REVIEW: The Brothers Grimm

There's something to be said, I think, in defense of well-meaning schlock. Unlike your usual soulless cash-grab, an otherwise lackluster film can be elevated by some degree of creativity on the part of the filmmaker. This is something we saw last year with Kong: Skull Island; in terms of plot and character development, it was about as basic as they come. However, the cinematography, creature design, and overall atmosphere of the film illustrated just how much of a difference a little artistic effort can make. One could make a similar case, I feel, for today's subject, The Brothers Grimm. Before the mid-aughts tsunami of edgy fairy tale adaptations (Snow White and the Huntsman is likely the most infamous, but Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters is easily the most ludicrous), Monty Python alum Terry Gilliam gave us his own spin on the mythos behind the classic folk tales (and the men who collected them). It's a movie I could see working well in a double-feature with Sleepy Hollow, but I admittedly enjoyed The Brothers Grimm a good deal more (despite its flaws).

A fictitious tale of the real-life Brothers Grimm, the film paints the siblings as a pair of con-men, travelling from town to town across French-occupied Germany, using smoke and mirrors to perform phony exorcisms. After being arrested by the French military, the siblings (played by Matt Damon and Heath Ledger) are instructed to investigate the disappearance of a number of young girls in the small village of Marbaden. Suspected to be the work of fellow con-artists, the brothers are offered amnesty for their various grifts if they can expose whatever scheme is being cooked up and rescue the missing girls. However, they soon discover that the curses and folklore surrounding the supposedly enchanted forest is far more real than what they're used to dealing with. Alongside Mercurio Cavaldi (an Italian torturer played by Peter Stormare) and a hunter named Angelika (Game of Thrones' Lena Headey), it's up to Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm to solve the mystery of the enchanted forest and save a host of kidnapped children from succumbing to a grisly fate.

The most immediately-striking thing about this entire film (and my favorite detail) is the absurd-yet-macabre atmosphere Gilliam is able to establish. Before being sanitized and mass-produced into a multi-million dollar franchise by the Disney Corporation, the original Grimms' Fairy Tales was chock-full of stories of death, murder, and other assorted horrors. Cinderella's step-sisters were mutilated and blinded for their sins and the evil Queen in Snow White was literally forced to dance herself to death while wearing red-hot shoes. The content and themes of these stories tended to be a tad heavier than the usual "wish upon a star and believe in your dreams" schtick we're used to today, and it's that sense of tone that Gilliam captures magnificently here. While it is an action movie, it's not especially violent or profane, no moreso than any given Pirates of the Caribbean movie. This is a perfectly acceptable film to let children watch (almost like a more adult Over the Garden Wall), that is if you're willing to deal with the series of morbid and surreal night-terrors The Brothers Grimm is sure to inspire. 

Yes, everyone still lives happily ever after in the end, and yes, the majority of these moments employ liberal use of dodgy mid-2000's CGI, but there were a few moments where even I, a grown-ass man, found myself getting a little unsettled by just how morbid some of these sequences were. Maybe it's because so many of these scenes (again, true to their 19th century inspirations) involve horrific things happening to children; then again, it's not much of a stretch to define a scene where a small girl is eaten alive by a horse full of spiders as pure, high-octane nightmare fuel. There's also a sequence later on in which a gingerbread man forms out of a pile of mud and proceeds to steal a child's face, leaving her to stumble around blindly, attempting to scream despite not having a mouth. While some people may find scenes like this offputting, I absolutely loved it; it's all presented without a hint of shame or irony, perfectly capturing that sense of foreboding and dark humor you see all the time in old-world folklore. The film knows what it's about and it has no intention of apologizing (as illustrated in the scene in which an adorable kitten is kicked into a rotor-blade). You get the sense Gilliam wanted to present the side of these classic stories you seldom see anymore in popular culture, and it ends up being arguably the biggest feather in the film's cap.

