The poet Jane Hirshfield once wrote, “The world is large and full of noises.” So too is the world of director Terry Gilliam, the former Monty Python member who has made his mark over the past thirty years as a director of beautiful-looking movies. In an era where most directors seem unwilling or unable to provide an audience with new images, Gilliam makes movies that stimulate the imagination. His films bubble over with rich and glorious imagery.
In “The Fisher King,” he created one of the most memorable scenes in film history when he showed commuters waltzing together during rush hour at Grand Central Station (trust me, it looks a lot better up on the screen than it reads). In “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” he took the viewer into the drug-addled mind of Hunter Thompson. While the movie is basically a total failure on a structural level, it truly is a visual marvel.
Along with being visually stunning, Terry Gilliam’s films have another thing in common: they are all remarkably cold and inaccessible. Gilliam draws much of his inspiration from his literary heroes. For “Brazil” he cribbed from George Orwell. “The Fisher King” was inspired by the T.S. Elliot poem “The Wasteland.” “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” is homage to “Gulliver’s Travels.” Yet, Gilliam’s films miss the humanity these literary greats infused into their work. With the notable exception of “The Fisher King” (Gilliam’s best film, but much of the credit there has to go to Richard LaGravenese’s wonderful script), not a single one of Terry Gilliam’s films ever makes you care about the characters that inhabit Gilliam’s beautifully rendered worlds.
For Gilliam, actors are mere props that he builds his set pieces around, not unlike the little paper cutouts he used in the animation sequences he produced when working with Monty Python. Supposedly, actors love working with him (Robin Williams, Jonathan Pryce and Johnny Depp all sing his praises), although I have absolutely no idea why. His bombastic and over-the-top visual approach takes attention away from the actors. It almost seems as if he uses his technical prowess and limitless imagination to show up his actors and draw attention to himself. This behavior is typical of young, inexperienced directors, but Terry Gilliam has been making movies for almost 30 years and is 65 years old.
Looking at his work and how he is in love with all sorts of needless camera trickery, you would think he was a fresh-faced director straight out of New York University’s film school. I am not trying to say that Terry Gilliam should take his inner-child out to the woodshed and give him a beating, but it would be nice to think that 30 years worth of moviemaking would have taught Gilliam how to reign himself in and focus on just telling a story. Look at how Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, two of Gilliam’s contemporaries, have stretched themselves in recent years. In the last 15 years, Scorsese went outside of his wheelhouse to make “Kundun,” “Cape Fear” and “The Age of Innocence,” while Spielberg mounted the Sci-Fi thriller “Minority Report” (the best movie of 2002), only to shoot back with the gentle and affecting “The Terminal” (the best movie of 2004). Terry Gilliam, on the other hand, is doing the exact same thing today that he was doing in 1975.
Gilliam’s new film is “The Brothers Grimm” and I’m afraid to say it’s more of the same. This time, he takes his literary cues from the fairy tales. Obviously, the movie looks great. Gilliam and director of photography Dario Marianelli create a wonderful looking version of “The Deep Dark Woods.” The two leads, Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, manage to scare up some nice chemistry as two marauding conmen who promise to rid towns of evil forces, only to find themselves drawn into a very real horror story. Screenwriter Ehren “Don’t Call me Aaron” Kruger (“The Ring”) creates a nifty plot and loads it up with some nice reversals and genuine intrigue. A good movie could have been made from these elements, but Gilliam sabotages all efforts by his cast and runs Kruger’s script into the ground. He just throws too much into the movie. Every frame is chock-a-block full of images Gilliam thinks add atmosphere. But, all they do is upstage his fine cast.
By the third act, the wheels completely come off of “The Brothers Grimm,” leaving Damon and Ledger scrambling not to embarrass themselves too much. They succeed, by the way. Neither actor is going to see any fallout from this turkey.
Watching it all unfold, I was reminded of a quote from a great thinker, a man maybe not as famous T.S. Elliot or Hunter Thompson or George Orwell or any of the other great writers Terry Gilliam draws his inspiration from, but still famous in his own right. The man I was thinking about was Ron Burgundy, who once opined, “We’ve been coming to the same party for twelve years now and in no way is that depressing.”
The same thing holds true for Terry Gilliam, who has been making the same beautiful but shallow movie for the last thirty years. And you know what? That is sort of depressing.
