Lost in La Mancha (2002, U.S. release)

Written and directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe.
Produced by Lucy Darwin.
Distributed by IFC Films.
93 minutes.

LVJeff's Rating: 7/10

Don Quixote Falling Down

The history of cinema must have seen many failed projects in its time, so why the particular interest in the collapse of the production of Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote? As Lost in La Mancha, the documentary that captured this failure, gets under way, the irony of the situation becomes clear. The story of Don Quixote is about a man who defies his delusions until reality finally sets in. Similarly, Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's film is about a director hell-bent on realizing the vivid work he imagines in his head, only to lose to harsh reality himself.

Fulton and Pepe's original purpose was to film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote's "Making-of" documentary, which was intended to be a special feature on the movie's eventual DVD (following the footsteps of their own The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys). Instead, what they found in their hands was a step-by-step account of how the movie fell apart. Budget problems, schedule problems, and, eventually, events that were dubbed by some as "acts of God" all contributed themselves to the pot of ingredients.

In shaping the story as their own version of the "Man of La Mancha," Fulton and Pepe present an idea more potent on paper than in execution. The individual events that lead to Gilliam's downfall are fascinating enough on their own, but only one of them really lends itself well to being cinematically displayed (the flash flood). The rest of the straws on the camel's back -- ranging from impatient investors to reports from a hospital -- aren't terribly compelling, and some of them feel mercilessly dragged out toward the film's end. As a result, as the energy drains from Gilliam, so too does it drain from the picture.

What does work extremely well, however, is the documentary's portrayal of Terry Gilliam as a man almost childlike in his love for making a movie. Gilliam's joy is infectious as he shoots test footage of rampaging giants, or oversees the creation of props and costumes. No secret is made of the fact that this is his dream project -- it's something he intended to make for over a decade. Fulton and Pepe allow us to watch Gilliam and deeply empathize with him, which makes his ultimate failure all the more heartbreaking. By the time the film ended, I began to envision wishful scenarios of Hollywood execs watching Lost in La Mancha, then immediately phoning Gilliam with the promise of enthusiastic funding.

Lost in La Mancha provides plenty of evidence for how fascinating Gilliam's movie could be. It looks like it could have been positively wild -- imagining Jean Rochefort and Johnny Depp battling giant face-less marionettes is enough to make me hope this project finds a second chance. This is perhaps the greatest value of Fulton and Pepe's film: to make the case for providing visionary directors the resources to make wondrous cinema for all the years to come.

©Jeffrey Chen, Feb. 5, 2003

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