Spring Break
Movie Reviews: "The Brothers Grimm" & "The 40 Year Old Virgin"
Issue date: 8/29/05 Section: Culture
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"The Brothers Grimm"
For a select group of moviegoers, Terry Gilliam is a personal hero.
With movies from "Time Bandits" to "12 Monkeys" to "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," this legendary director has infused a stunning, visionary style to create works that challenge the monotony of conventional films. His films are brash, daring, and most importantly, extremely interesting.
Thus, what I'm about to utter truly pains my heart.
"The Brothers Grimm" is one of the most hopeless movies I have seen all year.
For a movie about storytellers, it has some of the worst storytelling I've ever seen in a major motion picture, which results in a dreadful, boring, unfunny, hard-to-follow film that probably should have been sent straight to DVD.
Gilliam desperately wants to make "The Brothers Grimm" into a chaotic romp of a film, but it's all forced and doesn't have a script built for comedy. The pacing is slow, the jokes are flat and unoriginal, and even star power can't save this dying film.
Brothers Will (Matt Damon) and Jake (Heath Ledger) Grimm are two traveling con men in early 1800s Europe.
They create all sorts of elaborate hoaxes to make the local townspeople believe they can rid their village of the supernatural-all for the right price. When the French government captures the brothers, the two are sent to the village of Marbaden, where children are mysteriously disappearing at an alarming rate.
However, when it is discovered that an evil queen (the gorgeous Monica Belluci) is at the heart of the matter, the two brothers must cast aside all falsities in their methods of sleuthing and approach a real situation using more than their wits have to offer.
Although the acting is usually the last thing noticed in a spectacle of this size, the performances show interesting choices.
Damon and Ledger have both been cast against type (an ordinary director would cast Damon as the intellectual and reserved Jacob and Ledger as the brash Will), and both are adequate at suggesting their gradual belief in their increasingly bizarre surroundings.
On the other hand, Bellucci, as the central villain, has little to do aside from stand around in a remote tower, muttering various incantations and curses, often under tons of makeup. (It is a typically perverse Gilliam move, I suppose, to cast arguably the most heart-stoppingly beautiful woman in the world in a film and then bury her under old-age makeup for a healthy chunk of her on-screen time.)
