Film review: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Published on Thursday 15 October 2009 18:58

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS (15) ** DIRECTED BY: TERRY GILLIAM STARRING: HEATH LEDGER, JOHNNY DEPP, COLIN FARRELL, JUDE LAW, CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER

IT'S ironic but oddly appropriate that the catastrophe which should have tripped up Terry Gilliam's latest film actually turns out to be its most successful element. For a while, Heath Ledger's death last year, mid-way through filming The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, looked like it might sink this chaotic fantasy film. After all, Gilliam movies have fallen apart before for considerably less serious reasons than the death of their main star. In this instance, though, Gilliam has managed to roll with this tragic blow, reworking the story in such a way as to make the solution he's come up with to get round Ledger's passing seem entirely intentional.

Pulling off the casting coup of the year, the film now features Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell playing different versions of Ledger's character as he passes into the magical world of the titular imaginarium, a through-the-looking-glass world in which life is tailored to reflect a particular individual's most secret desires. The imaginarium itself is part of a travelling sideshow run by Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), a decrepit, centuries-old storyteller whose once glorious life has been reduced to a rag-tag existence by a terrible burden brought about by making a deal with the devil. This being a Gilliam film, the devil is a slippery fellow called Mr Nick who is played by Tom Waits and who likes to make wagers, the conditions of which he'll frequently change to keep himself entertained.

Given that Parnassus's tragic flaw is a compulsive gambling habit, Mr Nick has had plenty of fun tormenting him over the years, tricking him first into trading his soul for eternal life rather than eternal youth, then convincing him to trade the soul of any future child he might sire for the chance to experience love with the woman he fell in love with. It's this deal Mr Nick is getting ready to collect on. Parnassus knows that on his daughter's imminent 16th birthday he will lose her forever, so when Mr Nick proposes a new wager that might allow Parnassus to reclaim for good the daughter whose life he frivolously offset against his immediate happiness, he accepts it.

If this sounds a little garbled so far, that's nothing to how this information emerges in the film. Fragments of narrative clarity occasionally break through the frantic action, which initially revolves around the chaos that seems to erupt wherever Parnassus's troupe rolls up to a new stretch of London wasteground or the car park of the local Homebase DIY store – budget-restricted locations that Gilliam cleverly turns into a device to highlight the paucity of imagination on display in our daily lives. This trouble-magnet troupe includes Parnassus's aforementioned daughter Valentina (Lily Cole), who dreams of running away from the circus and leading a more normal life; a grumpy midget called Percy (Verne Troyer) who keeps Parnassus right as much as he can; and a winsome young magician called Anton (Andrew Garfield) who pines for Valentina even though she seems fairly uninterested in reciprocating his feelings.

They're barely able to scrape a living together, but their fortunes begin to turn when they encounter Tony (Ledger), a mysterious stranger with only vague memories about who he his. His amnesia is the result of a terrible beating, one that ended with him being hung by the neck from Blackfriars Bridge, which is where they find him. It's also how we're first introduced to Ledger, which is a little disconcerting, especially since Ledger was last seen in The Dark Knight dangling on a rope from a great height. Unlike in that film, his performance here isn't especially memorable, though his presence does momentarily lift the already muddled proceedings, albeit without ever really shining much of a light on what is actually going in the story.

Where the film really starts to dazzle is when we enter the world of the imaginarium. Tony is our guide and each time we enter we see another facet of his personality as Depp, Law and Farrell respectively reveal his seductive, ambitious and ruthless sides, forming a more complete picture of him in the process. It's a brilliant and audacious conceit that shows how brilliant Gilliam can sometimes be. It's just a shame the rest of the film is so wilfully ramshackle. It's one of the more curious ironies of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus that it expounds at length about the value of storytelling yet can't seem to get a grip on the one at hand. As the action draws to a frantic finale that sees the worlds of fantasy and reality smash into one another, traces can be seen of other Gilliam films such as The Fisher King, which gives a maddening insight into what could have been had a little more discipline been exercised.

Having said that, this may be well be Gilliam's purest film to date. He's Doctor Parnassus, by definition a centre of creative activity, which makes this film his anything-goes imaginarium. The only problem is that while he clearly soars artistically when his imagination is let off the leash, the final results don't always do the same. A shambolic Gilliam film may still be better than no Gilliam film at all, but losing the plot isn't quite as much fun as it used to be.