August 26, 2005

THE BROTHERS GRIMM is one of the types of movies these summer retrospectives were made for: it was kind of a big deal at the time (because of who directed it), I’ve barely heard anyone talk about it since, and I’ve never really considered revisiting it before, so doing so becomes a weird sort of time travel. Something like BATMAN BEGINS or WAR OF THE WORLDS has stayed in my brain and in the culture, so it’s ongoing. I have to put myself in a certain mindspace to remember what it felt like at the time. But does THE BROTHERS GRIMM even exist outside of the year 2005? I don’t know, I’d have to see more evidence.

It was an intersection of a bunch of different things happening in that moment. Terry Gilliam was a respected, still-we-hoped working director for people who loved film. Dimension Films was dominant and this was their most expensive film ever. Hollywood still saw screenwriter Ehren Kruger (SCREAM 3, REINDEER GAMES, THE RING, THE SKELETON KEY) as an exciting new voice, and there was a bidding war for this spec script. When you think about it this is exactly the kind of high concept screenplay that always ends up on The Black List, which started that year, so it just missed it.

The premise is that the Brothers Grimm are that beloved-by-Hollywood occupation of supernatural expert grifters. They’re known for traveling around helping villages hunt supposed monsters and what not but they’re really setting up tricks and illusions. There’s a Mulder and Scully dynamic, though, established in the opening. As children little Jacob blows the money meant to help their dying mother on what he’s told are magic beans. To this day Will (Matt Damon, SPIRIT: STALLION OF THE CIMARRON) bitterly tosses magic bean insults at Jacob (Heath Ledger, PAWS), who does still sort of believe in magic and likes to write down stories based on the folklore they learn in their travels.

It’s set during the French occupation of Germany, and one day they are arrested and brought to General Vavarin Delatombe (Jonathan Pryce, FREDDIE AS F.R.O.7), a prissy French bastard so evil that there’s a scene where a kitten gets chopped up and splattered on his face and he stops his manservant Letorc (Julian Bleach, TOPSY-TURVY) from wiping it because he wants to taste it. Anyway, children have been going missing from the village of Marbaden, the locals believe it’s a curse, Delatombe believes it’s a scam and knows the Grimms aren’t responsible but says he will blame them unless they go with cartoonish Italian torturer Mercurio Cavaldi (Peter Stormare, MERCURY RISING) and find the real culprits.

They don’t know it yet but of course we can guess that there are no culprits and they will have to face that their fictional worlds are real. Will is a skeptic assuming everything is done with pulleys and mirrors (he’s always marveling at how expensive it must be), Jacob figures out it’s real and tries to address it in his own way, eventually (maybe too eventually) they get on the same page but also use some of the tricks from their con artist trade to battle against real supernatural evil. Black List here we come.

It’s still true that something is off about Damon and Ledger in the leads, and I don’t think it’s that they’re doing generic English accents to represent German. Yes, Damon is the type of movie star who it’s a bit challenging to accept as different nationalities or in different time periods, but I don’t think it’s entirely that either. I read that Damon and Ledger were originally signed to play Jacob and Will, respectively, but they decided they wanted to switch roles. I can see why it might have been a more interesting challenge for Ledger to play the timid, nerdy brother after being such a charisma tornado in LORDS OF DOGTOWN, but also him playing Will might’ve been what the movie needed to really click. We’ll never know. At any rate I don’t think there’s enough chemistry there. I think Will needs some kind of swagger, more of a Harrison Ford grouchiness to bounce off of his brother. For a while they seem pitched as a comedy duo but for me they’re only mildly amusing, with occasional funny banter.

But for me this time the story does work. The brothers ask for a guide into the forest, and the only person who can do it is a trapper everyone believes is cursed and spits after mentioning. They are surprised to find that it’s a beautiful tough lady named Angelika (Lena Headey, who was also in a horror movie called THE CAVE which was released on the same day, but I watched the beginning of it and wasn’t really into it). That’s right, a girl can be a cursed trapper. She reluctantly shows them where to go and also provides all the needed backstory including a tale her father (Czech actor Tomáš Hanák) used to tell her about the tower still standing in the woods and how a Queen (Monica Bellucci, BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA) locked herself in there to avoid the Bubonic plague. We get some Rapunzel and Snow White in there, and there are bits to remind us of Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, etc.

I’d actually think it might be the worst part, but the coolest aspect is how the story mixes in those aspects of fairy tales and nursery rhymes, but always kind of mixed up and given a creepy context. When it spins off into horror sequences it actually gets really good. One of the best is when a little girl not named Jill goes to fetch a pail of water and sees a raven fall into the well. Seems bad for health reasons and then she pulls it up in the bucket, thinks it’s dead but it starts flapping its wings, splashing mud all over her face. When she wipes it off she just has a blank face underneath, no eyes or mouth, but her eyeballs are on the ground and then a vaguely humanoid blob of mud crawls out of the well and uses them as its own. I’m not sure how/why the mud becomes The Gingerbread Man, but I don’t need to know, because in this stuff the rule is the weirder the better.

Maybe the creepiest scene is not connected to folklore I’m familiar with, but it involves somebody feeding a handful of little white spiders to a horse that later starts spitting out webs and uses them to trap and eat a child. The rare sweet spot this movie is able to hit at its best is stuff like the somewhat iffy digital effect of a horse running around with a giant child-sized belly but managing to be more scary than funny.

