'Lost in La Mancha' chronicles a dream snowballing into a nightmare

Friday, February 14, 2003

By WILLIAM ARNOLD
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER MOVIE CRITIC

Movie buffs tend to have a strange fascination with failed or abandoned film projects. It's great wistful pleasure to speculate on what it might have been like to see David Lean's "Nostromo" or Stanley Kubrick's "Napoleon" or a completed version of Erich von Stroheim's "Queen Kelly."

MOVIE REVIEW

LOST IN LA MANCHA: The Un-Making of Don Quixote

DIRECTORS: Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe

DOCUMENTARY

RUNNING TIME: 89 minutes

WHERE: Varsity

RATING: None

GRADE: B

And this phenomenon has been fed by a pair of irresistible documentaries: "The Epic That Never Was," a 1965 look at the footage of Alexander Korda's never-completed 1937 "I, Claudius"; and "It's All True," a 1993 examination of Orson Welles' aborted 1942 film of the same name.

Now there's a third: "Lost in La Mancha," a chronicle of director Terry Gilliam's efforts to make his own version of Miguel de Cervantes' "Don Quixote." Gilliam developed the project for more than a decade but had to abandon it several weeks after the start of production in September 2000.

His film, "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote," was financed by European investors to the tune of $32 million (expensive by European standards) and was to star 70-year-old French actor Jean Rochefort as Quixote and Johnny Depp as a modern ad executive who gets whisked back in time to be Sancho Panza.

But everything that could go wrong on a production did. Actors proved uncooperative, the Spanish desert location turned into a nightmare (and ultimately a flood zone), and when Rochefort got too sick to sit on his horse, the completion bond people moved in to close the company down.

Gilliam, the ex-Monty Python member who directed "Brazil," "The Fisher King" and "12 Monkeys," makes a charismatic focus to the debacle: clownish, conniving, deeply driven, in love with the impossible and living with the grim specter of his 1989 mega-flop, "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen."

The film makes it clear that he went into the project on too thin a financial margin to withstand even one act of God, much less a half dozen, and we also get the sense from watching him in action that there may be something in his obsessive, windmill-tilting nature that invites disaster.

But there's no particular moral to be drawn from the catastrophe: It's a common enough story in today's shaky world of independent filmmaking. And, unlike its two failed-film documentary predecessors, this one is a distinctly sad experience. In the end, it's not much fun to watch a brave artist getting his dream kicked out of him.