August 23, 2005

What went so wrong with The Brothers Grimm and Proof?

It's not a happy situation. Terry Gilliam is one of the most original and talented directors of his generation. John Madden is a solid filmmaker and a tasteful, smart man. Madden actually has it easier here. He will keep working, regardless of this blemish. Gilliam, on the other hand, attracts trouble and this film, which can not redeem itself by being as interesting as other films he's made that haven't done well at the box office, is another nail in the coffin from which he is endlessly crawling.

Both films have source materials that simply fail to offer a real opportunity to make a film that works. In the case of Proof, the problem is that it is based on a stage play that got most of its power from being on stage. It is easy to see how certain big emotional moments would have been mesmerizing on stage… but on film the already increased intimacy of the form makes big emotions pay smaller dividends.

As for The Brothers Grimm, I have just two words of clarity… Ehren Kruger. There are few hacks that have gotten away with it for as long as Mr. Kruger. I guess it pays to barely rewrite the right Asian horror film at the right time (The Ring), because he doesn't even have any other successes driving his thriving career. I wish I could find an excuse for laying off on the guy, but I can't.

The Brothers Grimm is an interesting idea desperately trying to escape a really bad idea. Of course, I have no idea where Kruger really starts and when the other ideas begin. But The Brothers Grimm is desperate to be Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. And that is the one meta idea that might have worked… if a writer as skilled and bright as Tom Stoppard was writing the movie. Of course, the idea was done in a small way in Shrek, with previously unknown characters wandering through the world and ironies of the fairy tale. But you can imagine the Grimms wandering about finding inspiration for their various tales, sometimes needing enhancement, sometimes being need to brought down to a place where even children might believe it.

And the conceit of the film seems like pure Gilliam, except in its delivery. There is a Gilliam hero archetype. He makes movies about problem people, often inveterate liars, who are found out, but who are so compellingly alive and above the world that people let them pass… and then, they enrich the world beyond expectation. The thieving little men of Time Bandits, Baron Munchausen, Parry, Hunter S. Thompson… mad men who had more to offer than anyone judging them from the surface would understand.

The Brother Grimm are charlatans who eventually run into real trouble and somehow manage to overcome. But they aren't terribly special. They are as charming as Matt Damon and Heath Ledger can make them, but they don't have the words to be anything more than that.

In the meanwhile, this appears to be a Terry Gilliam who was really uninspired to do great work. It has a lot of amazing production design from Guy Dyas, whose only prior credit was X2… not even X-Men followed by X2. His job was to reconnect with what John Myhre and to expand it somewhat. Here, he did his best Dante Ferretti imitation. But what Ferretti and other production designers brought Gilliam was inspired lunacy, able to play visual ping pong with Gilliam. There is none of that feeling here. It's beautiful and lush, but uninspired. You will find Gilliam's name early in the career of many great production designers, from Feretti, whose Gilliam was only his second film in English, to Alex McDowell, who is now doing magic for Tim Burton.

But it's mostly the writing. It's stunningly unmemorable. There is literally only one moment in all of The Brothers Grimm that sticks with me and there is barely a spoken word. It is the end of the Queen of Mirrors, who you don't really know is the Queen of Mirrors until a specific moment, which you have probably seen in commercials already.

And that is a shame. I took away more from his aborted Don Quixote, shown in Lost In La Mancha, than this film… the men doing dialogue in stocks, the corpulent and dirty "giants," the gentle beauty shots of Vanessa Paradis and Johnny Depp arguing with a fish have all stayed with me. When I read about how Gilliam was forced not to use Samantha Morton, one of the great actresses of her time, all I can think is that even that would not have mattered when it comes to solving this mess of a story.

The plot of Proof is not a mess. It is, actually, almost too simple. The performances are uniformly excellent, except for Anthony Hopkins, who rambles his way to a sad paycheck. But who cares?

Without getting too far into the plot, the movie is about a woman who is so in her father's shadow that emerging from it is almost more than she can allow herself. Unfortunately for this film, her father is already dead when the film starts and he is pretty much crazy every time we meet him in flashback. As I write above, this conceit is perfect for the theater… there is a different kind of suspension of disbelief and an expectation of artificial devices that is older than Hamlet's father's ghost and as current as The Pillowman, now on Broadway.

Poor Hope Davis. As usual, she plays the feisty, nice looking, secretly troubled woman who in this case really lets her blind, petty nasty flag fly. (Funny, she doesn't look shrewish.)

Gwyneth Paltrow delivers a rock solid performance here. But it is not nearly the challenge that her role in Sylvia was. The material just isn't that interesting when you look at it as closely as we look at films. She gets to be sad and angry and sad and sad and shy and sad and scared. And did I mention that her character was sad?

There is nothing wrong with Jake Gyllenhaal's performance, except that he is drastically miscast as a quiet mathematician. Imagine Raquel Welsh playing Adrian in Rocky… get it?

The thing is, Proof is not a terrible movie. It's just not a very good movie. The performances are good. The attempts to open it up for the screen are hopeless. (See… they're driving…. It's not a stage play… but then they are talking in the box that is the car or they go inside the house to talk or whatever. There just isn't anyway to open up a chatter fest.)

The saddest thing about both these films is how long so many have waited for films they hoped would matter to them. And they are both utterly forgettable. A damned shame.

E-ME.