The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

City Paper Grade: B+

by Shaun Brady

Heath Ledger's death is the shadow that hangs over Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

[City paper Grade: B+ ]

After the erratically overwrought Tideland and the flirtation with the Hollywood mainstream in The Brothers Grimm that ultimately pleased nobody, Terry Gilliam returns to more familiar ground with The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. The narrative is a showy gloss on the Faust legend with Tom Waits as a carny-huckster Beelzebub and Christopher Plummer as a monk-turned-immortal showman, and its reliance on oft-told tales and fairy tale archetypes is welcome given how the narrative seems to unravel rather than unfold.

The story, relayed at times by hysterical gesticulations and at others by overlapping mutterings, seems as frayed and threadbare as Dr. Parnassus' timeworn sets and costumes, but is nevertheless engaging thanks to Gilliam's prodigious visual imagination and the baroque contortions he forces his tale to take in order to exercise it. The fantasy sequences play as a compendium of the director's inner landscape, from lush Münchausen fantasias to a chorus line of cross-dressing bobbies that evoke his Monty Python animations more than anything he's ever put before a live-action camera.

Heath Ledger's death in mid-production is the shadow that inevitably hangs over the proceedings, but the way in which Ledger's character, Tony, transforms into Johnny Depp, Jude Law or Colin Farrell upon stepping through the doctor's magic mirror only enhances the film's themes of duplicity and false appearances; anyone in a tabloid-free coma over the past few years would think it had been written this way. While Depp and Law simply meet Gilliam's excesses halfway, Farrell exudes a clammy charm that perfectly suits him for the film's final unpleasant revelations. And the backstory, of course, plays into Gilliam's cursed history, which adds a layer of subtext to this story of a man warily pursuing his compulsive imaginings.