Brothers Grimm

Terry Gilliam's Brothers Grimm tells the story of the disappearances of several girls, and so enter the Brothers Grimm. Matt Damon and Heath Ledger are both excellent in the title roles, Ledger especially with a more sympathetic portrayal than expected. I liked Peter Stromare and Jonathan Pryce here too. The film is full of clever nods to their fairy tales. The production design is a wonder, with lavish sets and colourful costumes, and there is some evidence of some detailed direction, if a little too serious. However, I wasn't keen on Lena Headey's performance as the main female character, and the storyline is very daft, and sometimes in the middle half bordered on getting a bit too silly. The script was okay, but perhaps because of the story it was underdeveloped, and cheesy in some places, and it was further undermined by a rather anti-climatic conclusion, that left me a little confused. Still, not a bad film, not awful but not great either. It is well performed and well designed, but is let down by the story and script mainly. 6/10 Bethany Cox.

The Brothers Grimm is a different movie than what I expected. It turned out to be similar to Big Fish in a way, but a little darker and with some awesome special effects.

Will (Matt Damon) and Jacob Grimm (Heath Ledger) start off as shysters, bamboozling local town people by setting up elaborate and "supernatural" schemes and charging heavily to ward off monsters, witches or anything else.

The story actually starts getting interesting when they run into an actual supernatural occurrence (or fairy tale). It seems that children have been vanishing in some "enchanted woods" and the French believe it is a scam similar to ones the Grimms have pulled.

While fighting off beasts and such, The Brothers Grimm encounter people who obviously inspire stories such as Little Red Riding Hood, Jack & The Beanstalk, Snow White and others. Altogether, things fill out quite nicely. It never comes straight out and says that Grimm's Fairy Tales comes from these stories but it gives the audience enough credit to figure that out on it's own, even though it is quite obvious.

Lena Headey deserves to be mentioned as the lovely Angelika. She plays a hardened and tough hunter/trapper who helps The Grimms and is also the love interest, which I guess is expected. Also, Monica Bellucci was a good addition as the "mirror queen".

I enjoyed this movie quite a bit. Like I said, more than I thought I would have. The special effects were very nice. The trees move realistically like snakes. More believable than some of the giant snake movies I have seen, anyways. I can recommend this movie. If you like Tim Burton style of movies, then you should like this one as well. 8/10

People have a curious tendency not to notice how bizarre and gruesome children's fairy tales often are. Terry Gilliam's "The Brothers Grimm" does notice. Unfortunately, that's just about its only insight into the subject. The film shows no understanding of what makes fairy tales memorable and exciting, or why they have endured through the ages.

A much better handling of the subject is the 1962 film "The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm," which intersperses a realistic though nonfactual account of the brothers' lives with dramatic recreations of the tales they collected. I'm not saying that Gilliam had to do a retread of the same material. I would be very happy to see a remake with a radically new approach, as long as it respects the underlying subject matter. Gilliam's film does not. Its storyline is mostly a long string of fantasy and horror clichés that remind us far more of contemporary movies than of classic fairy tales. The Big Bad Wolf, for example, has been reduced to a standard-issue wolf-man (brought to life with digital effects that are just a tad too jerky to be excused in our age of high-tech movie-making).

In this version, the brothers (Heath Ledger and Matt Damon, both inexplicably adopting English accents) are con artists who go from town to town posing as conjurers who can protect the local populace from evil spirits. A French general (Jonathan Pryce) catches on to what they're doing and forces them to work for him, on pain of death. But when they're sent to a new town, their old tricks prove useless against an age-old curse that really does haunt the woods.

The movie belongs to the old genre where famous writers become characters in their own stories. It's a genre I've never much liked, maybe because it suggests a failure to comprehend the powers of human imagination. ("No one could have made up these stories; they must have really happened!") But I have enjoyed a few films of this kind, such as the 1979 movie "Time After Time," where H.G. Wells builds a time machine and travels to the 1970s in pursuit of Jack the Ripper. This type of story has to work hard to achieve the willing suspension of disbelief. "The Brothers Grimm" fails on that front because it changes its reality too often. In an early scene, we're shown an intense battle with an awesome-looking banshee. Then the whole battle is revealed to have been staged. And then, later on, we're asked to believe that magic really does exist in this world after all. These repeated shifts in the story's reality are profoundly disorienting.

