Terry Gilliam uses shock and terror the way you or I might use air and oxygen. These qualities saturate the entirety of his colorful and checkered career. It is also why Gilliam is one of the few directors who can claim a unique understanding of the creativity behind fear and mayhem. Unfortunately, these talents are wasted in a film like The Brothers Grimm.
This film is a miscalculation by Gilliam, of proportions if not enormous then at least regrettably grave. Set around the end of the 18th century, two brothers, Wilhelm and Jacob, are living in French-occupied Germany making a good living scaring people out of their money as apocryphal ghostbusters. Will is skeptical and pragmatic; Jacob is optimistic and wishful. How the brothers feel about their job is summed up in one scene in which they're interrogated about the progress of a mission by a French General they've been conscripted to serve. The exchange goes something like this:
Jacob: "My liege, we have a case of genuine enchantment in the village."
Will: "Wait a minute, that's not official. The Brothers Grimm, Inc. is not unanimous in that opinion."
The French General is a sadist. Assigned to oversee the German territory, he knows the Grimms are charlatans but needs them to uncover a recent series of abductions in a small village. The General thinks another group of hucksters is extorting money and so sends the brothers to uncover the fraud. Once the brothers get to the village, however, it is clear something wicked this way lies.
On the surface, Gilliam seems to have a good idea about what the film should be. In the actual Grimm fairy tale collection, the one without pictures, the stories are often horrifying and perverse -- bad behavior is punished with twisted malice just as good behavior is immoderately rewarded.
In the world of The Brothers Grimm, life is nasty, brutish and cursed. Set design and art direction are the film's strongest elements, with a good balance of fantasy and grimness. Villages are gloomy and thick with fog, the aristocracy is gaudy and possessed horses can spit spider webs to eat children.
As for the many fairy tales gathered by the real Brothers Grimm, they make appearances as cameos or plot turns. The film is clever in how it stitches elements of those fairy tales into the story.
However, neither the story nor Gilliam seems to know what the movie is about. There is no clear moral here because innocents die and it isn't obvious there's a happy ending. The heroes' identities also are unresolved. The Grimm Brothers are selfish, altruistic, brave, sheepish, romantic and doubtful. The movie's attitude remains schizophrenic about the brothers.
Perhaps pieces of the script made sense by themselves, but collectively on screen it's simply a mess. It is as if several jigsaw puzzles were mixed together and the film is a failed attempt at their assembly. The picture is a cinematic vessel whose sad fate is to sputter around in circles.
What we have here is an imagination without direction, images without much purpose. The movie, like the film's villain, is all looks but no heart.
Our sense of happily-ever-after arrives only after we've left the theater.
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