Troubled Fairy Tale
Terry Gilliam's Career Stays Immured
By Cole Smithey
Terry Gilliam’s much anticipated narrative effort, behind his famously doomed attempt at adapting "Don Quixote" for the big screen, is a visually impressive but viscerally blank movie thanks to Ehren Kruger’s irksome script.
Without concern for the celebrated authors of such fairytale classics as "Cinderella" and "Rapunzel," Kruger weaves a loose canvas where he paints the erudite Grimm brothers as fictional nineteenth-century opportunists who make their money fooling German villages into believing in bogus monsters that only they can be hired to "exorcise."
The gypsy brothers, cynical Will (Matt Damon) and gullible Jacob (Heath Ledger), are found out and captured by French authorities who assign them to dispel the mystery behind the disappearance of young maidens in the village of Marbaden, near an enchanted forest.
Audiences other than preteens will be sorely disappointed at Gilliam’s over-massaged vision of a tediously gimmicky script.
Grime flies onto Ledger’s and Damon’s era-perfect costumes in rainy opening scenes that foreshadow the opaqueness of their cartoonish characters. With a page torn from a Hardy Boys story, the Grimm brothers perform a barn-enclosed exorcism that employs the use of a manned monster that swings from a contraption of pulleys to convince the barn’s owner that he has spent his town’s money wisely.
The sequence gives the movie a false start and predisposes the audience away from accepting the fairytale aspects of the story that compete with hollow comic efforts toward an unrewarding climax.
Jonathan Pryce is mechanically villainous as Delatombe, a commanding member of Napoleon’s Army overseeing a bumbling torturer named Cavaldi (Peter Stormare). The Army suspects the brothers for the disappearance of numerous girls from Marbaden. The military give the brothers a death-wish opportunity to prove their innocence by solving a mystery. Will and Jacob are left to convince Angelika (Lena Headey), a local huntress, to guide them through the thick forest for clues.
A mausoleum-like tower in the middle of the forest shifts the movie into a too-little-too-late spree of Grimm Brothers’ fairytale iconography. Owned by a murderous king and his "Mirror Queen," the impenetrable tower holds the answer for the brothers to reverse the Queen’s spell and make the area safe for young girls. Gilliam takes obvious joy with scenes involving a catapult device that sends Jacob flying through the air and inside the tower. There, Jacob gets more than an eye full of Monica Bellucci’s ancient queen.
"The Brothers Grimm" fails on three essential points; it doesn’t fulfill its title’s promise of teaching something about the actual Grimm Brothers; it comes no where close to achieving the clarity of any of the Brothers Grimm’s brilliant allegorical stories and lastly, it tarnishes Terry Gilliam’s already sketchy career.
Monica Bellucci steals the movie as The Mirror Queen a 500-year-old immortal ruler intent on attaining eternal beauty by way of a magical curse requiring the lives of 12 young maidens. Matt Damon’s morphing sideburns and eyebrows carry on their own surreal subplot while Heath Ledger diligently attempts to single-handedly carry a children’s movie with a 60 million dollar budget. Terry Gilliam and his adoring audiences would have been better off if he had just directed a faithful version of "Hansel And Gretel."
Rated PG-13. 118 mins.
