by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night
Charles and I got to watch a fairly recent (2005) movie on DVD: The Brothers
Grimm, directed by Terry Gilliam from a
script by one Ehren Kruger, which had a troubled production history (when has
Terry Gilliam ever made a movie that didn’t have a troubled production history?). First, Gilliam
and his writing partner Tony Grisoni heavily rewrote Kruger’s script, but
because of Writers’ Guild of America rules aimed at keeping directors from
claiming writing credits even if they rewrote (or originally wrote) major
portions of the script themselves, they weren’t allowed writing credits — so
Gilliam put his and Grisoni’s names way down in the credit roll as “dress
pattern makers.” Then what’s left of MGM pulled their financial backing either
just before or just after Gilliam started shooting, so he had to bring in
Harvey and Bob Weinstein — who had their usual hissy-fits with directors,
provoking an argument over the editing that lasted so long Gilliam was able to
make a whole other movie, Timeland,
while waiting for the conflicts to be resolved and The Brothers Grimm to be released. I wanted to watch this largely
because it had been in the backlog a long time and after The
Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, the Gilliam
film star Heath Ledger had been making when he died (three other actors
completed his part), I wanted to see the Gilliam film Ledger had lived to complete. I also wanted to show it now
because Charles just started taking an online class on science fiction and
fantasy literature, and an early session mentioned the Grimms — even though
this being a movie, and a Terry Gilliam movie at that, anyone expecting a
dramatization of the actual Grimm brothers and their trips across war-torn
early 19th century Germany collecting popular folk tales and editing
them into books like their pioneering 1812 collection Kinder- und
Hausmarchen (“Children’s and Household
Tales”) would be sorely disappointed.
Instead what Kruger, Grusoni and Gilliam
came up with was a script that followed one of the oldest dramatic chestnuts: a
couple of con artists extracting money from townspeople to fight demons,
goblins, witches or whatnot while they were actually staging the supernatural
events themselves suddenly come up against genuinely supernatural events and end up comedically hopeless
at stopping the real-life monsters. The Brothers Grimm starts “once upon a time … in 1796,” with one of the
Grimm boys using the family’s last money to buy some “magic” beans, an obvious
reference to Jack and the Beanstalk
even though, as one imdb.com contributor pointed out, the Grimms probably never
encountered Jack and the Beanstalk
because it’s a British folk tale not well known in Germany. The film then cuts
15 years forward, which would be 1811, at a time when Germany was being
occupied by Napoleon’s France —and not surprisingly Gilliam makes quite a bit
of the irony of being able to depict (as one of his titles has it) “Germany
Under French Occupation” when we’ve been so conditioned by Casablanca and all those other World War II-set movies to think
of the Germans as the occupiers and the French as the occupiees, not the other
way around (Gilliam even stages a scene in which the French attempt to burn the Grimms’ book just to make sure we get the point). The Grimms, brothers Wilhelm (Matt Damon) and Jakob (Heath Ledger)
— who call each other “Will” and “Jake” throughout the movie — are making a
living as freelance exorcists, using a couple of actors to stage supernatural
events in small German villages and then getting paid handsomely to exorcise
the spirits, demons, witches, trolls or whatnot supposedly haunting the local
townspeople. In fact, it’s this that leads them to their fairy-tale researches,
as they collect a lot of
information about local Germans and their superstitions, and when asking why the people believe this stuff, the Grimms are told a
lot of the famous stories that ended up in their book.
The opening sequence (at
least the first one that takes place in 1811 after that prologue with the beans
when the Grimms are still kids) is one of the best things in the movie: the
Grimms are in a small town whose millhouse is being haunted by a 100-year-old witch
who was put to death a century earlier but not properly exorcised before she
was buried — and she wasn’t buried in a mirror-lined coffin (a recurring theme
in the film — the Grimms even go into battle with their supernatural nemeses
with a mirror-covered shield). We see the witch rendered with all the artistry
modern-day computer-generated imagery can muster, and she’s viscerally
frightening — then, when the Grimms have “killed” her, we’re supposed to
believe that “she” was only one of the two actors the Grimms have hired to help
them stage supposed supernatural events so the Grimms can get paid to get rid
of these diabolical nemeses. Of course, the Grimms end up in the town of
Marbaden in the state of Thuringia, where they’re being hounded by the French
authorities who threaten to have them executed for their con jobs — only one
sympathetic French officer who’s really Italian, Cavaldi (Peter Stormare)
offers to pardon them if they can go to Marbaden and find the young children
who have disappeared under mysterious circumstances and free them. After a lot of back-and-forth involving the townspeople, the
occupation forces and the film’s central female character, Angelika (Lena
Headey, who for my money out-acts both the male leads), who tells them she knows vital information about the
haunted woods where the kids disappeared and also has a vested interest in
finding them because the first two to disappear were her sisters, we ultimately
learn that the haunted castle inside the woods contains an 800-year-old
countess (Monika Bellucci), listed as “Mirror Queen” in the dramatis
personae, who needs a serum derived from
the blood of 12 victims to make herself young and beautiful again. (Apparently
the writers derived this character from the legendary “Blood Countess”
Elizabeth Báthory in 15th century Hungary, who would kidnap young
women, drain them of their blood and bathe herself in it in the belief that
this would keep her from aging physically.) We also ultimately learn that
Angelika is the 12th victim she needs blood from to make this stuff,
and in the meantime the French, led by officer Delatombe (Jonathan Pryce, star
of Gilliam’s marvelous 1985 film Brazil), enter Marbaden and, Avatar-style, decide the way to get rid of all those pesky creatures haunting
the place is to burn down the forest.
