A Grimm Proposition
Happily Ever After is pretty hard to find in "The Brothers Grimm." (Film Review)
by Michael Sean McGowan
The Upside: A fascinating failure.
The Downside: Fairy tales gone fairly stale.
There's a scene halfway through The Brothers Grimm where Wilhelm Grimm (Matt Damon) is talking to a tracker in a small German village beset by supernatural forces. "Nothing makes sense in there!" Wilhelm cries, referring to the enchanted forest that envelopes the village. "It's like being inside Jacob's head!"
The Jacob he refers to is his younger brother, Jacob Grimm (Heath Ledger), a former scholar and academic who now follows his brother around from one superstitious town to another, cooking up some fake mystical occurrences, and then conveniently showing up to rid the people of their own fears- and their money. However, Will's statement could also refer to The Brothers Grimm itself, as well as its director, Terry Gilliam. Obviously in just a few words you get the idea that this is not a fact-based account of the brothers whose fairy tales have become literature standards and moral bulwarks, but I doubt anyone is prepared for how inside-out the movie really goes. The basic premise is that the brothers are catapulted into an adventure that becomes a slurry of just about all the Grimm Fairy Tales blended together. This is a clever idea on paper, and the leadership of one of the Monty Python troupe certainly lends hope, but the result is an incoherent babble of half-hearted physical humor, off-the-cuff references, and the kind of larger-than-life brilliance that served Gilliam so well in the coolly superb 12 Monkeys. Think of the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" piece from the movie Fantasia when you watch this movie (if you choose to) and you'll get the perfect representation of what goes wrong- dynamic genius that simply spins out of control and runs amok.
It doesn't help that Gilliam plays the whole contraption like a paint-ball death match: just unload ammo at everything and hope to hell you hit something. He overstuffs just about every frame with his patented "It's just a flesh wound!" tongue-firmly-in-cheek humor and weirdness and keeps the offerings coming. That's the problem- he hurls the goods at us with such from-left-and-right abandon that I didn't want to sit back and enjoy this movie- I wanted to duck. This is the kind of movie that few beyond the writer, director, and a small cult of followers will get while the rest of us just stare at each other with bewildered glances for minutes on end. With nothing to cling to, The Brothers Grimm gets way too weird way too fast (wait until you see a slimy gingerbread man steal a child's face- really...) and there are few if any coherent moments that allow us to take a rest.
The sketchy plot has the swindling brothers finally being captured by Napoleon's army in Germany, lead by a smarmy colonel named Delatombe (Brazil veteran Jonathan Pryce). The French, determined to eradicate the peasant Germans of their superstitions, sends the brothers to a small hamlet where eleven children have gone missing (he's convinced the culprits are other sham artists similar to the brothers). This is where the stew of Shrek-like references begin, only without the clever insight. The primary story is actually a little benign and kind of dull- the kids have been kidnapped by the Mirror Queen (Matrix Reloaded's Monica Bellucci), a vain monarch who, we are told, built herself an impenetrable tower to protect herself from a plague and then was cursed with "eternal life, but not eternal youth." Ehren Kruger's screenplay contains some flair, such as when Will refers to the fake armor the brothers wear into "battle." "It's not magical," he quips, "just shiny." But it's hard to determine just where Kruger stops and Gilliam begins and the result feels like a Monty Python stage performance put on by a bunch of drunken liberal arts majors.
I mention stage because The Brothers Grimm always falls just short of looking as wondrous as the material would suggest. With Sleepy Hollow Tim Burton made the nighttime forest creepy, however Gilliam's set pieces (especially the moving trees) have a lumbering, unnatural look to them. The grainy photography is down-right ugly and the snap-fast editing doesn't do anything to clear up Gilliam's antics.
The most disappointing thing is that after years of being inert, this has to be the movie that gets Heath Ledger to show some energy. Playing the open-minded (and almost naive) Jacob, Ledger scores quite an impressive contradiction- his performance is the most in-tune with Gilliam's beat, however it also manages to stay on course when everything else jumps the track. Looking less assured is Damon (the more cynical Wilhelm) who never quite convinces us he wasn't just dropped into the middle of this during a stint at the SAG awards. Peter Stormare (dude who played the Devil in Constantine), as one of Delatombe's lieutenants who acts as den mother to the brothers, simply babbles in an incoherent accent and fires guns into the air. He's a distraction.
The Brothers Grimm is Terry Gilliam's first film in seven years, his first since the critically reviled Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He hasn't been idle- the documentary Lost in La Mancha chronicled his attempts to update the Don Quixote story into a Johnny Depp vehicle. As La Mancha points out, the project died through no fault of Gilliam's, but only due to almost Biblical scourges of bad luck. Maybe that's part of where The Brothers Grimm goes wrong, too (there are stories floating about numerous production problems). I can't hate a movie like this- it is far too wild and imaginative, and perhaps this is where the consolation prize comes in. When Gilliam succeeds, he creates a masterwork. When he fails, it might not be pretty, but it is interesting. C
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