director
Terry Gilliam
screenwriter
Ehren Kruger
producer
Daniel Bobker
Charles Roven
cinematographer
Newton Thomas Sigel
music
Dario Marianelli
editor
Lesley Walker
cast
Matt Damon (Wilhelm Grimm)
Heath Ledger (Jacob Grimm)
Peter Stormare (Cavaldi)
Jonathan Pryce (Delatombe)
Lena Headey (Angelika)
Monica Bellucci (Mirror Queen)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 118m
u.s.
release: 8/26/05
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other terry
gilliam films
reviewed on this website:
- fear and loathing in las vegas
- the fisher king
- 12
monkeys
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You'd think a movie called
The Brothers Grimm directed by Terry Gilliam, one of the
leading fantasists in world cinema, would be an occasion for
true sorcery. But I can see no evidence, other than a few glittering
spots of bent visual imagination, that Gilliam was even on the
set. The movie feels thoroughly like a project Gilliam did halfheartedly,
just to stay in the game. The result plays like what might have
happened if Stanley Kubrick had directed an episode of Battlestar
Galactica -- some interesting moments no other director could've
pulled off, but why the hell is he even bothering?
I'm beginning to think that
old-school, quill-pen-and-candlelight fantasy and Terry Gilliam
are too neat a fit, anyway. This director thrives on conflict;
he has often yearned for the old Monty Python days, when they
had no budget for real horses and had to make do with knights
hopping around and clacking coconut shells together. Such a sloppy,
scattershot genius as Gilliam needs something to push against,
some barrier to force him towards a creative workaround, if he
is not to disappear up his own nethers. Two of his best recent
films, 12
Monkeys and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,
had nary a whisper of fairy tales, giants, period costumes, etc.
Maybe Gilliam, like David Lynch, needs stories that aren't
ideally suited to his past strengths, so that he doesn't fall
into easy self-repetition. Gilliam does nothing in The Brothers
Grimm that he hasn't done before, and far better, in such
films as Time Bandits and even Jabberwocky.
The premise, cooked up by screenwriter
Ehren Kruger (continuing his long run of mediocrity after a promising
start with 1999's Arlington
Rd.), has the famous storytelling brothers Wilhelm and
Jacob Grimm (Matt Damon and Heath Ledger) as con artists who
bilk superstitious villagers by fabricating supernatural menaces
and then swooping in to save the day. Naturally, the Grimms are
put to the test when a real paranormal threat rears its
head: various children, including Little Red Riding Hood and
Hansel and Gretel, have gone missing, and the Frenchmen who occupy
Germany want the Grimms to get to the bottom of the mystery.
This has promise, but the movie quickly degenerates into scenes
of Matt Damon and Heath Ledger (the latter of whom is gradually
shaking off some of his earlier stiff mannerisms) rushing around
cluttered sets. As a fantasy, Grimm coheres even less
well than Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,
which I thought was a righteous mess until I saw this
one.
Is it a comedy? A dark fantasy?
Gilliam never pinpoints it, and I'm not sure he wants to. I think
he wants it to be a scruffy, disorganized tall tale, debunking
the great brothers as a couple of fakers and wankers. But then
they're also supposed to rise to the occasion and become heroes
-- Gilliam tries to have it both ways, and it doesn't work here.
A Terry Gilliam movie about the real Brothers Grimm, with
no lame formula thrills imposed onto the biographical material,
might've been something to see and cherish. Instead we get a
hodgepodge only slightly more intelligent than Van
Helsing, and you have no idea how it pains me
to say that.
A couple of bits -- a horse
that unfurls a spider web from its mouth, a girl who rubs her
face off -- are fantastical and disturbing in the classic Gilliam
manner. Probably moments like that were what made Gilliam want
to come to the set every morning. But the rest of it is just
so much wasted, frantic energy. Jonathan Pryce turns up as a
snitty French higher-up, looking visibly bored; the luscious
Monica Bellucci, in spectacular costumes we never get a good
look at, barely makes an impression as the evil Mirror Queen
before she turns into a computer effect. The Grimms themselves
seem lost in their own movie; they're 19th-century Ghostbusters
without the wit. I'm not often shocked any more by the
badness of any given movie -- movies, by and large, suck nowadays.
But this is Terry Gilliam, man, the director of whom I
could never have said that his work, even when flawed and sloppy,
left me bored and irritated. Until now.
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