Drop Frame

"Grimm" Finish: A Review of A Review

01 September 2005

[These] are my principles, and if you don’t like them... well, I have others.

Groucho Marx

-~-

The wild and fantastical "The Brothers Grimm" is easily within the canon of director Terry Gilliam’s usual flights of fancy. It features brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm (Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, respectively) as con artists who masquerade as exterminators of evil spirits. They are sent as a punishment into a truly enchanted forest, where trees crawl, men are enchanted by an ancient queen, and the worlds of Terry Gilliam are finely restored.

Since the film's release last Friday, however, "The Brothers Grimm" has been reviewed on a scale from oddly entertaining – The Boston Globe’s Ty Burr called the movie, "An absurd mess that's more entertaining than it has any right to be," while Peter Canavese found it "easy to recommend but hard to love" – to downright bad. Manohla Dargis echoed many professional critics’ sentiments in her review for the New York Times: "‘The Brothers Grimm’ sputters and coughs along like an unoiled machine, grinding gears and nerves in equal measure."

The AP’s Christy Lemire is among the harsher critics. "It’s as if he doesn’t know what he wants his film to be," she wrote. "A loopy farce? A lavish costume-piece? A high-energy action film?"

Ignoring the obvious question – why can’t a film be all these things at once? – and assuming that Lemire has reviewed by the all-too common heading that any tip-toeing over genre boundaries automatically labels a film "bad," one has to wonder if "The Brother’s Grimm" is trying to be any of these. "A loopy farce," certainly, as Terry Gilliam is nothing without the sense of humor that placed him among Monty Python’s cast. "A lavish costume-piece" is less convincing, as that can hardly considered a genre: people make films that require lavish costumes, not lavish costumes that require a film (even then, the costumes in "The Brother’s Grimm" were quite good, meaning Gilliam succeeded where Lemire claims he failed). Finally, "a high-energy action film" is crap since, under its vague auspices, the term can imply everything from Schwarzenegger – probably where Lemire was going – to Bruce Lee to... well, anything: there was suspense and intrigue, a police chase, and gunfire in "Casablanca," surely that means it was trying to be "a high-energy action film."

Lemire continues, of course. "At times," she said, "it even feels as if this is Gilliam’s anti-war film, framed within the context of a comedic fairy tale." To which, the reader who has seen the movie, or even heard about the movie, says, "quoi?"

Lemire does not explain this fairly surprising revelation – surprising certainly to me, since I saw no overtones of Iraq or any other war in the spritely way about which Damon and Ledger confront the mythical horrors of an enchanted, 19th Century forest. Rather, Lemire summarizes the film, claims the effects are "schlocky," and comes to a head, saying, "Classic characters like Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, and Hansel and Gretel come and go, but they aren’t used to their full potential; they appear so randomly, they seem like afterthoughts. Although the Gingerbread Man, who forms from a glob of black goo at the bottom of a well, is awfully cute. Then he eats a small child." Sentence fragment "although... cute" aside, I begin to wonder if Lemire was watching the right "Brothers Grimm." In one sense because the Gingerbread Man forms AFTER eating a child, but more to the point, Gilliam’s allusions to Grimm fairy tales ARE afterthoughts... and that is the whole point.

Gilliam set out not to film Grimm fairy tales, but to construct a fictionalized account of the brothers as adventurers that has only the trappings of the stories the real brothers wrote. While Lemire only mentions the fairy tale characters who appeared in the film, Gilliam added others less obviously: the dead queen sits on a pile of mattresses – a la "The Princess and the Pea" – and Jacob’s drunken boast of going into hell to discover the name of an imp pangs of "Rumpelstiltskin." Certainly there are even more references in the film to fairy tales – not everything can be gleaned in one viewing – but these examples, as well as Rapunzel or the film’s Hans and Greta, are so clearly not meant to dominate the action that it is ludicruous to base a review on their status as elaboration.

This is a genuine problem in film criticism, for anyone: the desire to nitpick to the point of pugnacity, to the point of missing the point. Lemire is, after all, getting paid to write down what she thinks of a given film, and her desire to give the most informed, most precise, and most fair review leads her – let us hope – to watching a film more scrupulously than the average viewer. "Fair" is the key word: how does the critic avoid walking into a film without assuming that something is wrong with it? Then, how does the critic avoid picking out the things that are stereotypically wrong – genre blending – or seemingly opaque – "afterthought" references to fairy tales – that are, in fact, exactly what the artist had in mind?

The results of this critical habit in Lemire’s case are her loss of authority. Her criticism of the film that is justifiable and true – that the brothers’ relationship was not well-enough developed to buy the turning point when Jacob says, "You’re my brother – I want you to believe in me" – has no weight whatsoever thanks to the messages that she had already blown out of proportion. She becomes harsh about trivialities, scathing without any body to scold.

For my part, I would like to consider criticism something loftier than this review, not an automatic "this is good," "this is bad," but vastly more important, "this works because...," "this did not work since...," "this was effective for just that scene, but in the contexts of the whole film it was rather...," and so on.

Perhaps this is an idealistic dream. Perhaps Lemire was working on a deadline, with space restrictions, with only one viewing and one gut reaction of the film. Not perhaps, certainly: these are the realities of newspaper journalism. But what we can also be certain of in Lemire’s writing is a failure to address Gilliam’s film within the film’s language.

The critic needs to have eyes and ears for the story, as much as the filmmaker. It does no one good to be unoriginal.

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