The Brothers Grimm

Film has promise, but narrative gets gummed up with labored surrealism | Gene Edward Veith

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were super-scholars. In turn-of-the-19th-century Germany, they published 16 volumes giving the history of every word in the German language, the inspiration for the Oxford English Dictionary, which took hundreds of British scholars 70 years to complete.

But the Grimm brothers' greatest claim to fame is their collection of folk tales, which they gathered by interviewing peasants in the countryside, before that culture was obliterated by the Industrial Revolution. Since then, the stories of the Brothers Grimm—Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, Cinderella—have become treasures of world literature.

But in the movie The Brothers Grimm, these scholars are reduced to ghostbuster con-men turned action heroes. Once again, pop culture devours both the high culture of scholarship and the folk culture of fairy tales.