Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
I love Terry Gilliam movies.
Let’s get that out of the way right up front, so we’re all clear on it. I love Gilliam’s voice as a filmmaker. I love that his movies are messy and rarely play by the conventions of Hollywood, and you can always sense Gilliam just off-camera, giggling gleefully when the artistic mayhem pays off. His masterpiece, BRAZIL, may be my favorite film of all time, and I’m pretty head-over-heels for TIME BANDITS, 12 MONKEYS, FEAR & LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS and, especially, THE FISHER KING. I’m amazed at how close he let the filmmakers behind THE HAMSTER FACTOR and LOST IN LA MANCHA get to him, and I find his still-difficult treatment by the studio system to be consistently disheartening.
But even in the rare Gilliam misfire (and it’s hard to think of a better word for a film like MUNCHAUSEN), there are moments of such grace and wit and unfettered imagination that I find myself dazzled anew with each viewing. When your worst movies are worth watching more than once, you are an uncommonly good filmmaker. Think of that gorgeous waltz between John Neville and Uma Thurman, as the years just fall away from Neville, the two of them dancing higher and higher on air. The very least I expect from a Giliam film is a handful of those sort of magic moments.
And on that level, I enjoyed THE BROTHERS GRIMM, the most nakedly commercial and impersonal film that Gilliam’s ever made. The film is obvious, just to the edge of crass, and that’s got to be due to the thick-headed script by Ehren Kruger. It’s one of the worst scripts I’ve seen this year, mechanical and lifeless from the set-up. The film feels too calculated for you to ever really root for it, but it’s almost like Gilliam knew that when he signed on, and so did the cast, but they didn’t care because they knew it was Gilliam directing. It’s almost like the film exists in spite of the script, not because of it.
And so the film has this crazy energy about it, and sure enough, there are some dark fairy tale images in the film that feel like authentic nightmares, surreal and impossible to forget. Gilliam plays with CGI for the first time to mixed results. Some of it’s a little shoddy, but when it works, it’s original and striking, and even when it doesn’t work, it’s interesting. I wish that Kruger’s script played more with the specific iconography of the Grimm stories, instead of just a cursory nod at Red Riding Hood and a vague mention of a mirror on a wall, but the script misses so many opportunities that it’s hard to complain about any one specific one. Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm are fascinating historical figures, and I think people underestimate the cultural significance of what they did. They worked as Royal Librarians in Berlin and, together, they were creating an Encyclopedia of Grammar, serious work that earned them scholarly acclaim. It was Jakob who came up with the idea that changed the direction of their lives, though. He proposed a project where they would collect stories that were passed down as part of the oral tradition, folk tales that he believed revealed the truth about the inner lives of common people. They spent years traveling, writing down stories everywhere they went, and in doing so, they captured something for the ages that would have been lost otherwise.
So, of course, forget all that. Instead, this is basically a rehash of SCOOBY-DOO in which Jake (Heath Ledger) and Will (Matt Damon) are sort of the Mystery Machine Gang and Old Man Withers all wrapped up in one. They travel from village to village solving hauntings and curses that mostly seem to be scams that the Grimms run on the poor unsuspecting locals. It sounds like more fun than it is onscreen. It’s all sort of frantic and labored, and there’s a scene at the beginning of the Grimms as children to explain why Will doesn’t believe in magic but Jake does. It takes a while for the film to find its tone. That happens right around the moment that Jonathan Pryce makes his entrance. He’s wise to the game that the Grimms have been playing, and he could easily put them to death for it. Instead, he presses them into service. There’s a small village that’s reporting the same sort of incidents the Grimms have made their reputation on, and Pryce wants them to investigate and figure out who’s behind it.
Gee... y’think maybe this one’s real?
If you can’t guess from the set-up that the Grimms are going to have to defeat a real supernatural foe, then you’ve probably never seen a movie before. Every obvious choice that the script can make, it does. The way Gilliam handles it is by layering in some rich texture to even the most ham-handed scene. Take the henchmen played by Richard Ridings and Mackenzie Crook (better known as Gareth on THE OFFICE). Gilliam uses them as visual punchlines even when their scenes are poorly written, and they work as such. Same thing with Peter Stormare, who plays Cavaldi, henchman to Pryce’s character. He takes a fairly generic bad guy and lets his freak flag fly. Lena Headey, the female lead in the film, doesn’t salvage her deeply underwritten role. She’s a bore, and no matter how had the film tries to set her up as the love interest, she and Ledger never strike any sparks, so it never really clicks. Monica Bellucci’s ravishing when she’s supposed to be, but she’s barely in the film. It would be hard to even call what she does a performance. Basically, she’s there to model the extravagant costumes by Gabriella Pescucci, and she looks great doing so. As far as the leads are concerned, Heath Ledger seems to be much more in tune with what Gilliam's doing than Damon is, and the two of them have some funny back-and-forth, but again... the writing's just flat and obvious and too much of it fails for either of these guys to shine to their full potential.
Have you seen those amazing posters for the film? If not, check them out. I wish the film really did look like that all the way through. Newton Thomas Sigel’s work can be pretty great at times, but there’s something about this film that feels rushed, unfinished, lowball. I’ve heard all sorts of whispers about Dimension tampering with the film from the moment it started shooting. Whatever the case, I’d say this is ultimately an inconsequential film for Gilliam except in one regard: at least he finally got a new film made. Anyone who saw LOST IN LA MANCHA saw a beaten Gilliam, a guy finally and fully defeated by the process. THE BROTHERS GRIMM isn’t a great film, but even here, there is considerable evidence of the enormous talent that continues to make Gilliam one of the most interesting filmmakers alive. It’s worth seeing at least once, on the biggest screen available, when it opens August 26th.
Now I’ve got to run start working on my other two articles for the weekend... a trip to a set in Vancouver that was sorta neat and the return of Moriarty’s DVD Shelf. Until then...
"Moriarty" out.
