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August 30, 2005
The Brothers Grimm
Directed by: Terry Gilliam
Starring: Heath Ledger, Matt Damon, Jonathan Pryce, Peter Stormare, Lena Headey, Monica Bellucci
Rated: PG-13 for violence, frightening sequences and brief suggestive material.
Parental Notes: This is a strong PG-13 -- Terry Gilliam is known for including disturbing elements in his films and this is no exception. Viewers will encounter a pulverized kitten, a living corpse, a horse which swallows children, and plenty of grim fairy tale elements.
Terry Gilliam is a master of creating fantastical worlds. Whether it’s the dystopic future of “Brazil” or the surrealist quasi-present of his animations with “Monty Python,” he excels at turning the churnings of the mind into resonant images on the screen. “The Brothers Grimm” is no exception. It’s a mud-spattered fairy tale with a streak of the weird, a story of the triumph of the imagination over cynical realism, and a celebration of all those stories we read as children.
The tale follows two brothers, Jake (Heath Ledger) and Will (Matt Damon). Jake is a dreamer and a scholar of fairy tales while Will is a charming, conniving realist. Together, along with a pair of helpers (Richard Ridings and Mackenzi Crook), they make a living by ridding villages of supernatural problems. Well, by making the villagers think they’ve rid them of a supernatural problem. They have a knack for show business, or at least Will does, and Jake knows enough about what the villagers believe to make their cons convincing.
But this is French-occupied Germany in the era of Napoleon and French rationalism. When the local general, Delatombe (Jonathan Pryce), gets wind of their fraudulent dealings he comes up with a choice for them: either go to a benighted town which has apparently lost ten little girls to a cursed forest and figure out what’s going on, or be executed for their crimes. Both Delatombe and his pet torturer Cavaldi (Peter Stormare) are evil in true fairy-tale mode -- so much so that when Cavaldi accidentally splatters a cute little critter around the room in one scene, we are hardly surprised when Delatombe picks the fragments of meat off his face and consumes them.
The brothers are not fools, and figuring that the “curse” is the product of a rival set of con artists, they head off for the town. What they find, of course, real magic, complete with an evil queen (Monica Bellucci). The village is suitably muddy (anyone who’s seen “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” knows Gilliam’s predilection for mud), and packed with characters like Angelika (Lena Headey), huntress who is suitably tough and beautiful. She knows the secrets of the forest, and tries to convince the brothers that the magic is real.
The look of the film is amazing -- by turns realistic, sumptuous, gritty, and dreamlike. It is truly a fairytale of its own, only writ large. The mud and blood are pure Gilliam, but so are the spun gold and lace. Gilliam has his own inimitable style, much the way that directors like Tim Burton and Steven Spielberg do, and this is very much a Gilliam film. Sadly, the computer graphics are not quite up to the mark of the rest of the film -- where the costuming, makeup, and sets are fantastic, the CGI monsters are often laughably cheesy.
“The Brothers Grimm” also suffers from the classic Gilliam flaw: you have to let yourself get swept up in the story and not question the world’s rules too much. Nearly anything goes when there’s magic involved, and although there is clearly a system to the way the magic works in this film, it is never explained. The basic fairy tale rules are followed, though. The wicked are punished, the good who fall from grace are given a chance to redeem themselves, and the winners live happily ever after.
“The Brothers Grimm” is an odd film, a very Gilliamesque film, and while it won’t be to everyone’s taste, it might just satisfy those with the peculiar worldview to which Terry Gilliam caters.
Posted by Ealasaid at August 30, 2005 01:03 PM
File under: Rated PG-13Comments
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