Adventures Of Baron Munchausen, The (Blu-ray)

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"The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" is the kind of film I could get really enthusiastic about . . . for about as long as the Baron's adventures stay tethered fairly close to Earth. Once the teller of fantastic tales takes a trip with a young girl to the moon and meets a gigantic man there with a detachable head, well, for me that's when things start to go a little off-kilter, until things circle back for a slam-bang ending.

Then again, we're dealing with Monty Pythoner Terry Gilliam and his pal Charles McKeown, two guys who were also collaborating on the screenplay for "Brazil" around the same time that they were crafting "Baron Munchausen," so you know that weird is just going to go with the territory.

And the territory here is the world of the imagination.

Sally: "Where are we going?
Baron: "To the moon."
Sally: "That'll take ages.
Baron: "No it won't. The king and queen are charming. Their heads are detachable, you know. You do believe me, don't you?"
Sally: "I'm doing my best."

There was a real Baron Munchausen, a dandy-looking young nobleman who fought the Turks in the 1740s and was renowned for telling elaborate tall tales about his adventures--some of which involved escaping from the moon by cutting the rope at the top to attach it to the bottom, riding cannonballs to their destination, or dealing with a cloak that's gone daft and is taking the rest of his wardrobe with it. Rudolph Erich Raspe first codified the stories for the reading public in his 1895 book, The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, but Gilliam says in one of several substantial bonus features that it was a 1961 Czech film by Karel Zeman, with its combination of animated illustrations and live actors, that inspired him to take it to another level with all live-action.

I can't even wait for the "video" section to report that for a catalog title that's 20 years old, there are sequences in "Baron Muchausen" that look as pristine in Blu-ray as films that were made last year. The colors, the level of detail are all gorgeous in some scenes. But there are others--much like the inconsistency in the scenes themselves--where there's a graininess that makes it look like quite another film.

Still, "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" is full of enough jaw-dropping visuals, Pythonesque lines, and celebrations of storytelling and belief that it's no stretch of the imagination to recommend this title. It just won't be for everyone. Children, for example, might think that severed heads rolling are a bit much to take for any PG-rated film, and the flights of fantasy can seem awfully random and nonsensical to young minds. Heck, even old minds might wonder why certain things are occuring as they are. When that happens, just remember that "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" is a flight of fancy and a film devoted primarily to visual effects.

The plot is relatively simple: the Turks are bombarding a European city about the time that the actual Baron lived. It's a strikingly surreal AND realistic opening, with plenty of weary or shell-shocked faces among the walking wounded. In the midst of all this turmoil is a statue of the Baron that has been broken, and playbills announcing a performance of the Baron's adventures by The Henry Salt & Son players. Make that daughter, with Sarah Polley playing Sally Salt and Bill Paterson her flamboyant father. Their performance is a joy to watch in all its period splendor, but it's interrupted not just by the cannonballs that crash here and there, but by the intrusion of a dazed but persistent character (John Neville) claiming to be the REAL Baron Munchausen. What's more, he tells them that he's the reason for the war, and proceeds to tell them a convoluted story of how he came to incur the rage of the Sultan (Peter Jeffrey).

Like "The Wizard of Oz," which cast actors in dual roles as figures in both "real life" and fantasy, this film does the same with the Henry Salt players, who also appear in the Baron's fantasies. Or is the play the fantasy and the fantasy the reality? Whatever the case, the Baron and his "servants" with superpowers are the most fun to watch in this 127-minute outing. Eric Idle plays Desmond/Berthold, who's so speedy that he has to wear a large ball and chain to keep him from moving about too quickly. When he does, it's like a Speedy Gonzales or Road Runner moment, and played just about as wacky. The other troupers are Winston Dennis as Bill/Albrecht, Jack Purvis as Jeremy/Gustavus, and Eric Idle as Desmond/Berthold, whose powers cover a full range of things: super eyesight, super hearing, super strength, and the ability to shoot a wondrous gun at unimaginable distances.

"Baron Munchausen" held my children's attention until they lost sight of the plot, and that occurred not coincidentally about the same time as the Baron and stowaway Sally take off on their own adventure, leaving the super-servants behind. When Robin Williams appears as the king of the moon (and Valentina Cortese as his Queen Ariadne), the production design is stunning, but it all gets a bit too much like "Alice in Wonderland." Either you're going to like this voyage into Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum-dom, or you're not. Dads will perk up when Uma Thurman appears as Venus, sans clothing (all tastefully done, mind you), but when the Baron is hobnobbing with the king and queen of the moon and the god Vulcan, it feels like we've gone a little too far from the initial trajectory of the tall tales. The humor, too, feels less biting during these sessions, less like something you'd see in a Python hold. When the Sultan is ready to off the Baron and asks if he has any famous last words, the Baron replies "Not yet," to which the Sultan says, "'Not yet'? Is that famous?" Good stuff. The closest we get to that kind of cleverness is when the king of the moon says, "I think, therefore you is."