The Brothers Grimm

Terry Gilliam’s “The Brothers Grimm,” released in 2005, is a work of countless invention, but it is invention without pattern, chasing itself around the screen without finding a plot. Watching it is a little tiring. If the images in the movie had been put to the duty of a story we could get engaged to, he might have had something. However, the movie looks like a style searching for a purpose.

He starts with the Brothers Grimm, whose fairy tales impress those lucky children whose parents still read to them. There is a scary quality to the Grimm stories that’s lacking in their Hollywood versions. Roger Ebert said in his review, “no modern version of Little Red Riding Hood approaches the scariness of the original story, where the Big Bad Wolf was generated not by computers but by my quaking imagination.”

However, Gilliam’s purpose is not to tell the fairy tales, however some of them have cameos in his movie. He makes the Brothers Grimm into traveling con artists, around 1796, who travel from village to village in Germany, making insincere magic and claiming it is real. Wilhelm Grimm, played by Matt Damon, is the operator of the duo, a greedy pessimist. His brother, Jacob, played by the late Heath Ledger, somewhat believes in magic. This is how it has been since “Jake” and “Will” were children, and Jacob sold the family cow for a handful of magic beans.

The con artists are revealed by Delatombe, played by Jonathan Pryce, Napoleon’s man in Germany. However, instead of punishing them, he releases the duo to the village of Marbaden, where children are missing and it appears that in the haunted forest “the trees themselves set upon them. Delatombe’s strange harasser Cavaldi, played by Peter Stormare, is sent along to be sure the Grimms deliver what they’re supposed to. Ebert noted, “they are apparently supposed to be 18th century ghostbusters, or maybe the equivalents of the Amazing Randi, unmasking fraud.”

The problem is, the forest really is magical. A local huntswoman named Angelika, played by Lena Headey, knows it is and tries to convince the brothers, who become convinced only that they love her. There is another romantic trouble when the evil 500-year-old Mirror Queen, played by Monica Bellucci, casts a spell over events. When the Grimms try to enter her castle and break the spell, they’re going against the real deal: A kiss from her can murder. Jacob is tempted. Ebert admitted, “Jacob is tempted. Considering that she is 500 years old, I am reminded of Mark Twain’s first words after being shown an ancient Egyptian mummy: “Is he, ah — is he dead?””

Ebert continued, “A great deal more happens in “The Brothers Grimm,” and none of it is as easy to follow as I have made it sound.” The film is built of traits that may look like a great idea in themselves but have not been made into a narrative we can follow and care about. There is also the problem of who, exactly, Gilliam thinks the Brothers Grimm are. Sometimes they look like romantic heroes, sometimes like clowns, sometimes like fraud magicians, sometimes like real ones. Ebert said, “Their own fairy tales had the virtue of being tightly focused and implacable in their sense of justice: Misbehavior was cruelly punished as often as virtue was rewarded. Their strict code is lacking in the movie, which is based on shifting moral sands. At times the Grimms are liars and charlatans, at times brave and true.” Those times appear selected at the convenience of the movie.

Gilliam has always been a director who fills the screen with vast visual delight. Ebert noted, “In “Brazil” and “12 Monkeys” and “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” in the past and in the future, his world is always hallucinatory in its richness of detail.” Here the haunted forest is actually very impressive, but to what end? In a movie like Tim Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow,” the night and shadows hold real danger. Here the trees look more like an idea than a danger. Also, the movie, for all of its fantastic endeavoring, stays on the screen and fails to occupy our imagination.

I knew of this movie from the trailers when it was being released in theaters, but I never saw it. I was always thinking about seeing this, so a few months back, I saw this on Paramount+. I have to admit, this isn’t anything that really makes it memorable. If you watch it, you might forget about it easily since it doesn’t sit with you for very long. If you want to see it, it is currently streaming on Pluto TV, but I don’t know if I should recommend it.

Next week, we’ll be ending “Terry Gilliam Month” with the last film Heath Ledger starred in before he passed.