**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Matt Damon, Heath Ledger, Peter Stormare, Jonathan Pryce, Lena Headey, and Monica Bellucci
Directed by Terry Gilliam & written by Ehren Kruger
2005
118 min PG13
“The Brothers Grimm” is a beautifully-produced mess. Actors run around and scream histrionically in lavish surroundings and costumes, amidst effects that are, if not believable, then at least much more interesting than realism would be. The movie seems to have forgotten the first rule of fairy tales, which is that, no matter how complex and suggestive the underlying ideas might be, the stories themselves are quite simple. “Grimm” is the work of director Terry Gilliam, who up until now has understood this, and has made several films which are quite a lot like fairy tales in their elegance and simplicity. The “Time Bandits” run from one era to another. Hunter Thompson flees from one drug-induced imaginary fear to another in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Baron Munchausen goes from one legend to another. Jonathan Pryce is just trying to get his AC fixed in “Brazil.”
But “Grimm’s” screenplay is overstuffed and jumbled. This is the kind of movie where our heroes are warned “leave your weapons outside the forest!” when their weapons in fact prove to be amazingly useful. Every fairy tale imaginable has been crammed in, in one form or another, and while some of them are inverted and toyed with cleverly, others stick out like sore thumbs. It would be easy to blame screenwriter Ehren Kruger of “The Ring” movies. But it’s just as likely that an earlier draft of his script was nice and tidy, and it was only when faceless studio figures (think Tim Robbins and Peter Gallagher in “The Player”) started meddling that things got out of hand. There are all the parts for a solid, three-star adventure, they just aren’t assembled quite right. There IS a good movie in here.
The set-up is not without promise. We meet Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm (Matt Damon and Heath Ledger) in the days before they penned the fairy tales for which they became so famous. Right now they make a living staging supernatural attacks, then hire themselves out rescuing stupefied villagers. Damon plays the cynic, happy to exploit the fear around him, while Ledger is the sad idealist who wants at least one fairy tale to come true. Then a French general (Gilliam regular Jonathan Pryce, in another dryly comic performance) catches on to them and sends them to put a stop to some real sorcery. It seems a forest is eating village children. The general puts the Brothers under the care of his Italian torturer (scenery-chewing Peter Stormare of “Fargo”). In the village they meet up with a trapper (Lena Headey of “Ripley’s Game”) who is one of those annoying movie types who knows more than she’s saying and gets mad and impatient with everyone who doesn’t know what she’s not telling them.
I’m reading this description and, except for the trapper, I’m thinking, that sounds like a fun movie. Gilliam always gives his films a manic feel, but this time mania borders on desperation. The Brothers travel to the middle the forest, stand around, look at things, and then go home, as if the movie isn’t certain what they were supposed to do there. We get the feeling that all the falling down and slapstick is trying to conceal this uncertainty. Little back stories for every major Grimm tale have been crammed in: glass slippers, gingerbread men, hair hanging from towers, the plague, magic mirrors. These sorts of explanations were amusing in “Shakespeare in Love,” a little trite in “Shrek,” and now kind of tedious whenever they don’t fit organically.
It should come as no surprise to Gilliam fans that the movie’s production design is exquisite. There are witches, werewolves, grotesques, hags, groin vaults, towers, robes, gowns, dungeons, Napoleonic uniforms, Monica Bellucci’s cleavage, and the most fabulously phony woods since “Legend” or “Night of the Hunter.” The kidnapping of the children—by wolves, by globs of tar, by ominous camera angles—are genuinely spooky. My wife almost burst her bladder in the middle of the movie, not because she wanted to know what was going to happen next, but because she didn’t want to miss what the inside of the tower looks like. Trees come to life and stomp around, deep in the foreboding golden woods, and are shot with menacing wild angle lenses.
Gilliam has become one of the cinema’s foremost purveyors of wildly fanciful and crazily-lit landscapes. He combines these magnificent places with dark humor and general weirdness. He brings macabre humor to how human hair isn’t really strong enough to support the weight of a person and there are terrific throwaway bits with the French general being disgusted by German food. The movie gets some good laughs out of gender confusion and the decrepitude of a 500-year-old queen (Monica Bellucci, but don’t worry, she’s young, too). As the Brothers, Damon (“The Bourne Identity”) and Ledger (“The Patriot”) are a little overwhelmed by the messiness of everything around them—I can’t remember which one is Jake and which one is Will—but they do okay. Ledger has a few too many twitches and gestures, but it’s an interesting change of direction for someone on the verge of being written off as a pretty boy.
This is the second movie this summer that should have been good but was a mixed bag instead. Big budget alien invasion? Get Spielberg to do it! Manic fairy tale deconstruction? Get Gilliam to do it! He should have tightened things up, tossed out the extra characters, and kept our heroes from running back-and-forth so much.
Finished Tuesday, September 6th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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