I also adored the way that Gilliam was able to tie all of the notable Grimm folklore together, without it coming off as trite or unnatural. The idea behind the film is that Jacob (the more studious brother, played by Heath Ledger) is constantly taking down notes in a leather-bound journal, the implication of course being that these notes will eventually serve as the inspiration for the characters and stories collected in Grimms' Fairy Tales. The wicked Mirror Queen (Monica Bellucci), for example, is meant to serve as a sort of amalgam of the Evil Queen from Snow White and the titular princess from Rapunzel. The woodsman (Tomáš Hanák) is also the big, bad wolf. The film doesn't try for the overplayed "well here's what ACTUALLY HAPPENED" gimmick like so many other modern twists on classic stories, instead putting a unique spin on things that, overall, feels like a cohesive and believable backstory for each of these timeless fairy tales. Granted, I mean believable in a world with blood-moon enchantments and living gingerbread men, but the point I'm getting at is that, considering the world the film establishes, we're able to connect the dots between fiction and "reality". There are countless examples of the creative process working like this in real life (the Chain Chomps in Super Mario Bros were inspired by a neighborhood dog that would chase a young Shigeru Miyamoto around, Professor Snape was based off of J.K. Rowling's firm but fair chemistry teacher, etc.), so it's interesting to see a film work embrace its own fictional aspects and work backwards in such a way.

Attention to detail aside, I was most surprised at how taken I was with the relationship between the titular brothers; in the opening scene, we see a destitute family waiting for a doctor to help their sick little girl. Her brother returns home, only to reveal that he sold the family cow for "magic beans" that would supposedly cure his sister. As one might expect, the beans aren't magic at all and the little girl succumbs to her sickness and dies, much to the dismay of her brothers (who grow up to be Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm). It's a surprisingly dramatic origin for the two, illustrating just why they've taken up work as travelling con-artists, as well as providing context for their dynamic (both as brothers and as business partners). Wilhelm (Damon) is the more profit-minded of the two, typically taking charge; whenever anything sparks Jacob's imagination, Wilhelm is quick to drag him back down to Earth by mentioning the magic beans. And it's because of this inciting incident that, when the enchantments in the forest are proven to be real, Jacob is driven to get to the bottom of things while his brother would be content to collect what they can and skip town. If he can prove the existence of magic, then he can absolve himself of guilt for his sister's death; if magic exists, then she died because of a scam artist, rather than because of Jacob's ignorance and naïveté. It's an unexpectedly resonant aspect of an otherwise schlocky, offbeat action film, and one that I greatly appreciated in the end.

For all my praise, the film is far from perfect. The plot tends to meander about in search of something interesting to do, and scenes tend to just happen one after another. At just under two-hours, it definitely feels its length (despite some fun action setpieces scattered throughout). It doesn't exactly follow a traditional plot structure, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I have to say that this is one element where I wish Terry Gilliam had played it a tad more traditional. Your typical three-act structure is pretty hard to mess up, and while one can definitely divide the film up into a beginning, middle, and end, it's hardly three clean, even sections. The second act lasts essentially from when the brothers arrive at Marbaden all the way to the climax, and while this is where the majority of memorable scenes are found (such as the aforementioned nightmare horse and gingerbread man sequences), they're all spaced out between long spans of nothing. Our villains, while easy to root against, lack any and all subtlety or nuance and arguably the most interesting character (Angelika, a stoic hunter played by Game of Thrones' Lena Headey) is written out of the main conflict just before the final battle, relegated to nothing more than a typical damsel in distress who, oddly enough, ends up something of a romantic reward for both the brothers. At the same time, however, we also get Peter Stormare acting to the rafters as a morally-questionable Italian man. So at least there's that.

All in all, I enjoyed my time with The Brothers Grimm. It's heavily flawed, but it's also a ton of fun in a really offbeat, darkly humorous sort of way. You get the sense that there was some degree of a creative vision here, rather than just an attempt to make a cheap action movie out of some public domain fairy tales. The sets and costumes and lighting are all spectacular, as is the creature design and overall idea behind the plot. It's the kind of concept that would have crashed and burned in the hands of someone like Brett Ratner or Paul W.S. Anderson, but instead found something special with Terry Gilliam. Sure, it can technically be classified as a "guilty pleasure", but why over-complicate things? It's a fun, schlocky, imaginative bit of work that'll scare the pants off of any child you put in front of it. If you find yourself in the mood for that specific kind of fantasy film that seems to intentionally stray away from that Peter Jackson standard of "epic", you could certainly do a lot worse than this.