Don Quixote (2000)

Starring John Lithgow and Bob Hoskins. Aired on TNT in 2000.

When I was a grad student at UCLA I used to see John Lithgow walking his dogs on campus. He seemed somewhat approachable, and knowing he was starring in a new version of Don Quixote that was going to air on TNT, I decided to pitch an interview with him to the Los Angeles Times, for whom I had done some freelancing in the past. To my surprise, they bought the idea. Armed with an actual assignment I talked to Lithgow’s publicist, who set up a lunchtime interview for me during the upcoming press junket.

I went to Lithgow’s suite at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills and we walked down together to the restaurant. Quick side note: On the way down the hall we passed another suite where someone was doing press interviews. Lithgow asked who it was, found out it was Tobey Maguire, and decided to pop in and say hello. I waited in the hall.

Anyway, we ended up at the restaurant, where I enjoyed some very good crab cakes and conducted a woefully inept interview. Well, maybe it wasn’t that bad, but even though I had been a newspaper reporter I did not have much experience in the celebrity interview department. But Lithgow was congenial and patient with me, the piece ran in the Calendar section of the Times, and I got a check along with lunch at the Four Seasons.

So what do I think of the film?

If you click on the link above you’ll notice that the story I published was not a review. I wasn’t there to critique the film. Lithgow asked what I thought of it and I told him I liked it. And I did, but I wasn’t blown away. I found the acting a little too mannered for my taste, the Duke and Duchess too benign, the pacing a bit languid and the tone occasionally too reverential. But no film of Don Quixote gets it exactly right; every reader has his own idea of how the book should play on the screen and no film is going to please everyone 100 percent.

But I do use clips from this film when I teach Don Quixote because there’s a lot that I like about it. For starters, the language. My students sometimes complain about how Bob Hoskins portrays Sancho; they find his cockney accent distracting or inappropriate. But I love it. I like how the simple difference in linguistic register signals an important fact about Don Quixote and his squire: they come from the same town, but one is a gentleman, and the other is an illiterate peasant laborer.

The Setting. Although never explicitly mentioned, from the costumes you can tell the film is set in the 19^th century. Some might have a problem with this; if you’re married to the idea that Don Quixote is the product of a particular time and place, then taking him out of the 17^th century might seem to be one liberty too many.

But really, why not set it in a different time? We've all seen Shakespeare adaptations in modern dress and there is precedent for doing the same with Quixote: Orson Welles gave Don Quixote a modern setting in his doomed production. But another reason for moving the setting to the 19^th century could be to simply make it that much more obvious to modern viewers that the armor-clad Don Quixote is very much a fish out of water.

Point of View. I like the way the film visualizes Quixote's madness. This is a clear contrast to what many other films do. Usually, when Don Quixote attacks the windmills, the audience sees windmills. See for example, this clip from the 1991 Televisión Española production staring Fernando Rey and Alfredo Landa:

http://youtu.be/IVJEo92sy48?t=2m48s

We only know what Don Quixote is seeing based on his own description. But the Lithgow film shows us what Don Quixote sees.

http://youtu.be/VuIUnw1_8X0?t=15m31s

This approach puts us in Don Quixote’s head. We understand his madness from experiencing it instead of just witnessing it.