The Brothers Grimm

I always await a new Gilliam film eagerly. There are a small group of directors who like their films quirky, visually stunning and unafraid of pushing boundaries, and along with Tim Burton and Jean-Paul Jeunet, Gilliam is my favourite of these. And like them both, he produces films that are decidedly hit-and-miss. Burton has From Hell and Sleepy Hollow, Jeunet has Alien Resurrection, Gilliam has Jabberwocky – and now this. Yes, while it had its charm, I’m afraid I’ll have to put The Brothers Grimm in the ‘miss’ pile.

The Grimm brothers are travelling tricksters who find villages rumoured to be haunted by ghosts and stage dramatic exorcisms for lucrative reward, until one day, they find themselves in the midst of events that genuinely cannot be explained in any rational way. The film’s highlights are aesthetic – spooky forests and squalid hamlets that look like they came right out of the pages of a story book. Some of the sequences that allude to the Grimms’ stories raise a smile, but others fall flat. Whoever decided The Gingerbread Man would be a great addition at the climax of the action should never be allowed near a pen or keyboard again.

The biggest problem with the film was that it was too uneven. I like variety in a film, very much so, but clumsy slapstick, silly accents and Heath Ledger playing against type as what seemed to be an homage to Michael Palin’s accountant characters in Monty Python just didn’t suit the tone of the film, and weren’t funny at all. Not just the humour – the pacing, the flow of the scenes, the music: they all jarred and jerked in a most irritating fashion. The characters were all very shallow and one-dimensional, and all sorts of magic gumbo was produced at just the right moment to provide an expedient escape route for the characters.

Indeed, the most entertaining part of the night was the row of young teenagers behind reacting to a misplaced trailer for an Ang Lee film about gay cowboys. Oh, how they had to push their disgust, lest any of their friends might think they could possibly enjoy the premise! Bless their insecure little hearts!