The title of Gilliam’s latest film is rich in poetry and metaphor; it evokes childhood fairytales and sombre learning (in western culture Parnassus is considered the home of literature). This title, and what it encapsulates, is exciting, and hence has a lot to live up to. This is the kind of thing that Gilliam does well. He always seems as though he knows something that we don’t. In this film his characters are called names like Valentina and Anton, there are references to Through The Looking Glass, Confucius, conspiracy theories, Greek culture, eastern folktales and Satanic practices. He even has a scene where a computer game literally kills imagination. But nobody is going to notice that because this film came with too much baggage.
Gilliam seems to me to be reminiscent of an unlucky Herzog, with the distinction between them being that Herzog gets his dreams turned into films whereas a lot of Gilliam’s various visions remain just that, visions. This time though he kept going through the difficulties and I’m not sure if that was such a good idea.
The eponymous Imaginarium is a mirror (it seems to be made of some expensive tinfoil) that once walked through makes your imaginings manifest themselves in new and different worlds. Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) is an immortal alcoholic who used to be a monk until he sold his own mortality and his daughter’s soul to a debonair, serpentine gentleman who happens to be Satan (Tom Waits on wonderful form). The Devil will be claiming the daughter’s soul when she reaches the age of sixteen, which is fast approaching as the film begins and the narrative mainly concerns itself with the saving of this soul, a soul which The Devil himself doesn’t even seem to wish to claim.
Parnassus makes his living with The Imaginarium, along with the help of his daughter (Lily Cole, a singular beauty with an average talent for acting) and a young man he saved from the streets (Andrew Garfield: revelatory in Red Riding, slightly annoying here). After Parnassus and The Devil lock horns a mysterious man without a name is found in a very strange place. This man later turns out to be Tony, played by Heath Ledger.
As we know this incredibly gifted actor tragically died halfway through this production, yet Gilliam continued to make the film based on the footage they made together. For me, the whole sense of the film died with Heath Ledger. I don’t know how drastic the rewrites on the script were after Ledger’s death, but undoubtedly Gilliam and McKeown were clawing to grasp onto something filmable and they have done enough to make something that superficially makes sense. But if you examine it, even slightly, it really doesn’t hold together. The Imaginarium makes no sense; even within the perimeters it sets itself. It is sometimes an objective moral choice, sometimes a livelihood, sometimes controlled, sometimes uncontrollable, sometimes just imagination and sometimes real. You could justify this by saying that that’s how imagination works, but one person dies within The Imaginarium and lives a happy life in the real world, and another person dies there and stays dead, which makes you think Parnassus was the master of The Imaginarium all along or that it was all in his head, but that really doesn’t make any sense either. The entire film is peppered with inconsistencies such as this.
What’s even worse than that is that the characters don’t make any sense. They morph horribly and their motivation is skewed and unclear at all times. Parnassus doesn’t hold true to one single principle which seems out of character when you consider his beginnings and The Devil is a pretty decent and honest guy.
But the salient case is Ledger’s, Depp’s, Law’s and Farrell’s character, Tony. The device of face changing was artistically ingenious and it almost works, but unfortunately it just makes an inconsistent character even more difficult to track.
Ledger’s Tony is charismatic, smart and sneaky, but probably a good person. Heath Ledger didn’t get the scenes in which he would have excelled, but flashes of his brilliance shine through, such as his soft seduction of the sixteen year old daughter.
Depp’s Tony is a charming rogue given a depth and beauty of thought and eloquence. He is given the best dialogue in the film in a scene that could only be an homage to Ledger’s life and death, this scene contains the beautiful line: “Nothing lasts forever… Not even death…” But it doesn’t work within the movie’s framework given how the character turns out. Johnny Depp is good in the role but he still, for me, plays a subdued Jack Sparrow.
Law’s Tony seems to be a slightly slimier version of Ledger’s. Poor Jude Law is given the worst scene in the movie and can do nothing to improve it.
Farrell’s Tony is portrayed as simply evil, and though Farrell is actually quite impressive and does good work with his role you find it hard to notice because of all of the interesting plot points developed earlier on in the movie that turn out to be complete non sequiturs in his section.
I personally feel that Gilliam should have gathered the footage he had at the time of Heath Ledger’s death and made this another great failure, in the vain of Lost in La Mancha. That way Heath Ledger’s performance, the ideas and their original intentions could be preserved in a purer form. Instead we get an interesting and wildly creative film that ends in bastardisation. It compromises where it shouldn’t, and invents when it needs to be solid.
Gilliam tries admirably to make the film transcend Heath Ledger’s Tony, but the shadow the late actor casts is too great to be dispersed, and now the film will stay in this finished form when it is clearly an imperfect product. It’s really just a messy barrage of wonderful dreams that someone tried to impose a structure on and failed.
