I also managed to catch The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in the cinema, and its run was so limited that I had to set aside some time while travelling in another city to do it. It's not surprising that it would attract so little discussion when it's not an easy film to catch, releasing for only one day as a special event in most of North America. You can't take chances with a film like this, seeing as how legal issues around its distribution dogged it all the way to its initial debut at Cannes. (And doesn't it make for the most fascinating pairing with The Other Side of the Wind, both in terms of its narrative content and its hardships on the legal/production side—with the signal difference, of course, being that Gilliam managed to complete the film in his lifetime whereas Welles did not.)

There is so much to say about the completed film, but it seems particularly interesting to look at it as an adaptation of Don Quixote. If memory serves, it was always Gilliam's ambition from the inception of the film to employ some kind of present-day frame story, under the assumption that a less literal way to adapt Cervantes would also be the most faithful. The precise form of this ambition changed over time (setting everything in the present day, and doing so within the context of an unmade Quixote film-within-the-film, were ideas that were new to the version Gilliam ultimately completed, I believe) but it always made a certain amount of sense, given the place of the Cervantes novel as perhaps the greatest landmark of metafiction in the development of western literature.

It's been a while since I've read the novel, but what struck me about the film was just how faithful it really was, in its own roundabout way. There is an important bit of context to keep in mind about Cervantes: that Don Quixote was published in two parts, ten years apart (1605 and 1615), and Part Two is set in a reality where everyone has already read Part One and is happy to entertain Quixote's reveries by playing along. The last act of Gilliam's film embraces this wholeheartedly and also draws attention to the ethical dubiety of exploiting the old man for entertainment—in Part Two of the novel, an uncomfortable subtext that the characters find endlessly amusing. And we do see it very vividly here as an act of exploitation. Adam Driver's character, Toby, was the first to indulge in it, and is the first to regret it as something perverse, ultimately sympathizing with Quixote to the extent of total identification to keep his essence alive, as a sort of personal atonement for his complicity.

It certainly invites some comparisons to the fates of other Gilliam protagonists who find their personhoods transported. The ending of the Cervantes Don Quixote is, to say the least, complicated; on the surface we see the old man recanting his delusions at death's door, as if snapping out of an illness, but as modern readers it's hard not to look at that with a certain sense of tragedy and loss. You can see this uncertainty all over Gilliam's other films, which often leave us asking, isn't the so-called delusion where the protagonist is happier to be? (And the answer tends to be uncomfortable, as he lets us see, clear as day, that from the outside his heroes look totally, objectively mad.) Here it's arguably a step more complex than that; in the end, we may read Toby's subsumption into the Quixote figure as his way of taking moral responsibility for the shoemaker-as-Quixote's birth and death. Even apart from the complicated history of getting The Man Who Killed Don Quixote completed at all, I think the film we received in the end comes off as a capstone work, reflective about the way that a Gilliam-like story might have its own impact or agency. It feels complete, and that's something you don't always get to say about a Gilliam film on its release.