Terry Gilliam has wrought a lovely bit of fun with The Brothers Grimm. The plot borrows liberally from the Grimm brothers’ best-known (in the English-speaking realm) fairy tales, breathing new life into them for a new generation. Director Gilliam plays quick and loose with the historical Grimm brothers as well. Unlike the personages Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, Jake and Will are more a pastiche, a bit of Butch Cassidy and Sundance, a bit more of Felix Krull (the most famous comic con artist in German letters), and a whole lot of transformative mythologizing of Romantic heroes, the one as romantic dreamer and the other as larger-than-life man of action.
Closer in spirit to Adventures of Baron Munchausenthan any of Gilliam’s other work, The Brothers Grimm is a fast-paced, highly inventive visual feast. Some fairy-tale characters are computer-generated, some computer-enhanced, some of the merely low-tech flesh-and-blood type. Little Red Riding Hood, the Gingerbread Man, the flying poltergeist–all delight and terrify and astonish. The 500-year-old Mirror Queen (Monica Belluci) and her paramour Woodsman (Tomas Hanak) undergo spell-binding transformations on camera. The special effects employed for the Tower and the Enchanted Forest (shades of the Wizard of Oz duly noted), the careful detail in creating the “Thuringian” village, the use of authentic Czech locations all add vibrant color and rich texture, lending a dramatically realistic patina to the film’s illusions. The blending of precise visual details with the surreal dream-like quality of the fantastic characters and scenes also serve to underscore the film’s preoccupation with myth, where reality and fantasy merge and blur.
The historical Romantic era, when the brothers Grimm were collecting their folk tales, was a time of great uncertainty in Europe. The thrilling promises of the Enlightenment, of reason and revolution, including empirical science and technological innovation, and the spirit of democratizing revolution, also brought the French Revolution with its Reign of Terror and the rise of Napoleon. The Brother Grimm is set in late eighteenth-century Germany, during Napoleon’s military subjugation and at the height of Germany’s self-mythologizing Age of Poets and Philosophers. Bonapartism, idealization of the larger-than-life man of action, had already become a living nightmare for the vanquished Germans.
During this historically pivotal, but long overlooked, period, provincial, superstitious, semi-medieval Germany suffered humiliation at the hand of the arrogant, technologically superior troops of that era’s military super power France. Against such a grim background, Gilliam teases his audience with questions like, Who is really enlightened here? Are not these quiche-eating, dandified, wig-wearing Frenchmen loathsome? Are these superstitious, cunning, but loyal German peasants not totally winsome? While the film seeks to suggest, and have fun with, balancing reason and fantasy, it also slyly invites comparisons with the current world political order—bad Frenchmen (whom at least some Americans loathe today) bear striking resemblance to the American occupiers in Iraq, and the simple but good-hearted German peasants call to mind the loyal masses of followers who have kept George W. Bush’s regime alive. The Brothers Grimm does its easiest best playing to audience expectations and offering very comforting reassurances of some “old truisms” in the post-9/11 era.
One of the most notable, and refreshing, aspects of The Brothers Grimm, is its restoration of the pre-Hitler-era cliches of Germany. While the film broadly exploits cliches, from both Hollywood and the Grimm fairy tales, it is striking to encounter a depiction of Germanness so completely devoid of any Nazi cliches. Brothers Jakob (Heath Ledger) (well, actually he’s just “Jake”) and Wilhelm (Matt Damon) (who’s really just “Will,” and good at hunting indeed) are a pair of late-eighteenth-century ghostbusters out to make a quick buck. They arrive in Thuringia, filled with turreted fairy-tale castles and Little Red Riding Hood enchanted woods. In the heart of the countryside, they are beset by all sorts of irrational troubles (a veritable catalog of fairy-tale characters, spells, snares, and riddles), along with more mundane ones, such as Cavaldi (Peter Storrmare), the Snidely Whiplash-treacherous and cowardly Italian henchman for the French, or the liberated tom-boy-no-sleeping-beauty villager Angelika (Lena Headley).
Jake believes in fairy tales, even though he is a con artist. He is also the scribe, and dedicated to accurately recording the folk tales as he and his brother encounter them. While having his head in the clouds and believing foolish things (he embodies the cliche of the Romantic dreamer), Jake’s journey to find his one true love will, of course, be borne out in the end. In sharp contrast, realistic, hard-nosed brother Will tends toward the heroic bravura of action heroism, and his ability to turn the ladies’ heads by his physical prowess proves both a weakness and a saving grace. In the cliche of Romantic doubling, both brothers woo Angelika. Whom shall she favor, if either?. The romantic complications among these mere mortals, in turn, find doubling in the story at the heart of this film – the Mirror Queen’s efforts to have herself brought back to youthful life and beauty, and her relationship with her love-slave, the shape-shifting Woodsman.
Gilliam foregrounds elements from Little Red Riding Hood (and The Sleeping Beauty), very rich psychological and symbolic material. Many scenes visually echoThe Company of Wolves, an intense, if “minor” film by director Neil Jordan which explored Freudian wolf-man subtexts of sexual seduction. Gilliam has clearly been influenced by Jordan’s use of setting and script to blur the line between dream, magic, and reality in his film-making. However, before delving more fruitfully into the sexualized unconscious and internal journeys of self-discovery, Gilliam instead quickly refocuses the plot on a preoccupation with getting twelve stone sarcophagi filled, produces a pre-Raphaelite Ophelia floating dead on the water, and returns again to the question of sexual awakening in rather comic book terms, as more of an externalized Elektra problem.
While not one of Gilliam’s best efforts, The Brothers Grimm is a strong one. All the actors have fun hamming up their parts. The film is a visually sumptuous experience, a playful homage to the best-known Grimm fairy tales.
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