Matt Damon and Heath Ledger are the funniest visual effect in “The Brothers Grimm,” Terry Gilliam’s crazy new movie. Costumed as the early 19th-century storytellers, they wear frilly shirts and foppish jackets, popinjays without portfolio traveling through the German countryside.
Gilliam, the former Monty Python goof and director of “Brazil” and “12 Monkeys,” has a fiendish eye, so it’s no surprise that this movie is a crazy-quilt of design. It’s so cool to look at, you can even forget how jumbled the storytelling is.
| Fun: Terry Gilliam directs this fantastical idea about the storytelling Grimm brothers (Matt Damon and Heath Ledger) re-imaged as 19th century con men. If this story makes sense it’s news to me, but there’s fun to be had along the way.
Rated: PG-13 rating is for violence, subject matter. |
In the fictional universe written by screenwriter Ehren Kruger (“The Skeleton Key”), the brothers Grimm are no longer writers but con men. Their fantastical stories are invented purely as a way of convincing small-town populations that they are being threatened by witches or wolves, the better for the brothers to swoop in and chase away the evil spirits. For a price, of course.
Wilhelm (Damon) is the more dashing of the Grimms, and Jacob (Ledger) the bookish intellectual who actually bothers to write down some of their outlandish supernatural tales. Their shtick gets stuck when they arrive at a town where Napoleon’s French troops have occupied part of Germany.
Here, it seems, they don’t need to invent a bogus bogeyman – there really is some kind of curse laid on the nearby woods, involving an ageless witch-queen (Monica Belluci) and vanished children and a chamber hidden up in the trees.
The brothers can’t just cut and run, because they are under the eye of a French general (Jonathan Pryce) ruling the territory, as well as the general’s paid observer, an Italian mercenary (played with abandon by Peter Stormare). The Grimms also become intrigued by the capable Angelika, a self-sufficient huntress; she’s played by Lena Headey (the dark-browed British actress from “Mrs. Dalloway” and “Aberdeen”), who looks like she just slithered out of a pre-Raphaelite painting.
There’s much wackiness in Gilliam’s ideas – a man getting swallowed by a tree, a rotting but busy raven, a re-creation of the Hansel and Gretel story. His ability to be both whimsical and deeply disturbing – as in a sequence where a boy turns into gingerbread – is still in place.
As great as his visual imagination is, the film (shot in the Czech Republic) is actually sometimes ugly to look at, or at least chaotic. And if the story actually makes sense, it’s news to me. At least the real brothers Grimm told tales that you could follow like a trail of bread crumbs.
I still enjoyed watching “The Brothers Grimm,” with its goofy attitude and endless jokes against the French. Kudos to Matt Damon and Heath Ledger for being in the spirit of the thing, too. If someone could harness Gilliam’s talent just a bit – and then support his efforts more (this one sat on the shelf for a couple of years) – the results would probably be remarkable.
Heath Ledger (left) and Matt Damon star in “The Brothers Grimm.”
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