The effects were one of the production’s many troubles, and I can’t remember how good or bad people felt about Gilliam using the Devil’s computer machines, but I think they hold up well as digital FX that look cool as hell whether or not they look real. The highlight is a werewolf done in such a beautifully janky style that I believed (mistakenly, it seems) some of it was done with stop motion. (I found a good article from Computer Graphics World about how it was created by Gilliam-founded effects house Peerless Camera Company).

A little more traditional, but still very cool, is the death of the Queen where she shatters like a mirror, revealing a rotted corpse beneath. There are similar ideas done well in later Snow White based movies, but there’s something special about seeing it done back when they weren’t even sure computers could pull it off.

In 2005, as a good little movie buff who greatly respected Terry Gilliam, I considered THE BROTHERS GRIMM a huge disappointment. I’d forgotten that, as recorded in my review at The Ain’t It Cool News, the packed preview screening audience at the Harvard Exit seemed to like it and applauded at the end. But reviews were mostly like mine, saying it was an unengaging mess with occasional cool images, it opened in second place behind THE 40 YEAR-OLD VIRGIN, did make back its budget in theaters but not much more, and is not in my experience a movie that continued to exist.

For my 2025 viewing experience that worked to my advantage, though. Remembering very little and coming to it as “that disappointing Terry Gilliam movie” instead of “oh shit it’s the long-awaited new Terry Gilliam movie!” definitely makes it seem better. I was much more involved in the story than before, even if the “they’re fakers forced to face the real thing” gimmick is pretty labored. And I will have to disagree with my younger self – I actually do think there is some meaning in this. I like the theme that this forest is an ancient magic that the locals are in harmony with but that gets set off by invaders. In the backstory that means when the “Christian king” chopped down the forest to build a castle, and the forest grew right back around it, and in the present it means the forest itself fighting against the French occupiers. And of course a vapid queen insists on living forever and tries to steal the youth from children to do it, that’s an old one that’s always relevant but maybe moreso right now.

I personally have a hunch that Gilliam doesn’t know how to get along with people, because somehow other good directors have figured out how to keep making movies without it turning into a giant battle and fiasco every time over and over again for their entire careers. But to his credit the people he couldn’t get along with in this case include the fucking Weinsteins, who sound like they were their usual nightmare selves (artistically, not sure about the actual crimes). They wouldn’t let Gilliam cast Johnny Depp as Will (Damon later joked about how dumb they must’ve felt when PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN came out). They wouldn’t let Damon wear a funny nose (Damon later has a running in-joke about it in OCEAN’S THIRTEEN). They wouldn’t let him cast Samantha Morton as Angelika. They fired his cinematographer Nicola Pecorini (FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS) after six weeks for allegedly shooting too slow, and replaced him with Newton Thomas Sigel (BLANKMAN). At one point Gilliam got so mad he stopped shooting for two weeks. Then in post-production they fought about whether or not he had final cut for so long that he filmed TIDELAND in the interim. THE BROTHERS GRIMM was originally scheduled for a November 2004 release and pushed it back four times before shitting it out at the end of August.

Gilliam genuinely is a brilliant filmmaker – I admit that I haven’t seen BRAZIL, TIME BANDITS and THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN in over one thousand years (after worshiping them as a young man), but I can vouch for FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS and MONTY PYTHON & THE HOLY GRAIL holding up. This was by far his biggest budget, and his movie that was a fiasco in the most normal Hollywood way. I’m not sure it’s entirely the result of this failure, but he’s only done four more movies since, all much smaller profile. According to him The Man is always getting in his way, and according to Ellen Barkin don’t get on an elevator with him.

I’m not sure many people would give THE BROTHERS GRIMM much credit for anything, but watching it now it does strike me as ahead of its time and maybe the inventor of a subgenre. It seems to me to be in almost exactly the same vein as MALEFICENT (2014), SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN (2012), THE HUNTSMAN: WINTER’S WAR (2016), and MALEFICENT: MISTRESS OF EVIL (2019), except done earlier in the evolution of digital FX so the CG-heavy scenes are the standouts instead of the whole thing.

(I almost included HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS on that list, but maybe that’s different. I’m going to need to finally watch that one.)

And I guess if nothing else we can appreciate having one deep cut Ledger role. The guy did fewer than twenty movies in his career, and this is really the only intended as a blockbuster besides THE DARK KNIGHT. As discussed in the LORDS OF DOGTOWN review he was generally turned off by big movies but could be convinced by directors he wanted to work with. He must’ve liked Gilliam because he worked with him one more time, filming THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS at the time of his tragic death. They finished the movie by having the character transform into three other actors, and this time he was allowed to use Depp.

I’m not ready to live happily ever after with THE BROTHERS GRIMM, but I think it’s okay now, and worth watching for those jolts of Hellboy-esque folk nightmare juice. If I could soften it a little, this paragraph from my original review would be fairly accurate:

“I guess in a way this is like so many of the fantasy movies of the ’80s and back then. They got no sense of humor, the characters are dull as a butterknife, but every 20 minutes or so there is an awesome stop motion monster or puppet or something. Now that I look at it that way I guess it’s better than DRAGONSLAYER or KRULL or something. Hey, maybe it’s not that bad. But between the scary monster bits, it seems like the movie is supposed to be whimsical. I felt like I was supposed to be having a whole fuck of alot more fun than I was actually having.”