The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

• Starring: Heath Ledger, Christopher Plummer, Tom Waits, Johnny Depp, Jude Law
• Release date: 25 December 2009
• Runtime: 122 mins
• Rating: PG-13
• Genre: Adventure, fantasy, mystery

Synopsis:

Set in the present day, director Terry Gilliam’s fantastical morality tale follows the traveling show of the mysterious Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) — a man who once won a bet with the Devil himself, and possesses the unique ability to guide the imagination of others. Many centuries ago, Dr. Parnassus won immortality in a bet that found the malevolent Mr. Nick (Tom Waits) coming up short. While few would be foolish enough to try their luck against the powers of darkness a second time, Dr. Parnassus did precisely that — this time trading his mortality for youth on the understanding that his firstborn would become the property of Mr. Nick when the child reaches his or her 16th birthday. Flash-forward to the present day, and Dr. Parnassus’ daughter, Valentina (Lily Cole), is about to celebrate her sweet sixteen. Dr. Parnassus is desperate to save his little girl from her fiery fate, and when Mr. Nick arrives to collect, the good doctor presents the Prince of Darkness with a wager too enticing to refuse: Dr. Parnassus and Mr. Nick will each compete to seduce five souls, with possession of Valentina going to whomever manages to complete the task first. As the competition begins to heat up, Dr. Parnassus promises his daughter’s hand in marriage to any man who can help him successfully navigate the surreal obstacle course that lies ahead and finally help him undue the many mistakes of his past. While the sudden death of prominent Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus player Heath Ledger in January of 2008 left Gilliam and company scrambling to find a means of salvaging the film — which was already well into principal photography at the time — the cavalry soon arrived in the form of Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell, who each serve as alternate-dimension versions of the character originally set to be played by Ledger when the character crosses through a paranormal mirror. – Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

Review:

Terry Gilliam’s crackpot ambition and terrible bad luck have us rooting for him time and again, sometimes against our better judgment. In the past decade, a curse of Lady Shalott proportions has descended on his work: witness his unfilmed Don Quixote, scuppered by a flash flood and Jean Rochefort’s tumble from a horse, the brutal compromises on The Brothers Grimm – whose one memorable image is, in fact, a mirror cracking from side to side – and the stampede of distributors running away in droves from the “challenging” Tideland.

Still, there’s no worse luck in film-making than losing your leading man, at his peak of popularity and acclaim, with a film half-shot. Of all special reasons to wish that The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus was better, Heath Ledger’s involvement has got to be high up the list. So is the fact that it’s Gilliam at full tilt, weaving an elaborate tale of travelling theatre performers, the afflictions of mortality, and a portal, flimsily disguised as a mirror, which ushers you into a world of your dreams.

The film begins in modern London, and from its opening shot – a dingy pan along a nondescript street at night, with one of Gilliam’s Shakespearean-looking tramps snoozing in a gutter to the far left – many of its disappointments are clear.

A stage on wheels is parked outside a nightclub, the curtains swish back, and we’re introduced to Dr Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), the 1,000-year-old leader of a four-strong theatre troupe. Their makeshift burlesques don’t impress the rowdy locals, one of whom clambers on stage to grope Valentina (Lily Cole), Parnassus’s doll-like daughter, before being chased through the mirror by her suitor Anton (Andrew Garfield), giving us our first glimpse of what’s on the other side.

These dreamscapes are the film’s best hope, and there are certainly images that linger – Plummer’s face wrapped around a giant hot-air balloon, a candy-lane curving up against an ambrosial sky, or Tom Waits, as a dandyish Devil, sauntering on clouds. Still, we already feel Gilliam’s imagination rubbing up against his constricted budget, and CGI showmanship is not on any level his forte. You miss the hand-made charm and extravagant matte-work of Brazil, even Baron Munchausen, which this film resembles most in narrative technique. And it’s a sharp jolt back into the underlit grunge of the present, where Plummer and his acolytes look like smudge-faced Victorian castaways, scavenging amid the Thames debris.

There’s no sign of Ledger for half an hour, until the inescapably morbid sequence when he’s found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge. Soon revived, he becomes a mysterious circus groupie for the duration – a fugitive from justice after some vague business about charity fraud. It can’t be said that the role tests him hugely, except in trying to make basic sense of it, and Ledger was an actor who thrived when the pressure was really on, the demands huge and specific. Put another way, his Tony, who replaces Anton as the group’s MC, is a nimble enough clown, but no Joker.

If the middle section of the film becomes almost unwatchably punishing, it’s because Gilliam bargains its emotional core away, and you’re made aware of that distressingly fine line between visionary and delusional. We spend a lot of time with Cole, Garfield, and Verne Troyer’s sarcastic midget, none of whom thrives at all in scene after scene of leaden noodling. Nothing close to a workable story emerges, except when Plummer, the pick of the cast by default, is regaling Cole with the pact he made to gain immortality, which unfortunately means she’s going to the Devil on her 16th birthday. Even a big Tom Waits fan might balk at this. The anguished father-daughter relationship, which should have driven the entire fable, needs a more experienced actress than Cole to fire it up – the camera is in love with that impossible moon face, but she doesn’t reciprocate with any visible feeling.

As misguided as so many of Gilliam’s conceits are here, it’s important to set aside the compromises that simply aren’t his fault. Ledger’s unfinished scenes were all the bits in fantasy-land, which is where Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell step in, each providing a more rakish spin on the character than the last. Their appearance is actively to the film’s advantage – we’re craving any kind of variety by this point –and there’s some interest to be had anticipating their cameos each time Ledger takes a plunge into that wormhole.

Still, when Depp muses about stars who have died before their time, as photos of James Dean, Rudolph Valentino and Diana, Princess of Wales float down a slate-coloured river, it’s hard not to detect a whiff of forced memorialising on Gilliam’s part. “They are forever young, they won’t grow old.” Then the river rears up and becomes a serpent with Waits’s head on the end.

There’s a difference between pondering sad, uncanny ironies and being force-fed them – it’s sadder still that Ledger had to be enshrined like this.