When the Grimms protest he has them
tortured and threatened with execution — when Cavaldi refuses to shoot the
Grimms on Delatombe’s order, Cavaldi says he resigns his commission and
Delatombe calmly pulls out one of the pistols he wanted to use on the Grimms,
shoots Cavaldi and says, “Resignation accepted” — and there’s a catastrophic
scene at the end in which the old woman appears to have won, Wilhelm Grimm has
been mortally wounded, but the Mirror Queen says he can be healed if he has sex
with her (and Gilliam, just to confuse things further, keeps cutting back and
forth from Monika Bellucci as a young woman to her plastered in age makeup to
play the 800-year-old crone), and he appears to have done so when Angelika, who
also appears to have been raised from the dead, offers them a way to kill the
Queen and be free of her spell. When she’s not corporeal the Queen takes
possession of her mirror — the one she’s been asking throughout her story arc,
“Who’s the fairest of them all?” (you remember) — and when it shatters each
piece seems to contain a piece of her as well. I may be confusing my
recollections of this movie big-time in terms of what was happening when, but
that’s not too important because in a film like this, in which the writers have
created a nearly rule-free fantasy in which almost anything can happen at any moment and therefore there’s no
story logic or continuity, the actual events of the story are not that
important. I had some of the same frustrations with The Brothers
Grimm that I did with The
Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus: I find
stories like this in which literally anything can happen at any moment highly annoying. In order
to shock an audience by violating its expectations, you first have to create
some — and this time around Gilliam and his writers, credited or not, couldn’t
be bothered. What makes The Brothers Grimm grippingly watchable is the sheer beauty and audacity of the
conception: the effects (particularly the ambulatory trees, which really do look like moving trees and not shaky models with
actors inside) are first-rate and Newton Thomas Sigel’s cinematography has such
intense depth-of-field Charles was wondering whether the film was originally
shot in 3-D. (It wasn’t, but it really didn’t need to be — though one wonders
what shots in the film are Sigel’s and which ones were done by the original
director of photography, Nicola Pecorini, who was fired when the Weinstein
brothers took over the production.)
Like many of Gilliam’s other films it’s
audacious in its visual conception and rather shaky in its plotting — dramatic
coherence has never been
Gilliam’s strong suit, though one thing that made Brazil special was that it was, at least by his standard, a
relatively well constructed story (and it also took place in the near future
instead of the legendary or quasi-legendary past, and somehow making a movie in
which the physical reality is more or less that of our own time puts some
limits on that tremendous imagination of his and harnesses it to do useful
work) — and it’s also not terribly well cast. According to various imdb.com
“trivia” posters, Johnny Depp was originally supposed to play one of the Grimms
(there’s also a report that when Matt Damon and Heath Ledger finally were cast,
it was originally supposed to be Ledger as Wilhelm and Damon as Jacob, though
the two actors asked if they could swap parts and Gilliam said O.K.), and quite
frankly it would have been a much better movie with the edgier, more
interesting Depp in Damon’s role — Damon is just too pretty, too impassive and
too concerned with projecting his looks to be right for a role in a Terry
Gilliam film. As for Ledger, he’s O.K. as a “type” but, as I said in my
comments on Imaginarium, he seems
to have been a very limited
actor, suited to play only one type of character: the tortured introverts he
portrayed in his best films, Monster’s Ball and Brokeback Mountain. At least this role steers more towards his strength
than the part in Imaginarium did
(when I saw Imaginarium I thought
Colin Farrell was so much better than Ledger they should have scrapped all
Ledger’s footage and remade the whole movie with Farrell). The film is stolen
by Lena Headey, who was strong enough it made me wonder what she’d been doing
since — mostly the TV series Terminator and Game of Thrones, the
latter of which has been popular enough hopefully it will give her the
reputation she deserves — and it has the obligatory Gilliam-movie references to
shit (notably one in which a French officer says “Merde,” then realizes he is
supposed to be sounding like a German and corrects himself to say “Scheisse”)
and a quite clever last sequence in which the final credit, “And they all lived
happily after … ,” is interrupted by a shot of a shard of mirror containing
part of the Mirror Queen’s face and the next title reads, “Well, maybe not.”
It’s a title sequence that sums up Gilliam’s sense of humor and provides an
appropriate tag to a film that shows just why he’s so controversial — among the
items on the imdb.com message boards about him are “Best Director of the ’90’s”
and “Worst Director Ever.”
