Poor Terry Gilliam. It's been eight years since his last movie, the daring adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, and if the documentary Lost in La Mancha, about his aborted attempt to interpret Don Quixote, is of any indication, those years were long, arduous, and unproductive. And that's not even taking into consideration the problems making and releasing films like The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Brazil. Like Orson Wells before him, Gilliam makes films under a cursed cloud of forced compromise, and his latest film, The Brothers Grimm, is no different. The director's latest rates pretty far down the scale compared to his best works—its production was compromised, many vital elements that the filmmaker needs in place to construct his personal visual style are weak, and it all shows. Luckily, Terry Gilliam is one of the rare directors from whom even a hack work can be fun, energetic, and interesting, and The Brothers Grimm is, sporadically, all three.

I readily admit, the pitch sounds great. The famous fairy-tale spinning Grimm brothers, Jacob (Heath Ledger) and Wilhelm (Matt Damon), are in fact, hucksters conning war-weary and heavily superstitious German locals that their supernatural fears are quite well founded. Charging a heavy price, the brothers fake exorcisms and demon exterminations to much fame and acclaim, all the while Jacob recording the (unfounded) legends of the German populace in a diary bound to become material for the famous stories. Ehren Kruger's screenplay, however, thinks itself far too clever in the ham-handed way it weaves the Grimm tales into the Grimms' lives. Gilliam's visuals are as inspired as ever, but they are dragged down, way down, by a script that, along with intercutting clipped Grimm visual quotations, thinks making one brother a rationalist and one brother a believer in magic in such a bizzare, carefree film is a serious dramatic conflict. This crucially unmeaty, long-standing argument between the two comes to a head when their ruse is discovered by a malicious French general (Jonathan Pryce, lovingly butchering a French accent), and the brothers are sent to a small German town to investigate the disappearance of several young girls in a nearby wood. Under the guard of a sadistic Italian torturer (Peter Stomare) and guided by a 1970s-style feminist tree-hugger (Lena Headey), the Grimms are caught up in an authentic fairy tale about a vain, power-hungry queen (Monica Belucci) and her ambition to remain beautiful forever.

The themes may be wafer thin, but there is hardly a better plot for Gilliam to invigorate than a wild and uneven fairy-tale. Yet, problems abound. From the get-go, the film is dragged down by gratuitous miscasting—Damon is mostly bland and ineffective, and Headey is so forgettable it is difficult to remember her features and her character when she is off-screen (Gilliam's choice for the role, Samantha Morton, would have been great). And even the good actors are often left clueless with the lurching, herky-jerky plot that leaves characters with little to do until an action sequence, or some other revelry, clicks awkwardly into motion.

With narrative and actors floundering, the pleasures of The Brothers Grimm are scattered and erratic. For one, it has got terrific spirit, for even if scene after scene falls flat, or the Hammer-style B-movie generics sometimes slip from the inspired to the trite, you can tell that Gilliam is trying with all his might to make this movie work and move. He also has captured, even with the film's frustrating inconsistency, the way the Grimm tales were both completely absurd and startlingly dark. The film likewise is often unexpectedly violent, and also, especially in Ledger's winning, equally unexpected comedic turn, as strange and goofy as any Python sketch.

The moments that hit this register of weird, jumbled, energetic fairy-taling are liberally sprinkled amongst the film's larger problems, but, surprisingly, The Brothers Grimm's clunky execution has something to do with the underlying theme of the film, the effect of artifice, reality, and magic on people. This effect can be seen in the populace, the powerful, the faithful, the family, the unbelievers, the good, and the evil. Though the film rarely touches on it, the time setting (during the Napoleonic wars), with a war-torn and heavily traditional population passively resisting invaders, and the broad satire of the ruling French, let the film have some socio-political sense about the desire and fear to believe horror stories. But it is the cultural sense of this theme that Gilliam most indulges in, connecting the ideas to filmmaking itself—a movie is a constant play between artifice (the audience knowing they are watching a constructed object) and magic (being swept up or immersed in the diegetic world). Although the majority of Gilliam's filmography has been about personalities striving to immerse themselves in a magical world (or, in the case of poor Bruce Willis in 12 Monkeys, escape the magical world), The Brothers Grimm is the first film Gilliam has made that, in its fairy-tale plot and its awkward, on-again-off-again continuity of quality and intelligence, actively plays with the audience being both caught up in the film and aware of its terrible construction. With this theme strongly integrated into the plot, and with Gilliam's delightful studio-bound visuals and exaggerated character acting, this could be one powerful fairy-tale—one of sheer whimsy, dark, silly, and rich and ultimately about why we love movies. No director currently working would have been better to bring this story to screen (the Powell and Pressburger team would have loved it, no doubt), but the troubles getting this film made, from the cast and the script to post-production bizarrities like shoddy CGI, baffling editing and lame pacing let in only a confused—but potent—glimmer of a true Terry Gilliam film. I can see behind the creaky artifice of a troubled film to the magic underneath, but The Brothers Grimm does not have enough magic in it to survive the scrutiny.