Gilliam the Questionable

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Directed by TERRY GILLIAM

Screenplay by CHARLES ALVERSON

and TERRY GILLIAM

Terry Gilliam is one of the Monty Python crowd, and Jabberwocky, despite a title and some quotations borrowed from Lewis Carroll, is, in some respects, a continuation of what was so brilliantly begun a couple of years ago in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Once again the setting is the Middle Ages. Once again the medieval world is seen as all ignorance, blood and excrement. Once again chivalry and romance are viewed as aristocratic conceits designed to make an ugly epoch palatable to the more delicate sensibilities of the time--and to latter-day observers of history.

There is, though, one important way in which Jabberwocky differs from the earlier film. That is in its almost total lack of humor. The fecund inventiveness, the marvelous pace and timing of Grail, the curious blend of earthiness and delirium that gave it its unique place in the history of modern screen comedy, are missing in Gilliam's work.

Oh, he makes some starts in the right direction. He has a dotty King known as Bruno the Questionable. A monster terrifying Bruno's realm is reported to be so horrible that he is capable of turning a man's teeth white overnight. And the story of a cooper's young apprentice, filled with enthusiasm for modern ways, who finds the medieval city no more interested in him than his native village, is serviceable enough--especially as Python Michael Palin plays him.

But Gilliam finds it impossible to sustain, let alone develop anything like a consistent comic tone. In the end, the director is mostly making dour social commentary on the society he invented. He is never able to connect it either with our own or with the historical period that apparently inspired him.

Textures and Details. Gilliam has issued a statement urging people not to compare his movie with the Pythons' work, gibbering on about "textures" and "details," calling Bruegel and Bosch to his side as witnesses to the truth of his vision. But Jabberwocky is not a grand enough failure to sustain such comparisons. It really is marked-down Pythonism, which proves that in enterprises of this sort, several heads are better than one. Richard Schickel

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