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The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (12A)
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Dir. Terry Gilliam, France/ Canada/ UK, 2009, 123 mins
Cast: Christopher Plummer, Heath Ledger, Lily Cole, Johnny Depp
Review by Carol Allen
This fantasy is very much a product of the fertile imagination of Terry Gilliam, being a sort of contemporary Gothic fairy tale with touches of Grimm, which at times takes off into the surreal animated world of his earlier Monty Python glory days. Which means, whether it's to your taste or not, this film is glorious just to look at.
There's more to it though than just pretty visuals. It's the rambling but intriguing story of Dr Parnassus (Plummer), who with his daughter Valentina(Cole) and assistants Anton (Andrew Garfield) and Precy (Verne Troyer) travels around a contemporary but somehow darkly skewed version of London with the travelling show of the title. Selected members of the audience are invited onstage and pushed through a magic mirror into the Imaginarium, which is an alternative universe of their fantasies and desires. One night the company rescue a man in a white suit, Tony (Ledger), who appears to have hanged himself from one of the Thames bridges but is still alive. Tony joins the company and becomes a suitor for Valentina's hand. Because Dr Parnassus has a dark secret. Thousands of years ago he made a bet with the devil Mr Nick (Tom Waits), in which he won immortality. Part of the bargain is that when Valentina reaches her sixteenth birthday, which is now imminent, Mr Nick will claim her. The guy who gets the girl is he who can save her from her fate.
The "through the looking glass" land of the Imaginarium is a glorious work of imagination, a colourful, two dimensional fantasy land of curious creatures and shape changing landscapes. Plummer holds the story together with wry humour as Parnassus, whom immortality has driven him to drink; the gravel voiced Waits is great fun as Mr Nick and Garfield, who has described working on the film as being like playing "Chekhov in Beano land", is very likeable as young Anton, who has long carried a torch for Valentina. Ledger's performance as the enigmatic Tony, a silver tongued salesman with suspect motives, was of course his last, as he tragically died during the filming, presenting Gilliam with the major problem of how to finish the movie. He has solved it brilliantly by recruiting not just one but three star actors (Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell) to play Tony in the sequences set in the Imaginarium land, scenes which may or may not have been in the original script, but in which each of the actors shows a different side of the character's complexities. It may well have been making a virtue out of necessity but it succeeds beautifully.
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