It’s unfortunate that despite a memorable ensemble cast and some wonderful special effects wizardry, director Terry Gilliam’s latest, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, is ultimately more perplexing than rewarding.
Appropriately, however, the film already destined to be remembered for showcasing Heath Ledger’s last performance seems to find itself whenever the late star is on-screen. As Tony, an unscrupulous charity worker marked for execution by some Russian gangsters, he is given a chance at redemption when he is rescued by the thousand-year-old Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) and his travelling theatre troupe, comprising his daughter, Valentina (Lily Cole), a sleight-of-hand expert named Anton (Andrew Garfield), and the diminutive Percy (Verne Troyer).
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus  
Directed by Terry Gilliam. Starring Heath Ledger, Christopher Plummer, Tom Waits, Verne Troyer, Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Colin Farrell. |
Tony can’t remember who he is or why the mafioso-types are after him, and as he gets acquainted with his saviours and newfound friends – forming something of a love
triangle with Valentina and Anton – Imaginarium begins to unfurl its twin storylines.
One revolves around Tony and his unknown past misdeeds, the nature – and consequences – of which are slowly catching up to him despite his amnesia,
and the second traces Doctor Parnassus’s bets with the Devil (Tom Waits), the results of which conferred immortality upon him but also require him to relinquish his daughter to Old Scratch on her imminent 16th birthday.
Tony sets out to help the doctor win the bet and save his daughter by sending five mortal souls through his imaginarium, a hallucinogenic Wonderland contained inside Parnassus’s mind and accessible through a magic mirror inside the stage.
Evoking Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (in which the living hero narrates his own death in the past tense), the third act loses most of its rational cohesion, but where such illogic was ingratiatingly whimsical in Munchausen, it feels sloppy in Imaginarium.
Then again, as inane as the story becomes (something refreshingly unpredictable in its own right after the formulaic conventionality of most of this year’s big studio films), Imaginarium is typical Gilliam in that its most rewarding facets are the performances (save that of Troyer, guilty here of some horrid line delivery) and the fanciful splendor of the film frame treated as a canvas for visual artwork.
Certainly, Gilliam’s signature elements are in place, including highly self-conscious storytelling, sporadic potshots at modern consumer culture, and the director’s trademark grungy visual aesthetic of "Victorian steam-punk meets industrial decay."
As many filmgoers will likely know already, Ledger’s death during filming forced Gilliam to partially re-cast the role. Luckily for him, not only was a trio of A-list stars (Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Colin Farrell) ready to stand in, the narrative perfectly accommodates their substitutions: Tony is played by Ledger in the film’s real world, and by one of the others whenever he enters the imaginarium, which he conveniently happens to do exactly thrice.
Less fortuitous, somewhat ironically, is that Depp is such a perfect fit; Ledger is noticeably channelling him in some of the earlier scenes, rendering the transition between them almost imperceptible, but this leaves poor Law and Farrell conspicuously different even as they perform admirably.
Compounding the discomfort over Ledger’s posthumous appearance is the fact that he first appears hanging by a noose beneath a bridge, apparently dead. Then there are the scattered references to immortality (as celebrity) achieved through death, with explicit mention of Rudolph Valentino, James Dean, and Princess Diana. But Gilliam claims all of this was in the script from the beginning.
Ultimately, alongside Ledger, Tom Waits is the best reason to see Imaginarium as he joins some illustrious company putting his own unique spin on the character of the Devil (to wit, Viggo Mortensen in The Prophecy, Gabriel Byrne in End of Days, and Peter Stormare – who shows up all too briefly in this film – in Constantine).
"Nothing is permanent, not even death," says Johnny Depp as Tony. And while the wording is suspect, seeming to imply eventual reincarnation more than lasting recognition, Imaginarium – while not the bravura film it perhaps deserved to be – permanently cements Ledger’s talent as an actor and a leading man.