The Brothers Grimm

"Grimm" is like being stuck on the 'rock-o'plane' in a county fair with a fresh hot dog on your belly

Official Brothers Grimm Site
Gothic Fantasy
Starring Matt Damon, Heath Ledger, Lena Headey, Monica Bellucci
PG-13 (for mild violent fighting scenes and implied violence to children)
Running Time: 119 Minutes
Released:August 26th, 2005


1 Out Of 5 Bites


Terry Gilliam managed one thing well in the Brothers Grimm.....and that was to turn a normally dashing/handsome Matt Damon (Jake) into a disarmingly grotesque, mutton-chopped, mid-nineteenth century curiosity. I tried to maintain interest in the imagery and scenery, but it was a manic overdose, often to cartoonish proportions. Sure, I tried to scout the plot like a famished Bavarian wolf on an empty stomach, but I lost the scent. But, dang those Matton chops were revolting.

So topsy-turvy is this debacled, extra-chromosomed dereliction of a post-modern fairy-tale that you forget the terrific-ness of most of the scenic spreads. Gilliam and writer Ehren Kruger shaft the Grimm brothers' original European politically-motivated folk tales and advantageously insert their own wacky French connection, with a Napoleon-esque deviant occupying Germany circa 1813.

I was more enchanted with the pasty and frilly interpretation Heath Ledger's character (Will) was given. It was a true study in daintiness and annoying facetiousness that it was an ironic freak of nature that Will was able to summon the bravado to land a knuckle sandwich on his brother's (Jake's) grill. Would that the movie had it the other way around.

Nothing against Ledger et al personally. I just wanted to slug the movie as a whole for its wishy-washiness. Gilliam's most successful film Time Bandits was as rife with its gradiosity and borderline uninteresting twists, turns and a profundity of imagery. Everything in Grimm teems with activity and motion that it no longer comes out of the corners of your imagination, as it should in its most effective place. You start to expect it with a yawn. There are only so many times that a branch fashioning itself in the form of a sinister ankle-grabbing hand can scare.

Will and Jake manage a semi-successful scam as the roaming exorcists of hob-goblins that are nothing more than their planted hob-nobbers who are in on the hoaxes, bleeding unsuspecting villages of their moolah. But the frauds are exposed by the French occupiers, who call them out in the wake of the disappearances of several girls from a remote village. After multiple threats to life and limb, they are forced to restore order while brandishing their fakery. Soon enough, the situation is real and the brothers are pulled apart by not only the weirdest and cutest chick (Lena Headey) in the village, but by the fact their chicanery has nothing to offer them in the face of the demonic barrage. She takes them to the heart of the goings on and we are taken into the heart of a bumbling maelstrom of conceit, one-upsmanship, greed and implausible heroisms.

Gilliam chooses to sprinkle echoes and remnants of extant fairy tales so as to say "looky-here at MY fairy tale." Girls are the prey.....a girl in a red hood staked by a wolf; Gretel meeting a dastardly fate in a cave; and finally we see a reference to SleepingRapunzelBeauty. We don't really know which or to whom the movie gallops to in the latter case, but the diffusion is already well established.

The references play a faint tune on our psyches, but not for the purposes Gilliam may have intended. Who knows.....perhaps he was an opportunist here. I was subtly reminded of the endless cascade of one "girl" after another disappearing in our real world by real two-legged wolves into the disenchanted forests of real suffering families. I don't know if this was purposeful, but the aftertaste didn't help. Especially if there is a hint of truth in the (arguably) subtle reference to seduction behind the story of Little Red Riding Hood.

Even if the Grimm's weren't the writers the movie would have us believe (and they were more cultural folklorists in reality), Gilliam's labor is not a sleeping beauty. It is more like the gloppy, amorphous blob of tarry slime that appears eyeless in the middle of the movie from a well. It is sludgy, without solidity and formless in principle. In the end, we have amalgamated Cliff's Notes images of these tales meant to be woven into a new yarn. The result is more of a sinewy sneeze into a Kleenex-less hand.

Monica Bellucci appears mainly in a mirror, in her tower, but in reality is a sleeping ghoul with a rauchy Rapunzel-ish coiffure on her bed. She is awaiting her wolf-man slave to rustle up all the villages' virgins to bring her immortality (and his existence is yet another sub-plot barely touched upon). Just stop the film here and show stills of Monica, thank you. Damon summons a sophomorish portrayal of the disappointed mastermind of the brothers while Ledger is sheer lethargic silliness. Headey should have been entrusted with more time and brunt in the film.

Time magazine recently referenced a possible hissy between Miramax brass and Gilliam on artistic direction during production. Gilliam's tantrum must have been this on-screen final mess in all it's twisty, rooty ankle-tripping ways.