Best of Bruce

January is usually the dumping ground for movies the studios have no idea how to sell, and unfortunately, the amazingly good 12 Monkeys seems likely to fall victim to this syndrome. Too arty for action fans, too sci-fi for the latte drinkers, it's not any of the things the hideously ugly ad campaign suggests it is -- some trashy amalgam of The Terminator and Outbreak, featuring Bruce Willis running and Brad Pitt chewing scenery. Rather, it's an uncommonly well-thought-out dystopian fantasy from a couple of masters of the genre, director Terry Gilliam (Brazil, The Fisher King) and screenwriter David Peoples (Blade Runner, Unforgiven), who wrote the script with his wife Janet. It may feature the best acting Willis and Pitt have ever done. It's an outstanding, complex, unclassifiable work and a blessing for those moviegoers daring or curious enough to enter its mind-twisting world.

That world, in Gilliam fashion, is our own, seen through new eyes. Our first glimpse of a city in the not-too-distant future (it turns out to be the ruins of Philadelphia) shows vaguely familiar buildings as snow-covered mausoleums overrun by zoo animals. The human race, what's left of it after a virus wipes out billions, lives underground. Willis is James Cole, a prisoner who is offered freedom if he'll accept a dangerous mission: travel back in time about 30 years, to 1996, and find an eco-terrorist group called the Army of the 12 Monkeys that history records as having unleashed the virus. He's not expected to prevent the outbreak, merely to learn enough about the virus's origin to enable scientists in his own day to invent a vaccine.

As in Brazil, however, the jerry-built future technology is not infallible, and Cole frequently finds himself landing in the wrong past. When he lands in 1990, prophesying the end of the world, he's promptly locked up in an asylum. There he meets inmate Jeffrey Goines (Pitt), whose conspiracy-minded ravings dovetail oddly with Cole's knowledge of the future, and Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), an expert on millennial paranoia.

Just as the understandably skeptical shrink is beginning to accept Cole's story, he begins to entertain his own doubts -- maybe he really has hallucinated the whole plague-ravaged future. Indeed, subsequent trips suggest to him the equally frightening possibility that he's trapped in his own nightmare, or that he himself is actually a catalyst for the disaster. He keeps hearing a raspy voice that tells him he's being monitored by other time-traveling agents and by a bug implanted in his own teeth. As he and Dr. Railly become close, he wonders whether he can evade his captors and keep from returning to the horrifying reality (or psychosis) of the future.

Pitt's character, whose dad (Christopher Plummer) is a haughty virologist, turns out to be the future leader of the Army of the 12 Monkeys. For his madman, Pitt steals from some of the best (Jack Nicholson in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Robin Williams in The Fisher King) and adds his own charisma and wicked sense of humor. Willis shows his talent for keeping his wits about him while taking serious batterings (the secret appeal of the Die Hard films); he gives good martyr. The fiercely intelligent Stowe stays well-grounded as the audience surrogate.

As in Blade Runner, Brazil, and Unforgiven, there is beneath the genre trappings a story of characters who learn, to their horror, that they cannot avoid moral engagement with their corrupt worlds, and that the only hint of redemption lies in unflinching self-knowledge. Gilliam, whose films always erase any distinction between reality and imagination, turns out to be the ideal director for this material. The film is full of his celebrated production design and visual tropes -- wide-angle shots of interrogations, filthy homeless people, witty allusions to pop culture and ancient myths -- but he tones down his usual whimsy and sentimentality to find an unexpected poignance in small moments. There's a wonderful scene where Willis and Stowe are listening to Fats Domino's "Blueberry Hill" on a car radio and Willis's eyes well up with tears. "I love the music of the 20th century," he croaks. If there is anything real, anything durable enough in our civilization to outlast our millennial drive toward Armageddon, it may be such life-sustaining moments as these that we create in our art.

Click here to read more about director Terry Gilliam