"The Brothers Grimm": Trapped in a Fractured Fairy Tale
In Terry Gilliam's wildly inventive new movie, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, fairy-tale purveyors to the world, find themselves caught up in a magical story not unlike one of their own. Well, sort of.
The real Grimms were young German law students who in the early 1800s began devoting their time to the collection of Teutonic folktales and legends. Their first book, "Children's and Household Tales," published in 1812, contained 86 such stories; a second volume, published two years later, added 70 more; and over the course of several subsequent editions, the total grew to more than 200. Among these sometimes dark and gruesome narratives were the now-familiar children's yarns, "Hansel and Gretel," "Cinderella," "Snow White," "Sleeping Beauty" and "Little Red Riding Hood." The brothers went on to become university professors and to publish a number of other joint works, including a collection of nearly 600 German legends. They were serious and widely esteemed scholars.
As presented to us in "The Brothers Grimm," however, these two historical figures are virtually unrecognizable. In Gilliam's telling, they are traveling con men, wandering from one grubby village to another persuading the superstitious inhabitants to hire them to ward off witches and other demons that have suddenly started terrorizing the local countryside — nonexistent entities that the brothers, here called Will (Matt Damon) and Jake (Heath Ledger), have actually fabricated themselves, with the help of their behind-the-scenes assistants, Bunst (Richard Ridings) and Hidlick (the delectably skeletal MacKenzie Crook, of "Pirates of the Caribbean"). As fake apparitions fly through the air, the Grimms ward them off with blindingly shiny "evil reflecting" armor and exotic nostrums. (Witches, they tell the rubes, must be "shot through the heart with the tears of a child.")
Will has no use at all for notions of magic and enchantment, except as fodder for his scams. The more mild-mannered Jake, however, is a secret believer. Their traveling quack show comes to a halt one day when they encounter a village that truly is cursed — its tenderest maidens are mysteriously disappearing — a forest that actually is enchanted and a smart and tough-minded country girl named Angelika (Lena Headey), who might not have much use for magic herself, except that she can see that it exists all around her.
The story is set in the time of the Napoleonic wars; France has invaded and is occupying Germany, and the local French governor, a supercilious general named Delatombe (Jonathan Pryce), is determined to stamp out the sort of superstitious nonsense the Grimms are perpetuating. To put an end to their activities, and possibly to them, he dispatches his comically vile Italian henchman, Cavaldi (Peter Stormare), a man who proudly styles himself "a master of the torturing arts."
In the movie's production notes, Gilliam notes that in making the film, he sought to illustrate the cultural clash between the rational values of the Enlightenment, represented by the French occupiers, and the primordial beliefs in myth and magic that permeated the peasant worldview. (Gilliam is clearly a believer himself.) It's a clever idea, and the director has filled the picture with some wonderful things: a horse that swallows children, a torture chamber equipped with a string quartet and, most strikingly, an ancient queen (Monica Bellucci) whose legendary beauty exists only in her mirror — away from it, and deprived of her periodic draughts of the blood of small children, she's a hideously desiccated, corpselike crone. The look of the movie's squalid terrain — the grim rain, the mud, the maggots, the ratty town squares — is pure Gilliam; and while not all of his conceptions work (there's a slime creature that looks like the Pillsbury Mud Boy), there are other images — a woman licking a toad, tree roots growing out of a man's mouth — that'll stay with you. (As will, no doubt, the sight of Angelika slitting and gutting a dead rabbit, then matter-of-factly squeezing the blood from its carcass.)
Thus described, "The Brothers Grimm" sounds like a spectacular wonderment. In fact, though, it's a slog, an out-of-control fantasy that's strangely unenchanting and, in the end, rather tiresome. The story is played like comic opera, with Peter Stormare, that past master of (sometimes delightful) overkill, projecting his broad, vaudeville-style rants as if he were trying to convey them to the back rows of a very large theatre. And while Damon and Ledger give their all in playing the leads, they come across, at times, as goofy cut-ups — they seem to be having more fun than we are, and we can't figure out why. (In addition, Damon, stockier than usual here, and longer-haired, bears an odd resemblance to the comic Eddie Izzard — who would have been an interesting addition to the cast.)
Terry Gilliam is well-known to be an extraordinary filmmaker with an inspired visual sense. But this movie appears to have slipped out of his control, and in the end, the visuals — as inspired as they often are — can't save it.
—Kurt Loder
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