Lost in La Mancha

What happens to a dream deferred? Well, sometimes it goes into turnaround, and the six lousy days of footage you shot of it wind up as filler in a documentary/funeral dirge detailing the terrible downward trajectory of that dream. At least, that’s what happened to Terry Gilliam’s dream, a 10-year-long endeavor to put to film his freewheeling adaptation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Gilliam sought to bring the same kind of peculiar, breathtaking vision of Twelve Monkeys and Brazil to his latest project, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote; instead, that vision was compromised by torrential storms, mud-wrecked sets, not-all-there funding, and a leading man laid up one week into the shoot with a double hernia. Documentarians Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe chronicle all this and more with surprisingly forthcoming interviews with key players, including Gilliam and his costume designer, producer, and assistant director, but none of the actors (who included Johnny Depp and French legend Jean Rochefort). Some of the film footage is interspersed throughout, as well. Gilliam didn’t get very far, but what he got looked stunning: The costumes and set design of the piece are nothing short of spectacular, and the director’s giddy enthusiasm for the project is infectious. All told, the eventual shucking of the project, at great expense (both financially and emotionally), is a bit of a tragedy, at least in artistic terms; yet Lost in La Mancha’s breezy approach somewhat diminishes Gilliam’s loss. Throughout, the documentary is fun and engaging, even whimsical when using (to good effect) illustrations and Gilliam’s own storyboards; but the very fancifulness that makes Lost in La Mancha enjoyable also inadvertently slights Gilliam’s professional loss – a loss, he makes clear, that was quite personal, too. Still, with nothing but vague murmurings of an eventual return to filming in the fall, Fulton and Pepe’s film is the best document we have of what might have been. And what might have been looked great.