3) The Wholly Family
The Pythons are no strangers to the world of corporate collaboration. From Bird’s Eye Peas to toothpaste the team made some of the best corporate videos around. However The Wholly Family is a project borne out of the best kind of sponsorship – one which includes a free reign for the filmmaker. Garofola pasta funded Gilliam’s twenty-minute odyssey into the weird and wild world of a child’s selfish, unstable Id and it is a tiny masterpiece.
There are some beautiful images here, as always with Gilliam, but the ground beneath our feet begins to turn against us as the film goes on and we are caught in its web as the darkness descends gently. Like Spike Jonze’s film I’m Here, made with Absolut, there is no product placement here (in one scene it could be argued that there is quite the opposite happening), instead we have an unfettered Gilliam at play with all the wonders that brings with it.
His next movie is The Zero Theorem, and it is still looking for a distributor but is a fine film, Gilliam seems to have been refreshed by his experiences with The Wholly Family which you can watch below.
