The Magical Treasure of ‘Baron Munchausen’

We wouldn’t really want to be children again. Mumps. Chicken pox. First day of school. Big dogs. But to find the world an adventure, an astonishment. Believable again. Who wouldn’t want that?

That is Terry Gilliam’s gift: He spins his yarn about an elegant old duffer who has waltzed round and round through the air with the goddess Venus, who has been to the moon and has the moon dust in his shoes to prove it and we are his, our eyes as round as the fullest moon.

Children won’t know that “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” (selected theaters) is the most sophisticated vision imaginable. That a treasure-chest of references--from movies, old and new, animated and otherwise; from the history of art and from music and mythology--is being spilled out for them. That their imaginations as well as their funny bones are being tickled and that, actually, they are being taught to prefer the beautiful to the gaudy, the perfect to the shoddy. (You hate to think what the Care Bears will look like after “Munchausen.”) Children will simply accept the movie’s magic matter-of-factly, the way they do a book by Maurice Sendak or a movie as effortlessly fine as “The Black Stallion.” They don’t yet know how great a present it is, and that’s probably best.

The rest of us have no such stake in keeping our cool, and from its very first minutes, “Munchausen’s” witty splendor is reason enough to lose ours. In an unnamed European city under siege from the Turks in the late 18th Century, a very tatty theater company is attempting to tell the miraculous adventures of a semi-fraud, Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, the Baron von Munchausen.

The Theater Royal itself, backstage and onstage, is enough to hook us: There is an enormous sea monster with sea-blue-green scales who might have swum straight out of Sendak and seductive mermaids (the most seductive Uma Thurman from “Dangerous Liaisons” and Valentina Cortese, in the first of their double roles). Suddenly, just as we are entering a Turkish harem, the performance is interrupted by a tottering old gentleman (John Neville) who says he is the baron himself.

To prove it, he will save the city from the siege and set a few facts about himself straight. But to do this, he needs his four friends: Berthold (Eric Idle), the fastest man alive; Albrecht (Winston Dennis) the strongest; Adolphus (Charles McKeown) the most farsighted and Gustavus (Jack Purvis) the most leather-lunged.

Only the spirited Sally Salt, 10-year-old daughter of the troupe’s impresario, believes him, but she’s enough for Gilliam: The adventures are off and rolling. Salt is played by Sarah Polley, a marvelously feisty, blessedly un-cute Canadian actress who seems to have been raised oblivious to any child-acting cliches. A perfect foil for the richly classic shadings of Neville’s Baron, Polley is irresistible. (Kids will recognize her at once as Ramona Quimby, from the splendid PBS series based on Beverly Cleary’s “Ramona” books.)

And so we glide back into the harem again, which this time is “real,” staffed by Fellini-esque harem ladies so pinkly voluminous they appear to be made out of folds of salt-water taffy. It’s the domain of a cheerfully lethal Sultan (Peter Jeffrey), and the consequences of a bet he makes with Munchausen are the bombardment of the city.

That is how things began, Munchausen explains to a skeptical audience. If he can leave the besieged city and seek out his four invaluable friends, he will raise the siege. And so, in a hot-air balloon made from the silken knickers of the town’s ladies, and with Sally, who has secretly stowed away on board, Munchausen soars off, to hover between faith and disbelief, reality and illusion, old age and virile manhood.

“He won’t get far on hot air and fantasy,” sneers his nemesis, the Right Ordinary Horatio Jackson (Jonathan Pryce, terrifying behind his Three Blind Mice glasses), chief bureaucrat of the city. Ah, but how wrong he is. Those are exactly the qualities the world needs a shot of--and that movies soar upon.

(That, and money, and how ever much this extravaganza cost, it is, as they say, all up there on the screen a thousandfold. Frankly, it is beside the point of this film, anyway, not its big news.)

The baron is a terribly reassuring hero. Not all of us have adjusted to the Age of Reason, no matter how long it’s been upon us. For those discombobulated by astronauts and space stations, who can barely manage daylight savings time and who are put off by an invention with more moving parts than a fly swatter, the baron is our man.

And Gilliam is our man too. Ironically, he has harnessed the most advanced side of movie technology to make poetry, not hard-edged hardware. To give us a shimmering, tide-rippled moonscape, littered with giant heads like some silent De Chirico vista; to offer a theater that Piranesi might have etched, an angel of darkness that Goya would recognize.

But its best moments go straight into our filmic unconscious, as unerringly as “The Thief of Baghdad” or “Pinocchio” or “Moliere,” to create new pockets of wonder. There are the King and Queen of the Moon, whose heads and bodies can be--and frequently are--separated: reason and carnality, nicely differentiated. If the king, “Ray D. Tutto” / Rei di Tutto / King of Everything, sounds madly familiar, it is an unbilled Robin Williams, creating his own amazing universe.

There is the baron’s dalliance with no less than Venus herself (Uma Thurman, naturally), who has stepped daintily out of her Botticelli clam shell. The sight of them, waltzing upward into the sky, attended by angels whose wings flutter like hummingbirds, is enough to make steam shoot from the ears of her hairy husband, Vulcan (Oliver Reed, also naturally).

And more and more and more. But it is “Munchausen’s” theme, that in the face of logic and reason, there is still a place for the imagination, that is its greatest gift. “We cannot fly to the moon. We must face facts. We must live in the modern world,” gloats archvillain Pryce.

For all those whom the modern world unsettles slightly, there is Munchausen. And small, sturdy Sally. And, thank the Lord, Terry Gilliam, captaining his magnificent artisans: production designer Dante Ferretti, cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, costume designer Gabriella Pescucci, special effects man Richard Conway, editor Peter Hollywood and composer Michael Kamen. And whoever it was who persuaded Munchausen’s horse to sit.