PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 8/24/05)

Most Hollywood period pieces are burlesques of whatever period they depict, imbuing their characters with modern attitudes and having them spout anachronistic banter. This is largely done with marketing considerations in mind; present-day audience demand for colloquies along the lines of what you might find in Boswell’s Life of Johnson appears to be getting lower all the time. Director Terry Gilliam, as he’s demonstrated in pictures such as Jabberwocky, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and others, is a master of a much more artistically deliberative and potentially subversive period burlesque. For some, Gilliam’s latest picture, The Brothers Grimm, will be best appreciated as a cage match between Gilliam’s sensibility and the more traditional Hollywood concerns represented by the likes of production executive Bob Weinstein and screenwriter Ehren Kruger (hey, remember Reindeer Games?).

Kruger imagines the titular brothers as bogus detectives of the supernatural who are compelled by an obnoxious French general to take on what turns out to be a genuine enchanted forest—one replete with characters and scenarios that will later populate the tales we still know and love today. Brother Will (a sly, relaxed Matt Damon) is the womanizing cynic who concocts the team’s illusions and sees all of life as a shell game, while, schematically enough, brother Jake (a sweet and awkward Heath Ledger) is the true believer and hence the One who can show the way, deliver everyone from evil, and all that. Gilliam plumbed a similar duality in his 1991 The Fisher King, but in that film he took full advantages of the opportunity it offered him to plumb madness, a subject I suspect fascinates him more than magic. He’s clearly being kept on a much tighter rein here, but he still gets his licks in, directing Jonathan Pryce (a Gilliam veteran, having starred in the beleaguered Brazil) to do a French accent almost as outrrrrragggeousas John Cleese’s in Grail. Then there’s the unrecognizable and incomprehensible Peter Stormare, as an Italian soldier overseeing the brothers’ mission, who seems to be channeling Stanley Tucci and cult-fave character actor Timothy Carey simultaneously; you can practically hear Gilliam cackling in the background every time Stormare makes another mush-mouthed declamation. And then there’s all the period muck (remember how unrealistically clean most period pics were prior to Grail?) and of course all the dazzling, inspired imagery-of the grotesque-caricature, lyrical–fairy-tale, and harrowing-nightmare variety, sometimes all at once. In the end it’s still Gilliam Lite, but Gilliam Lite is better than no Gilliam at all; some might even argue, citing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, that it’s better than full-throttle Gilliam. I wouldn’t agree (and at the very least, there are dozens of fellow Fear and Loathing fans who’ve got my back, I’m sure), but I still like The Brothers Grimm.—Glenn Kenny