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The Brothers Grimm August 28, 2005 |
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Fairytales aren’t always light and happy, they don’t always have blonde, gallant Princes, merry singing peasants, and cuddly forest creatures, sometimes they have witches, sometimes they have old, shriveled up queens, sometimes they have wolves, and sometimes they have death and destruction. In Terry Gilliam’s new film, “The Brothers Grimm”, his first film in seven years, the fairytale is most definitely dark and disturbing, with haunted forests, moving trees, possessed water wells, child eating horses, bad French accents, spooky spells, a 500 year old vanity queen, and a tower of doom so riddled with bad karma it makes the fortresses in the second ‘Lord of the Rings’ film look like the Four Seasons. There is some humor, awkward and uninspired, and there is some sunshine, particularly in the final frames, when the darkness gives way to song and dance, as is often the case with dreary films and their happy coda’s, but for the most part, you’d be lucky to get through this depressing, clunky, and over-the-top cinematic fairytale without having the urge punch yourself in the shin, if just for a little bit of sanity, as Gilliam’s overindulgent fantasy takes you to the nether regions of a psycho folk storyteller on acid. Of course you wouldn’t expect anything different from the man who hails from Monty Python, directed the cult classic (and badly overrated) “Brazil”, tried and failed to bring Don Quixote to the screen, but tried, and did bring Hunter S. Thompson to the screen with “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, a movie so wacko, so off the wall scatological, so in your face with visual insanity, that it makes this new trek through the darker subconscious of naughty little fairytales seem tame. But that it isn’t, and Gilliam’s failure is that he wants it to be, but at every turn there is one wild, supernatural sequence after another, and when it stops to spell out a plot, or to heighten the emotion between one character or another, it gets lost in what just happened, leaving an already baffled audience wondering what on earth they are sitting through. Fans of the old tales will be disappointed that none of the tales are actually faithfully told, and fans of Gilliam, who have put up with some weird cinema in their days, may not stand for the jumbled plot and less than spirited lead actors, but then again, fans of Gilliam are a strange lot, and if they think “Brazil” is a masterpiece, than maybe I’m just missing something. The story to the movie takes place in the late 18th century, with Matt Damon and Heath Ledger starring as Will and Jake Grimm, a traveling consortium of hucksters in French occupied Germany, who charge an arm and a leg to exorcize the demons out of local farm barns. It’s a lucrative business, since the only demons are the ones they make up themselves to scam the peasants, but one day they are captured by a snotty French general (Gilliam regular Jonathan Pryce), and ordered, under the surveillance of a bumbling French soldier (Peter Stormare), to put their practice to good use, finding the eleven missing children of Marbaden, who have mysteriously disappeared within the dark forest. Jacob Grimm, who carries around a leather bound book scribbling down notes, which we presume will turn into the folk tales we know today, is fascinated by the stories of the haunted forest, and the evil towers buried deep within its moving trees, but older, saner brother Will thinks stories of myth and fantasy are hogwash, and is still spiteful, that as children, Jacob bought a bag of “magic beans” instead of medicine their dying sister urgently needed. “All my life I’ve studied these folk tales, and now I find one that’s real,” pleads Jake to his skeptical brother, “it’s not beans, Will, it’s real.” That reality involves a 500-year-old queen (Monica Bellucci) who has her pet werewolf kidnap young town girls to be the centerpiece in a spell that will turn her time ravaged face back to its original beauty. As the brothers run around trying to beat the forest, and defeat the queen, with the help of a pretty animal trapper (Lena Headey), the bumbling French constantly get in the way, giving the brother’s multiple villains to put up with, while battling their own brotherly differences. When it comes together, the visual overload of Gilliam’s ambitious effects, coupled with the bizarre story is just too much to handle. Gilliam deserves some credit for creating a dark fairytale world reminiscent of German expressionism and ‘30’s Universal monster flicks, and his effects never look cheesy, but the story never gels, the characters are never all that compelling, and Damon and Ledger don’t seem to fit together as German brothers (their accents are almost as bad as Pryce and Stormare’s French tongues). Fragments of the original stories are woven into the made up plot, such as “Hansel and Gretel”, “Rapunzel”, and “Little Red Riding hood”, but Gilliam might have been better served actually filming the classic tales in full and weaving them into a smaller story as a triptych, like Robert Rodriguez did with Frank Miller’s “Sin City” stories, but instead we have a troubled family drama mixed with a supernatural thriller laced with uneven British humor, just like late Python. I like the supporting players, especially Headey as the film’s sole love interest, and Mackenzie Crook (Gareth on “The Office”) as one of the brothers’ conspirators in their town hoaxes, but Damon is bland as Will, and Ledger, full of ticks and mumbled sentences, doesn’t impress me as a sturdy mystic, let alone a future master storyteller. Terry Gilliam may have ambition, imagination, and surreal style to boot, but “The Brothers Grimm” is a grim spectacle, and in the long run, no Hollywood fairytale. “The Brothers Grimm” is playing at the Movie-Plex 59. by Adam Suraf
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