How to Fix The Brothers Grimm

In which yr. humble author suggests how a big Hollywood flop went wrong, and how it might, at enormous expense, be repaired.

First off: I love Terry Gilliam. I've already written about the pivotal role the Python boys played in my life, and of them, by far the best filmmaker is Gilliam. Brazil in particular is a movie whose influence on me has been enormous--in fact one of the biggest challenges Marc and I have in adapting City of Truth is keeping it away from Brazil territory. So everything I'm going to say about the movie comes from the position of a true fan, someone who wishes that Gilliam had a Spielberg-sized following so that Gilliam could always find the financing and support to do whatever on earth he feels like.

Marc and I went to see the movie last night, at the gorgeous Mann Village theater in Westwood, a true movie palace and one of the great perks about living in L.A. I was dismayed to walk in, on a Friday night of only the second weekend for this movie, and find the theater was nearly empty. The crowd, once the movie started, was probably no more than thirty people, maybe closer to twenty. Which means that the second-weekend falloff, to which Hollywood people pay close attention, is going to be dreadful, and the powers-that-pay will say "See? That Gilliam bastard is nothing but trouble, and he keeps losing money." (Never mind that his movies sell consistently on DVD, and I'm sure that in the long run he has always ended up making money for his backers.) But the reviews were middling, and on this particular weekend--when the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is far more absorbing, and terrifying, than any Hollywood movie, this kind of attendance was probably inevitable.

So what to do about the middling reviews? First off, as Marc noted after the movie, a filmmaker has to be allowed to strike out from time to time, particularly one who keeps reaching like Gilliam does. Gilliam films have never been modest: they always stretch out as far as they can, they're always audacious and original, and when they work they are spectacular (think Brazil, 12 Monkeys or The Fisher King). When they don't work (think The Adventures of Baron Munchausen), they're still interesting as hell, and on the whole I'd rather see a failure like Munchausen than a "success" like Armageddon. (Okay, that was an unfair comparison.) Here, I think, is how the movie could have been fixed (and yes, there are spoilers, so if you think you may rent this someday, you might want to stop right about now).

Perhaps the most glaring error is the lack of simplicity. I'm fascinated by the old folk tales too, and from time to time I've tried to write one. They are fearsomely difficult, because they are compact like a poem, they are plain-spoken even when their content is florid, and while their metaphorical content is often quite deep, on the surface they are all plot. A character is introduced (very quickly), finds him/herself in a situation (very quickly), there is a turn or two, and then some sort of resolution happens (very quickly). In Brothers Grimm, nothing happens quickly, none of it is clean and compact, and the style is even more florid than the content. The first half meanders badly: the brothers go into the forest, they come out of the forest, they go back in, they come back out, they go back in, etc. All this endless back-and-forthing before the story ever really starts to happen. The first bit of the movie is fine, and I like the idea of the brothers as shysters who find themselves in a real situation; their introduction to the accursed village of Marbaden works fine, for the most part; but once they go into the forest with Angelika, they should have just stayed there and had their adventure.

Granted, this means the movie is an hour long and no studio would ever back it. That's one of the problems with a fairy tale-based project like this one. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine faced a similar problem with the somewhat similar Into the Woods, and their brilliant solution was to have the characters' adventures take up the first act; then the second act is devoted to the "ever after" period when ever after turns out to be not so great as the characters had hoped. So there are solutions to be found, but Gilliam (and screenwriter Ehren Kruger) didn't find one. Padding the first half is simply a recipe for disaster.

There are also tone problems, particularly in the performances. There isn't much characterization going on here: the brothers are never more than lightly sketched in, which is in keeping with the fairy-tale nature of the stories (and I don't know that the "magic beans" backstory really adds all that much), so Heath Ledger substitutes a kind of frenzied hyperactivity for characterization, with awful results. His performance is just like Brad Pitt's in 12 Monkeys, all flurry without foundation. In the hands of a really good character actor, all that frenzy might have been grounded in something, but in Ledger's hands it just felt arbitrary and annoying and distracting--the most aggravating performance of the year. Where you do have real character actors, like Jonathan Pryce and Peter Stormare, there is just as much cartoonish clowning, but it's easier to buy into. Even with these two, though, there is a problem: the cartoonishness keeps you from taking them seriously, thus seriously undercutting their effectiveness as villains. (And I never bought into Stormare's conversion into a good guy toward the end.)

Fortunately, I know how to fix that: when Cavaldi and Delatombe first interrogate the brothers, the brothers' two dim-witted assistants are threatened with death in order to goad the brothers into confessing that they are frauds. Much later in the film, the dim-witted assistants are killed by Delatombe; but if they were killed during that first interrogation, then Delatombe has real credibility as a villain. We know what he's capable of, and all the clowning suddenly has some credibility--he's now a dangerous clown. This would also add some tension to the later moment when Delatombe is threatening Angelika--but since the dim-wits got through it okay, we never worry about Angelika's fate.

So there you are: how to fix The Brothers Grimm. Streamline the first half and get the characters into their adventure much faster; make the villains more credible by having them do something actually villainous right at the top; and forget all the fussiness and let the brothers be real people surrounded by the supernatural and the outrageous (note that Lena Headey's Angelika feels completely real throughout, and is the one character we ever feel anything for). Make these changes, while keeping the spectacular visual style and the high-stakes adventure that makes the second half work so well, and I think you could have a pretty damn good movie here.

And hell, the reshoots should only cost five or six million. A pittance!