It's been seven years since Terry Gilliam made a movie. His last film, an adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, was received with mixed enthusiasm by critics and did poor box-office business, but like all of his movies, has become a cult classic. Gilliam is a director with big ideas that often require large budgets for fantastical sets, costumes and effects, but his films are rarely commercial successes. It's rare that he doesn't have high-profile clashes with producers and studios, or that his productions don't come precariously close to being shut down because of budget problems or other setbacks. The 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha is all about the failed production of Gilliam's adaptation of Don Quixote, a project he still hopes to return to someday.
Gilliam's return, The Brothers Grimm, doesn't stray from his career path: The director walked away from the project for six months after extensive conflicts with studio head Bob Weinstein. While both now claim to be happy with the product, it's not hard to see that Grimm is easily Gilliam's most mainstream, accessible work to date. Whether that will translate into box-office success is another matter.
Just because it's accessible doesn't mean it's not clearly Gilliam. Set, like all of his work, in a skewed fantasy world just a little to the left of reality, the film posits that the real-life Grimm brothers, famous for their fairy tales, are a pair of con artists who travel from town to town preying on the superstitious with fake hauntings that they then "cure." Shy, bookish Jake (Heath Ledger) and loud, arrogant Will (Matt Damon) have a pretty good gig going until they're caught by Delatombe (an absolutely hilarious Jonathan Pryce), the ruler of French-occupied Germany and a nasty, petty despot, who decides to spare them from execution if they can banish the demons haunting a small village.
Since the brothers didn't invent these demons themselves, and this is a Terry Gilliam movie, it's not hard to guess that Will and Jake will soon encounter actual versions of the fake menaces they've been creating. Young girls are being abducted into the forest surrounding the village, and the brothers, saddled with Delatombe's incompetent Italian assistant Cavaldi (Peter Stormare, also hilarious), enlist the aid of local tracker Angelika (Lena Headey) to find out what's going on.
What's going on ultimately involves an imprisoned evil queen (Monica Bellucci, sadly underused), a few familiar elements from classic Grimm tales given new twists, and buried somewhere deep beneath all the effects, a commentary on the way imperialism can decimate unique regional culture. The script by genre factory Ehren Kruger (who recently wrote the half-baked horror movie The Skeleton Key) is strictly paint-by-numbers, but Gilliam infuses it with a manic energy and sumptuous visual style that elevates it above the predictable.
Damon and Ledger are actually the blandest members of the eclectic cast but they serve well as audience surrogates, acting skeptical and curious, respectively, about the strange goings-on in the forest. Those goings-on are what make the movie intriguing, alternately funny and scary, and more knowing in the end about what makes fairy tales important than it first appears to be. Gilliam makes a point of specifying the time and place of the movie's setting, and the few scenes directly addressing the way the conquering French subjugated and sometimes obliterated the folk tales of the native Germans hints at an intriguing subtext that is unfortunately never quite fleshed out.
Instead, the film ends up pretty much as you'd imagine from the way it started, but Gilliam is second only to Tim Burton among mainstream filmmakers in bringing a surreal, imaginative style to even the most tired of scripts, and that's exactly what he does here. The Brothers Grimm is a bit of a let-down after such a long hiatus for Gilliam, and not nearly as daring or thought-provoking as classics like Brazil or 12 Monkeys. But luckily, we won't have to wait long for another glimpse into Gilliam's fevered imagination; his next film, Tideland, is due early next year.