The Brothers Grimm (2005)

Terry Gilliam's 2005 fantasy adventure concerns two con-artist folklorists in Napoleonic Germany who peddle fake exorcisms until a genuine curse forces them to develop something resembling courage. It is a handsomely mounted production, full of mud, wolves, and gingerbread men, and it carries almost none of the social programming a modern studio would insist upon. The cast is white, European, and largely male. No romantic subplot is arranged to make a statement. The film wants to be a Gothic romp, and mostly it is one, albeit a lurching one that critics at the time found inert.

Lena Headey's Angelika is a capable fur trapper who rescues the brothers more than once, and the film grants her competence without ever building a case around it. The villain is a queen who traded everything for youth and beauty, which positions vanity as the monster, an arrangement that flatters no contemporary sensibility. Jake's encyclopedic obsession with folklore reads as a character quirk, not a clinical portrait. The con-artist premise flirts with a critique of credulity and superstition, yet never turns its eye toward money or power in any structural way. The French occupiers are buffoons, not a ruling class to be devoured.

The film's liberties with the actual Brothers Grimm, recasting them as frauds and scoundrels, are the stuff of pulp invention. No argument about history is being made, only a premise exploited for adventure. The whole enterprise is content to entertain. It lectures no one. It has no thesis to deliver, no lesson to impart, no audience to correct. The result is a director locked in war with a studio, a production that ballooned past eight hundred effects shots, and a finished object that is beautiful, incoherent, and entirely innocent of the ideological preoccupations that would define the following decade. In the taxonomy of cultural instruction, it is a blank page. There is something almost restful about that.