Auteur For Hire

THE BROTHERS GRIMM

Directed by Terry Gilliam

Midway through The Brothers Grimm, Terry Gilliam's first new feature in seven years, is a scene that reminds you of the director's rare ability to indulge in flights of fancy while staying thematically on point. The title characters-a couple of yarn-spinning, magic-faking, peasant-bilking charlatans played by Matt Damon and Heath Ledger-are in a dark forest outside Marbaden, a town in the German countryside plagued by child abductions. Damon's Wilhelm Grimm, the team's answer to P.T. Barnum, and Ledger's Jakob Grimm, a dreamer who sometimes feels guilt over the duo's manipulations, have journeyed with a couple of compatriots into the woods on the trail of the lost children, only to be ambushed by the forest itself. The trees literally come to life and scuttle toward them, branches flexing, roots twitching like spider legs. It's a wonderfully creepy image, made hilarious by the brothers' reactions. They're both frightened, but where Jacob, a dreamer, accepts that they really are dealing with magic, Wilhelm cynically persists in trying to guess how the tree effect was achieved. Wires? Mirrors? Puppets?

Chaotically amusing as it is, the scene isn't just fun. It reinforces the central theme of Ehren Kruger's screenplay-the clash between mysticism and empirical thought, between visions and observable reality-and ties The Brothers Grimm into the rest of Gilliam's career, particularly The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and the aborted Don Quixote, both of which are about the deep human need for fairy tales, legends and magic, and the notion that narrative itself is a kind of magic. The scene is also a charming, sidelong comment on watching movies in the age of making-of specials and DVD supplements. Even when the artist achieves a sorcerer's control over the medium, it's still hard to suspend one's disbelief, because we've been taught that credulity is for suckers.

Whether you'll want to suspend your own credulity for The Brothers Grimm will depend largely on your fondness for Gilliam. And what fantasy buff isn't fond of Gilliam? From Brazil on, the former animator has become such a symbol of wild-man integrity-a gonzo artist raging against the Hollywood machine-that one is inclined to support him even when the work isn't great. This movie should put that inclination to the test. It's eye-popping, energetic and rudely funny in the time-honored Gilliam manner. But it's also muddled, frenzied, exhausting and, overall, more superficial than it should have been, especially when one considers the subject matter: a fairytale about the Brothers Grimm.

Set in 19th-century Germany, where ancient superstitions and folktales were under attack by the occupying French army and its imported Enlightenment ideals, Grimm positions the brothers as ghostbusters in reverse, manufacturing phony hauntings and possessions via crude special effects (including a witch on wires played by Gareth Williams, costar of The Office), then encountering a haunting they cannot explain or dispel. The whole movie is suffused with Gilliam's brand of giddy intelligence, which mixes skepticism and wonder. Cherry-picking images from Grimm fairytales, Gilliam is like a magician who explains his tricks as he goes, yet still wants you to believe in the magic of whichever one he's about to perform. Haunting imagery abounds: a red-hooded girl with a picnic basket touching a rose bush and inspecting her thorn-bloodied fingertip; a demonically afflicted horse with insects swarming around its mouth swallowing a child, then racing into the woods, its massively pregnant belly undulating with each gallop; a woodchopper's crossbow-toting daughter, Angelika (Lena Headey), encountering a bipedal werewolf (it moves like a Ray Harryhausen skeleton warrior) that might be the incarnation of her dad.

The flamboyant theatricality of the sets and effects (most of the forest exteriors were shot on a soundstage) make much of The Brothers Grimm feel dreamily unreal, and lend it a childlike, "let's put on a show" quality. (Fantasy buffs may be reminded of Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves and Ridley Scott's Legend, both of which were shot mainly on sets.) The fairy-tale images jostle against the Pythonesque (or should we say Gilliamesque?) slapstick that deftly captures the Grimm stories' undercurrent of nasty Germanic humor.

Even when the gates of hell seem to have opened up, Wilhelm and Jacob keep squabbling like a comedy team in a black-and-white two-reeler. They're trumped in oddness by Peter Stormare's Cavaldi, an Italian mercenary and torture expert who works for the province's occupying French general (Jonathan Pryce). Cavaldi's mix of cruelty, surliness and incompetence owes less to Grimm's fairytales than to Voltaire and Jonathan Swift. He seems happiest when he's brutalizing helpless people (in an ecstatic moment, he puts Angelika in what looks like a giant Hobart mixer) and saddest when contemplating his presence in Germany. Grousing about the language, he snarls, "Every word is like an execution!"

Despite Gilliam's density of imagination, the end result is still dissatisfying. The Brothers Grimm is too slight and superficial-too blockbustery-to carry the weight of the director and screenwriter's ambitions; it makes its main (frankly, simplistic) points early on, then loses interest and becomes a riot of stunts and special effects that aren't executed deftly enough to discourage one from glancing at one's watch and pondering the movie's kinship to equally ambitious, faintly similar movies that also didn't work (for instance, Steven Soderbergh's Kafka, in which the writer becomes ensnared in a Kafkaesque adventure, and Peter Jackson's The Frighteners, in which a cynical, exploitive parapsychologist encounters a haunting he cannot control).

The last 20 minutes are thick with contrived action and suspense and somewhat mechanical moments of wonder. They're over-scaled and bludgeoning, like one of the brothers' scams carried out at the Hollywood level; they make you bored enough to think back over the rest of the movie, at which point you realize that Gilliam never really bothered to elucidate exactly how, in this universe, dreams, visions and stories intersect with so-called "reality." Even fantasies should have internal logic, and this one really doesn't. "Nothing makes sense there," Wilhelm says of the enchanted forest. "It's like being inside Jake's head." Or the director's.

As in Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear, one can't shake the suspicion that Gilliam is not just teasing Kruger's script to uncover organic connections to his previous work, but superimposing pet obsessions and motifs in order to make Grimm feel more like an auteur's statement and less like what it is, a work-for-hire job. In that spirit, Gilliam recently told Time that his latest feature "? may not be the deepest film I ever made, but I do think there's real enchantment in it," and admitted to the Guardian that after Don Quixote collapsed, he and costar Johnny Depp made a pact to do a commercial film apiece, to accumulate enough box-office clout to make another run at Quixote. As Gilliam told it to the Guardian, Depp said to him, "'You make a commercial film, I'll make a commercial film, and we'll get the money to do Quixote'? He made Pirates. Grimm is my commercial film." Gilliam's caveats suggest a filmmaker's correlative to the old "If a tree falls in the forest" question: If you let the whole world know in advance that you're selling out, then deliver a movie that's probably too peculiar to be successful, are you really selling out?