as he believes it should be, and thus he fights windmills he believes to be giants and rescues prostitutes he believes to be damsels. Much of the cultural legacy of Quixote is in the value of a certain type of madness, an attempt to turn an excess of realism on its head and celebrate a worldview that has an influence by being the change it wants to see. So naturally, it is ripe for metatextual play, and in fact the film version of the musical Man of La Mancha embeds the tale in a framing narrative of Cervantes telling the story himself while imprisoned, as a means of inspiring in a time of political upheaval.
So in a film that is about an actor who believes he IS Quixote, who inveigles a wayward film director into being his squire, I saw opportunity for a wide ranging commentary on storytelling, filmmaking, the line between the narratives we tell ourselves and madness, and Gilliam’s own journey in trying to make this very film. It seems made for that kind of story in a way something like Adaptation frankly was not, in the sense that the very narrative he’s trying to adapt bring reality and storytelling into sharp relief. It was an opportunity to do something like 2005’s Tristram Shandy, itself based on another PoMo-before-Modern-was-even-a-thing novel by Laurence Sterne in which the nature of adapting the unadaptable is faced head-on. I don’t mean that The Man Who Killed Don Quixote had to be deep, but I did expect it to actually make use of the elements it had set up.
But apart from having adapted Quixote, there is almost no connection between the filmmaker, Toby (played by an always exceptional Adam Driver), and the themes of madness and storytelling. At least, not in the sense that the film ever seems to get around to saying anything about his position in society as a teller of stories. And while Jonathan Pryce is a very good Quixote, we never really learn anything about what embodying this fictional knight has done for his life or his sense of self. In fact, I know no more about the characters of the original OR the adaptation than I did at the beginning. It’s a romp, to be sure, and not unenjoyable. But when the very text you’re adapting contains such rich fodder for an exploration of the value of telling tales, it seems remarkable un-self-aware.