The source of disarray in the woods is an undead queen (Monica Bellucci) trying to regain her youth in an elaborate spell that will be completed once she sacrifices a series of children from the town. She resides in a tower in the woods, appearing as a skeleton on one side of a mirror and as a beautiful woman on the other. Her magical control over the woods serves as an excuse for numerous scenes of mysterious enchantment, most of which have a very tenuous connection to the central plot. The trees in the forest seem to have a life of their own, walking around when no one's looking. A mysterious creature lurks at the bottom of a well. The wolf-man is a servant of the mirror queen, using magic to ward off would-be visitors. But a coherent story never emerges from these elements. The screenplay seems to make up the rules as it goes along, inventing whatever is convenient at any given moment. Every now and then, some familiar quote is referenced--"Who is the fairest of them all?"; "What big eyes you have"; "You can't catch me, I'm the Gingerbread Man"--but always gratuitously. The movie's magical story is formless and convoluted, lacking any consistent narrative logic. It comes off as a series of elements arbitrarily glued together.

As a result, the magical sequences lack payoff. We keep waiting for something wondrous to happen, then nothing does. In one sequence, for example, two children named Hans and Greta are making their way through the woods, leaving a trail of bread crumbs in their wake. We eagerly await the children's encounter with the gingerbread house run by the cannibalistic witch, or at least something of comparable interest. But just about the only thing that happens is a mysterious sequence involving a levitating shawl. Like many other sequences in the film, this one doesn't go anywhere and has only the faintest connection with the mirror queen story.

No doubt there's an important theme at work in scenes like this. The movie is suggesting that the classic fairy tales are the result of accounts that have been embellished over time. But other writers have handled this theme much more effectively. Gregory Maguire's novel "Wicked," for example, turns "The Wizard of Oz" into a sophisticated adult fantasy with complex character motives and sly social satire. In that novel, there is a definite implication that we are being told the "real" story, and that the conventional version is the corruption. But the novel handles this conceit by expanding on the story, not degrading it. There's no point in creating a revisionist fairy tale if it's going to be less fleshed out than the original.

Well, my friends, I have just returned from the earliest possible showing of "Brothers Grimm" in my area, and I can assure you it was well worth getting up a few hours earlier than usual to watch. However, I would caution anyone who doesn't like Terry Gilliam's work, Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, or the REAL brothers Grimms' stories that this is not your average fantasy. The story is set in french-occupied Germany in the 1700s, a real time in which real people actually lived. Even some of the magical aspects of the story are explained by real events (I won't spoil it for you). So quite a bit of the plot deals with the realities of the day and age along with the fantastical aspects of the forest and its inhabitants.

That being said, the story also deals with the opposite side of unreality-- the dark and unnaturally gruesome. This is where I think the writer hit on a brilliant point; while the real brothers' stories have happy endings and some lighthearted moments, most if not all of their stories involve some degree of blood and gore. My hat is off to Ehren Kruger for being true to that aspect of their work.

The only aspects of this movie I disliked were the unresolved ending (which I won't spoil, either) and some of the acting. Lena Headey's performance did not impress me, but it could just be lack of material to work with (a very overdone character) and the fact that I've never seen any of her other work. Matt Damon is interesting to watch as usual. Peter Stormare and Jonathan Pryce are wacky to the point of annoyance as an Italian torture specialist and a French general. The only truly wonderful performance, however, is that of Mr. Ledger, whose bumbling, scholarly, tag-along Jacob was both a sympathetic character and a side we rarely see from this multi-talented actor.

This is not a movie for everyone (I wouldn't bring children with the tendency for nightmares or irrational fears, for example). It's not a movie you'll learn from or probably want to see hundreds of times. But for the moviegoer looking for beautiful cinematography, a few good laughs, and a fairly suspenseful story, look no further.

Squabbling brothers in France-occupied Germany circa 1811 have manufactured a heroic image for themselves as witch-hunters and tall-tale tellers, but when a decrepit witch in an enchanted forest begins stealing maidens for their youthful blood, the duo find themselves up against real evil for the first time. Terry Gilliam-directed fantasy has incredible production values, cinematography and scoring (not to mention two appealing lead performances by Matt Damon and Heath Ledger), yet it takes a good hour to get this picture off the ground. The narrative is heavy-going and, while not a hodgepodge, the film could certainly use a bit more heart rather than CGI effects. Gilliam's handling takes on a more robust, old-fashioned flavor in the second hour, and the movie improves tremendously as a result. The witch's palace (set atop a skyscraper tree) is dazzling, and the initial entrance into her raven-laden lair is deliciously giddy. Jonathan Pryce is well-cast as an evil general who attempts to torch the two men in an impressive forest fire, however the charm of the piece (and the glue holding the adventure together) lies with Damon and Ledger, and they are by turns wily, funny, strapping, childish, and heroic. **1/2 from ****