The Brothers Grimm

Terry Gilliam! For me, the anti-Tim Burton. A genuinely visionary (not a word I throw around) director who also knows the importance of story and respects writers. No doubt coming up with Monty Python, a team of five writers prepared to fight to the death for their work, helped.

When he's directed other people's screenplays, as on 12 Monkeys and The Fisher King, by all accounts he's been respectful to their intentions in the extreme. He involves them in decisions more meglomaniac directors reserve for themselves alone.

And when he's serving his own vision (Brazil, Time Bandits, the ridiculously underrated Adventures of Baron Munchausen), he has enough of a brain to know what his weaknesses are. And he asks good writers to help him. Who? Oh, only Tom Stoppard, Michael Palin--people like that.

He is my favorite director, and not only because he was smart enough to know Watchmen couldn't be condensed into one movie. I don't write the kinds of things he makes, but he's one of the only directors I'd give one of my scripts to in a minute.

And yet, to follow Terry Gilliam's career is to see a man who again and again finds himself on troubled productions. I don't know if he brings it on himself or what, and lord knows I don't think he was wrong in many or all of these cases.

But, it started with clashing with his fellow Pythons on Holy Grail. His battle with Universal to release Brazil in the form in which he wanted it is legendary. The production of Munchausen was a nightmare, but at least a truly remarkable film resulted. The same cannot be said of his aborted attempt to film Don Quixote, the ill-fated production of which is documented in Lost in La Mancha.

Reading between the lines of recent interviews Gilliam has given, you get the impression that here he ran afoul of the infamous Weinstein brothers, who are known to keep a heavy hand on their films. For one thing, they forcibly replaced his preferred director of photography. And the film, especially in the first half, seems to have the fingerprints on it of someone saying come on, come on, cut faster, get to the moment, no lingering, no beauty shots, come on come on come on come on come on!

But I don't want to let him entirely off the hook just because he is my favorite director. Who is to blame when a film is only just all right? The director, the screenwriter are the most obvious culprits when a movie is truly terrible, but when it's enough, 'twill serve? What then? There are too many things we don't know about what goes on behind closed doors.

This is my way of saying that The Brothers Grimm is minor Gilliam, but even minor Gilliam is always interesting. It contains enough of a glimpse of the way the Grimm fairy tales would look through his eyes to make me wish this film had been simply that.

But, unfortunately, we're lumbered with a story in which most of the parts mesh, but far too often the resulting beast just lies there, it doesn't sing, it doesn't soar, it doesn't swell with pride.

The main thing I came away with is a desire to see more of one of the supporting players, Lena Headey, an actress whose face is new to me.
She's a very attractive woman and seems, inasmuch as you can tell, to have the chops to embody a better character than this one. But although she starts out well and strong, in the end the film forces her into a box.

I'm just left thinking how very long it's been since we've had what I would call a "pure" Gilliam film. One that seems, as co-writer Charles McKeon described Brazil, like taking off the top of his head and peering around inside.

It's been too long, and I hope he's allowed to make another one soon.