The Brothers Grimm

Starring Matt Damon, Heath Ledger, Lena Headey, Peter Stormare, Jonathan Pryce and Monica Bellucci

Written by Ehren Kruger

Directed by Terry Gilliam

So like all real artists, Gilliam takes chances. Daring brilliance, he sometimes succeeds, and produces a worthy classic like Brazil or 12 Monkeys. But when he fails, he fails spectacularly. So great is the hubris of the true artist that he often tempts the Gods; nowhere was this illustrated more clearly than in the 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha, which chronicles the Biblical plagues visited upon Gilliam as he lost his battle to bring The Man Who Killed Don Quixote to the screen.

That failure meant a full seven years had passed since his last completed picture, 1998’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. By 2003, Gilliam had become so desperate to get behind the camera again that he agreed to become a director for hire on The Brothers Grimm, first for MGM and then for Bob and Harvey Weinstein. The match of director and material looked great on paper. But the result, I’m sorry to report, is rather like paying Jackson Pollack to complete a paint-by-numbers version of The Last Supper. Both men have a lot of trouble painting inside the lines.

The story, which gets points for originality, is set in “French-occupied Germany” during the Napoleonic era and concerns the travails of the Grimm Brothers, Wilhelm and Jacob (Matt Damon and Heath Ledger). As our story begins, these future authors of Grimm’s Fairy Tales ply their trade as 18th Century ghost-busters, journeying from village to village vanquishing evil spirits and banishing witches from farmers’ barns. So what if the brothers, with the help of their paid henchmen, actually create said spirits and witches themselves, out of primitive special effects and whole cloth? The end result is that the villagers feel safe and the brothers have some coin in pocket. There are worse ways to make a living.

But then comes word that evil spirits of some other making have invaded the forest outside the village of Marbaden and made off with a handful of children. French military governor Delatombe (Jonathan Pryce) dispatches his maniacal Italian henchman Cavaldi (Peter Stormare) to arrest the brothers and then makes them an offer they can’t refuse: end the terror in Marbaden or face the guillotine.

What follows has all the making of an exquisite fantasy. You know going in that Gilliam has the chops, and the film’s delights are all to be found in soaking up the details. There are strange moving trees that make the Ents in The Lord of the Rings look like scraggly saplings. We see subtle hints of characters and stories that will later find their way into such classic Grimm Fairy Tales as Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel and The Frog King. Mad horses spin cobwebs from their mouths to ensnare unwitting virgins. Beautiful huntresses skin rabbits before our eyes. Toads are licked. Heads are lopped off. Toothless crones make dire pronouncements. And on a luxurious bed in a fantastical tower in the middle of the forest lies the Mirror Queen (Monica Bellucci), who has been granted eternal life but not eternal beauty, and who has her own agenda.

It all sounds wonderfully rich, and visually the film is up to Gilliam’s lofty standards. Unfortunately, all those disparate elements listed above are merely that— disparate elements. At no point does this film achieve any narrative flow. Rather than building up a head of steam, it moves in jerky fits and starts, lurching from one scene to another like a drunk pinballing from lamppost to lamppost. Damon and Ledger are tasked with serving as our proxies and guides through this chaotic stew, and they’re game enough. But it’s clear that neither of them had any idea whether they were swimming, drowning or just treading water.

The problem here is the script, by Hollywood journeyman Ehren Kruger, who’s made a career of failing upward. Since his first produced screenplay, 1999’s Arlington Road— a middling thriller that relied heavily on contrivance and coincidence to deliver its puny surprises— Kruger has produced one under-performing script after another. The closest he’s come to delivering on his promises was The Ring— but that was an adaptation of the Japanese original, and was saved from certain doom only by the sure hand of director Gore Verbinski. This script is a mess, and Gilliam is too busy rearranging the deck chairs to notice that the ship is sinking. What Kruger needs to do is enroll in one of Robert McKee’s Story seminars and nail down the basics: inciting incidents, character arcs, subtext and catharsis. In any art form, you have to master the rules before you break them.

But Gilliam, God love him, is still fighting the good fight. He fought tooth and nail with the notoriously hands-on Weinsteins over the casting, the score and the cinematographer. He even shut down the production for two weeks when Harvey and Bob got too far up in his grill. "I'm used to riding roughshod over executives, but the Weinsteins rode roughshod over me," Gilliam famously said.

So while The Brothers Grimm won’t join the pantheon of Gilliam classics, it’s clear that Captain Chaos, as his friends call him, still has fire in the belly. During a six-month hiatus in the Brothers shoot, Gilliam went off and directed the children’s fantasy Tideland, which he’s reportedly quite pleased with. He’ll survive this stumble. After all, even Picasso had his off days.

September 1, 2005
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