The Wholly Family

Terry Gilliam – 2011 – Italy 
  

Shot in Naples, The Wholly Family returns Terry Gilliam to the ornate and boisterous Italian environment inspired by his beloved Fellini, on display most patently in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989).  A family of three explores a populace bazaar while on vacation; one of those vacations that seems much more like a stressful nightmare than any type of relaxing holiday.  Problems of temperament and communication are at the forefront, underscored by the fact that the father seems British, the mother Italian and the son American.  Like the willful and rebellious children in other Gilliam films, the boy refuses to leave the marketplace without a small doll that he covets and eventually steals after his parents refuse to buy it for him.  That night, he dreams of the doll coming to life and leading him on a series of frightening and enlightening adventures.  Gilliam’s stylistic trademarks like fish-eye lenses, (possibly due to budgetary constraints), are spared here in favor of Cocteau-like surrealism.  Imagery and situations derived from Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories are overt, as they have been throughout Gilliam’s career; in Jabberwocky (1977) most obviously, but also in Time Bandits (1981) on through The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (2009), in which characters always pass through some type of portal into a dimension of mind and dreamscape.  The film demonstrates the healing power of dreams and a family being made ‘whole’ by an acceptance of this power.  Many Gilliam films end in conundrums, which are read by cynical critics as foundations for sequels, but which are intended by Gilliam to indicate that cycles always repeat themselves, that every apparent resolution is also the spark of a new journey.  The Wholly Family might seem slight and affected in a way, and it is certainly not the substantial feature we so desperately need from Gilliam, but a short by him is still profoundly more interesting and rewarding than the forgettable and flimsy movies that populate the multiplexes, festivals and art-houses.