Terry Gilliam’s 2005 inventiveness “The Brothers Grimm” is a reams like one of the shabby Monty Python shows he used to work in, with moments of acuteness scattered amidst stretches of tedium and sheer silliness. The talking picture is at least twice as good as most people say it is and to half as documentation as we’d all hoped it would be.
Perhaps it’s a small-minded unfair placing such a burden on Gilliam, but after some stunning prevail upon directing things akin to “Monty Python and the Heavenly Grail,” “Time Bandits,” “Brazil,” and “Twelve Monkeys,” we believe quite a lot from him. He does have a clever idea successful here, though. We know that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm got the ideas for their fairy tales partly from existing folklore and partly from their own fertile imaginations. What Gilliam and screenwriter Ehren Kruger (”Scream 3,” “The Ring,” “Skeleton Key”) add is a touch of realism. In the movie, not only do the Grimms make up their stories, they make them up from real-life adventures.
Matt Damon and Heath Ledger falling star as Will and Jake Grimm, a pair of youthful con men traveling through the German countryside in the pioneer nineteenth century, bilking the peasantry forbidden of their funds by claiming to expel demons, slay dragons, drive trolls, and such nonsense. Actually, they dissemble their exorcisms with props and hired actors to fool the nescient masses. But they can’t fool the regional French magistrate in Germany, General Delatombe (Jonathan Pryce). He sees them as a remedy for what they are, but he also recognizes that he can reason them. A small rustic village has been a pain in the arse in Delatombe’s side concerning some often; puerile girls are mysteriously disappearing there, supposedly through allure, and he has been unfit to find out the real cause. Delatombe sends the brothers to the village, on susceptibility of death, to rid it of its supposed abnormal occurrences.
That’s when Order and Jake discover that the disappearances are not the work of mere mortals, as they had thought; they’re the work of an bad Queen (Monica Bellucci), a vain and parsimonious sorceress Queen, living at the pinch back of an fossil, crumbling dungeon deep in the center of an enchanted forest. She locked herself in the tower to elude the aggravation that ravaged her people below, and the poor dear’s been up there fitted five hundred years (”They haven’t been brand to her, have they?”). She needs the lives of the village girls for a witching spell that will renovate her youth and advantage. To get on to the tower, the brothers enlist the aid of a lovely local lass, a trapper and guide, Angelika (Leana Headey), whose architect disappeared in the woods a year before.
Gilliam playfully jams all the characters he can from fairy tales into ditty motion epitome, among them Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, the Wicked Witch from “Snow White,” Rapunzel, the Gingerbread People, and so on. The more genius of the two brothers, Jake, writes down in a journal everything he sees, which of course will grow the basis for the many stories the brothers will later write up when they finally settle on to change professions.
OK, it’s a slick point for a flick picture show, as I’ve said. Unfortunately, not everything goes Gilliam’s way, and the two leads exemplify the movie’s imbroglio. Playing against sort, Heath Ledger is the scholarly, sometimes gullible, and generally ineffectual brother, Jake, who as a little one traded money with which he was reputed to buy medicine on the side of “magic beans,” an act his older brother Will never let him forget. But Ledger is so alarming, so dramatic in his impersonation, that he introduces too somber a tenor into what ought to be a purely tongue-in-cheek frolic. On the other hand, Matt Damon’s acting is so much more lightweight at times and so much more bullying at other times that the two contrasting tones non-standard like always at odds, leaving viewers to wonder just how they’re expected to have a hunch about any of it.
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Possibly the funniest person in the film is Peter Stormare as the Eximious Cavaldi, Delatombe’s chief henchman and master of the torturing arts. While Pryce’s General is a somber comic villain, Stormare’s Cavaldi is a very-blooded comic ruffian, and again the contrast in their characters is representative of the movie’s contrasting styles. Is the story expected to be subtle parody or blunt farce?
