Fear and loathing in Bavaria.
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The fairytale premise of
The Brothers Grimm
would be perfect, you'd think, for director Terry Gilliam (
Twelve Monkeys, The Fisher King, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, Brazil…
) and his bizarre, irreverent visuals. The year is 1796; it's as good as it's going to get for Emperor Napoleon and the Grimm boys travel French-occupied Europe working their grift. Wilhelm (Matt Damon) and Jacob (Heath Ledger of
The Knight's Tale
) Grimm pose as magicians who save the peasantry from evil curses, infestations of witches and so forth. Their task is made simpler by the fact that none of these actually exist; they hire actors to pose as foul, fearsome spirits whom they then exorcise, using flashy gimmicks such as bottled "baby tears" and a crucifix which bursts into flame. Afterward, they split the take from the grateful villagers and everyone's happy, until the French blackmail the Grimms into investigating why the village of Marbaden is losing its little girls one at a time. Do the Grimms have competition-or could enchanted forests and wicked witches really exist?
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Though the half-kooky, half-scary look and feel of the film aren't exactly wrong, they're not quite right either. Crowd scenes obviously consist of about 10 people all violently milling about, and there are shabby bits where the CGI snags and stutters. Matt Damon makes a manful effort to hold up his end of things as Will, the brother who's as strapping and alpha-male as his sibling is weedy and bespectacled, always scribbling nerdily away in his storybook ("Little Red Riding Cape?"). But from poor Heath Ledger's amateurish, muddled performance we must turn away in polite embarrassment-not only are his gestures and facial expressions bewildering, but it's also impossible to understand what he's saying. Maybe it's his native Australian warring against the weirdness of the Franco-Prussian accent the entire cast seems inexplicably to have adopted.
The worst offenders, surprisingly, are the normally reliable Peter Stormare as an Italian mercenary and Jonathan Pryce as an effete French general. Does Stormare think it's acceptable to speak in an outlandish porridge of Italian, broken English, and what sounds at times like Pig Latin? And why does Pryce deliver his lines as if he were the love child of Zsa Zsa Gabor and Henry Kissinger? The result was that the man sitting next to me had to ask his partner to repeat every other line to him-which might have been useful rather than annoying, except for the fact that she couldn't understand the dialogue either. What lines we could overhear of
The Brothers Grimm
just pulled us out of Gilliam's attempt at his usual wry visual spell-of a fairytale world where wolves metamorphose into men, enchanted trees devour the unwary and magical toads can be solicited with a reluctant kiss.
