Master of big fantasy

Calling Terry Gilliam a liar isn’t an insult. It’s a job description. Gilliam is often referred to as a dreamer, but he casts his lot not with visionaries but with frauds and mountebanks, tellers for whom a well-spun tale is its own reward.

It is hard to envision a more perfect match between teller and tale than the one between Gilliam and Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, the Baron Munchausen, memorialized as the greatest liar in history. That in itself is, of course, something of a tall tale, perpetrated by one Rudolf Erich Raspe, who cast the baron as the hero of a series of extravagantly embroidered and thoroughly implausible adventures. But stories, as Gilliam is fond of observing, are more powerful than truth.

“The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” released as a 20th-anniversary DVD this week, stars John Neville as the famous fabulist who swoops in on an 18th century theatrical re-creation of his life and loudly denounces it as a pack of lies -- not because it is untrue but because it isn’t nearly outlandish enough. He proceeds to elaborate a string of fantasies, each more bizarre than the next. He tricks a Turkish sultan out of his treasury, visits the King of the Moon (an unhinged, Italian-spouting Robin Williams) and provokes the ire of the Roman god Vulcan (Oliver Reed) by dancing an airborne waltz with his wife, Venus (Uma Thurman).

Through it all, he is accompanied by a young girl (a 9-year-old Sarah Polley), a petulant, impetuous creature who reels in some of the baron’s more far-flung yarns.

The making of “Munchausen,” related in a feature-length documentary by Constantine Nasr on the second disc, is legendary in its own right, less as a fable than a cautionary tale. Gilliam often says he has been unfairly typed as a profligate madman despite regularly bringing his movies in on budget, but “Munchausen” was certifiably out of control. According to one account, the production was three weeks behind schedule on the first day of shooting.

Fate has dealt Gilliam a series of difficult blows. “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” was scuttled when his Quixote proved too ill to work, and Heath Ledger’s death put a halt to “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.” But Gilliam has a knack for turning adversity on its head. Retaining Ledger’s footage, Gilliam cast Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell as his other-dimensional counterparts. (Incidentally, Ledger’s antic turn in Gilliam’s “The Brothers Grimm” gives lie to the notion that Gilliam dislikes actors. No other director allowed Ledger such giddy freedom.)

In Gilliam’s movies, reason and authority are the enemy, whether it’s the all-knowing bureaucracy of “Brazil” or the calculating city official played by Jonathan Pryce in “Munchausen.” Like “Grimm,” in which Pryce plays a similar role, “Munchausen” is set at the dawn of the Age of Reason, when, at least in Gilliam’s telling, fantasy was stamped out in favor of science and progress, words that are ashes in the Baron’s mouth. When Pryce accuses him of lacking a grasp of reality, the Baron replies, “Your reality, sir, is lies and balderdash, and I am delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever.”

Even Gilliam’s friends have suggested he is hampered by his own mythology, finding windmills to tilt at where there are none. But Gilliam’s ability to craft large-scale fantasies that still retain the handmade feel of a pencil sketch has inspired a cottage industry of books and documentaries exploring his process. (Andrew Yule’s “Losing the Light” is an engaging blow-by-blow of the “Munchausen” ordeal.) How does Gilliam get away with it? Thereby hangs a tale.