Terry Gilliam is a frustratingly enormous talent, but also two traits that struggle with each other while you watch one of his movies and often team up to fight him. I have a feeling that Gilliam giggles. This must be what irritates his financiers and studios about him.
It’s no wonder he has trouble getting projects greenlit. Gilliam is a disaster artist, known for baroque, expensive visions (Brazil) that studios are reluctant to release; and bad luck with budgets and acts of nature (see the documentary Lost in La Mancha about his failed attempt to make Don Quixote). The reason he still gets work is because no other filmmaker’s films look like his they look like concept sketches on an artist’s desk. Few directors have this ability. They take great care in putting their visuals on screen but then the attitude of his films is, “Laugh, it’s only a picture!”
The Brothers Grimm is his latest film, following Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). Like any Gilliam picture, it’s as frustrating as it is admirable, and like any Gilliam picture (except maybe 12 Monkeys, his most dialed-down), you leave with guarded enthusiasm.
Basically, these two brothers (Matt Damon and Heath Ledger) are just running from fairy tale characters and the French (“Burn zem! Burn zem now!” And so forth).
That said, at times The Brothers Grimm works best when it stays simple like that as a straight-up comedy with a clever gimmick that gives Damon and Ledger something to run around for. You can see why Gilliam would get excited (and eventually bored: His next film is a drama called Tideland which premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival next month).
For one thing, Gilliam doesn’t have both feet planted firmly on Earth. The Brothers Grimm has nothing to do with the actual German brothers, which is a bit of a letdown; their story of how they collected legends, followed by centuries of obscurity, is much more interesting. You mean, you still don’t know who the Brothers Grimm are? That lack of appreciation (maybe a sly dig at Gilliam himself) becomes a running joke.
Damon and Ledger play freelance rural ghostbusters, more or less. They show up in hamlets and pubs and offer to exorcise the countryside of demons.
The Brothers Grimm wrote Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel and the Gingerbread Man enough public domain friendly fables to keep two Walts Disney flush with free material for decades.
The Brothers Grimm in this movie are typical Gilliam characters, con men who use special effects, big words, and enough confidence in their game to separate yokels from their cash.
Them being on an adventure that turns into a cash cow, A girl in a red riding hood gets kidnapped by a wolf, children get eaten by a woman in a gingerbread house, some grotesque cookie creature crawls out of well it’s all orchestrated by a queen in tower who once grew her hair so long it was ladder for her lover. Or something like that.
In other words, the magic they were pretending to be doing became real. It starts funny enough: Damon is Will, the skeptic, Ledger is Jacob, who thinks everything is true and writes it all down. He knows that one day they’ll be millionaires from their stories. They find out about a plan to kidnap girls and drain their blood into the sleeping queen.
It’s kind of a bad way to approach naturally fantastic legends literally like that. There’s something cool about seeing how things would have played out in kind of real Europe. It’s creepy when the wolf goes from four legs to two. Where it falls apart is when the film tries to weave those fairy tales into your average blockbuster messy, loud, hard to understand, effects-filled, run of the mill chaos.
It’s hard to believe Gilliam had something so middle of the road in mind. Then again The Brothers Grimm is one of Miramax’s last big releases before Bob and Harvey Weinstein leave the company with Disney buying what was left. Maybe they needed $80 million to look like $80 million?
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