Johnny-on-the-spot documentarists Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe trace the crash-and-burn trajectory of Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. (They had performed the same service for the completed flight of his Twelve Monkeys.) A testament to his runaway ambition, this behind-the-scenes peek at the Creative Process offers much of interest to the filmmaker's champions and detractors alike. The latter will not be softened by the parallels drawn between Gilliam and his eponymous hero ("a man charging at windmills"), nor by the parallels drawn between Gilliam and Orson Welles, a grandiose maverick who likewise ran aground on an attempted adaptation of Cervantes (a few tantalizing black-and-white clips are entered in evidence), and who in truth made a habit of running aground throughout his later career. Gilliam's version of the novel evidently was never meant to be a straight adaptation, but rather a sort of Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court in which a modern-day ad man, played by a stringy-haired Johnny Depp, would somehow join forces with the self-anointed knight-errant. Perhaps to his detractors more plainly than to his champions, it will seem utter folly to have put the director of Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, nicknamed "Captain Chaos," in charge of an underbudgeted production on a shooting schedule (in Spain) that allowed no margin for error: "Terry," admits his photographer Nicola Pecorini, "has the tendency of overloading everything." Even so, it is stunning how quickly things fall apart: F-16 jets on training maneuvers spoil the first day's shoot; a hailstorm spoils the second and beyond; and Jean Rochefort, after studying English for six months to do the Quixote role, requires constant medical attention for what at first is suspected to be a psychosomatic malady and ultimately is diagnosed to be a double-herniated disk. Sometimes the absurdity is such as to make you ponder the possibility that the whole project is make-believe and that what you are watching is only a "mockumentary" in the vein of Burn, Hollywood, Burn. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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