Not counting his starring role in Lost in La Mancha, it's been seven years since Terry Gilliam has graced American theaters. His absence speaks volumes. These days, it's generally accepted that directors who won't submit to Hollywood interference will realize their visions for a price; often, European financiers pay production costs, while American distributors wait to see the finished product before chipping in. Galling as it might be to see Sundance's finest trolling the Continent for funds, the system works well enough for a filmmaker like Jim Jarmusch, whose minimalist aesthetics mesh with his modest budgets. But you can't make a Terry Gilliam movie on the cheap. Independent but not "indie," Gilliam is an unabashed maximalist, a grand, messy dreamer whose movies can invariably be read as parables of his own struggles against the industry (which, incidentally, are often as fascinating as the movies they produce).

Not counting The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, whose cash-strapped production collapsed in catastrophe, The Brothers Grimm feels like Gilliam's first provisional surrender — a mainstream movie in a career devoted to attacking the mainstream. The script, by thriller specialist Ehren Kruger (The Ring, Red Eye), is a pseudohip gloss on classic fairy tales that casts Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (Heath Ledger and Matt Damon) as charlatan ghostbusters selling their services to superstitious German villagers. They bone up on local mythology, stage an invasion by whichever beastie the locals fear most, then stroll into town and offer a solution to their manufactured problem. For a price, of course.

The worm turns when Delatombe (Jonathan Pryce), the French commander charged by Napoleon with taming the recently conquered German provinces, forcibly engages the brothers to calm a village whose young girls have been disappearing into the nearby woods. Delatombe, an apostle of Cartesian rationalism, knows that the brothers are frauds, but he reasons that the villagers' plight must be the work of a similar group of mountebanks, and who better to expose their scheme? Gilliam, who depicted Napoleon as a seething autocrat in Time Bandits, has retained his taste for satirizing the French; Pryce gnaws at the role as if it were an oozing slab of Camembert. As his henchman Cavaldi, Peter Stormare adopts an impenetrable accent and the bearing of an organ grinder's monkey, a savage done up in civilized finery.

Indeed, if there's a fatal flaw in The Brothers Grimm, it's that the bad guys have all the fun. Although Will and Jake, as they're unfortunately called, ought to be Gilliam's brothers in tale-spinning, they're fundamentally bland. It's not the actors' fault: Ledger, in his most confident performance to date, plays the intellectual Jacob with an overcranked jerkiness that suggests his discomfort in the physical world, while Damon was reportedly willing to wear a grotesque false nose to give business-minded Wilhelm a dash of color. But, according to published reports, Miramax's Harvey Weinstein threatened to shut down the production if Damon was spotted with his bogus proboscis, and vetoed the choice of Samantha Morton for the female lead in favor of the more conventionally attractive Lena Headey. What's more, Weinstein fired Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas cameraman Nicola Pecorini after six weeks of filming for being "too slow," and replaced him with Three Kings' Newton Thomas Sigel.

To anyone who's followed Gilliam's career, such goings-on are par for the course, although Weinstein seems to have been a more formidable adversary than most. But if The Brothers Grimm isn't full-bore Gilliam, the director's handiwork is easy to spot around the edges. The movie's most memorable scenes are the abductions of the village's children, staged as recreations of famous Grimm tales (or, the movie implies, the inspiration for them). What could have been mere in-jokes — after one disappearance, Jacob, who's always scrawling in a leather-bound book, mumbles to himself, "red riding … cape" — are rendered as phantasmagoria, nightmare images with a Vermeer patina. It's clear the story doesn't interest Gilliam, at least not as much as suspending two of the Grimms' accomplices over a vat of boiling liquid with their heads in snail-filled glass boxes. Gilliam and his writing partner Tony Grisoni are not credited, but Gilliam has implied that he essentially discarded the script for a "dress pattern" of their devising (which explains why he and Grisoni are billed as "dress pattern makers"). The Brothers Grimm never quite slips its shackles, and it actually grows less satisfying as the movie nears its predictable climax. But if the movie feels stitched together and not all of a piece, that may be as Gilliam wants it. When the chief villain's statement of purpose is "All I wanted was a little order," disorder is the best response.

The Brothers Grimm Directed by Terry Gilliam A Miramax release Opens Friday at area theaters recommended