Here it is at last: the last Heath Ledger performance that the world will ever see.
This performance is encased within a meticulous and frantic dream world, cobbled together by the half-mad Terry Gilliam and complemented by the addition of three generous performers who stepped in after Ledger’s death. For fans of Gilliam, the movie is a delightful and often sublime return to form. For fans of Ledger, there may be some disappointment.
Heath’s character Tony is more of a secondary player and for the sequences taking place within the titular Imaginarium, he is portrayed by Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell. Depp does the least speaking but looks most like Heath, Law’s is the most sympathetic and multi-layered, and Farrell hits most closely to what I think Gilliam was going for with Tony. And what of Ledger himself? He’s good for sure — one of the many ‘what ifs’ of Parnassus is what the film would have looked like if Ledger had been Tony for the duration. My suspicion is that it would have only improved things and added a unifying thread that the movie doesn’t quite have right now.
With that out of the way, though, let me say that The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is a welcome surprise from Gilliam, who has long been one of my favorite directors, languishing amidst the zaniness and difficulty of his own projects. The last great movie he made was 1995′s Twelve Monkeys. Parnassus is no Monkeys, but it has that same delicious sense of the surreal, the absurd and the mythic with forlorn dreamers struggling against the grain and grit of the all-too-real mundane world.
Dr. Parnassus, played to obstinate, irritable perfection by Christopher Plummer, was once a monk who now wanders the Earth in his painful immortality due to a bargain he made with the Devil (Tom Waits) centuries ago. In the shabby backstreets of London, he and his entourage run a smoke and mirrors production referred to as The Imaginarium. Parnassus’ secret is that behind the dime store mirror is a world where the subject’s innermost fantasies are tweaked and twisted by both the doctor and the Devil in a war for their souls. Parnassus’ daughter Valentina (Lily Cole) becomes the next object in the bargaining war, and the first one to claim five souls wins Valentina’s.
Heath steadies the sequences around the Imaginarium, and the colleagues who take over for him add elements of needed humanity to the overstuffed fantasy set pieces. But on the acting front the movie is won by Plummer’s Parnassus and Tom Waits, a black-hatted, pencil-mustached Mephistopheles who looks like Ron Perlman but sounds like Dennis Leary in need of a lozenge. They are playing mythical archetypes — the wily, old man and the deceiving trickster — but inasmuch as they can, they give their parts a playful sense of camaraderie.
Lily Cole is extraordinarily beautiful and the odd juxtaposition of her childlike features and womanly body work well for Valentina’s character. Her acting is good too and the chemistry she shares with Andrew Garfield as Anton lends her spot in the picture a sweet romantic light that doesn’t shine anywhere else. Verne Troyer has been given that thankless job of the little person in a Gilliam film (Percy) but he doesn’t play it that way. Instead, he’s Parnassus’ conscience, and rises to the fore in scenes with Plummer, which isn’t an easy thing to do.
The script is a strange nuts-and-bolts concoction that never feels completely thought-out at the story level, but has a certain rightness as a fantastic fable. Gilliam, for whom narrative cohesion is usually an albatross around the neck, sticks to the tale as much as he needs to and uses the Imaginarium as his outlet. Jellyfish lift people out of the air and into a hovering, phosphorescent world, while children wander off across ephemeral vistas that look like Candyland, constructed by Salvador Dali. The moving parts of this vast dream world are mostly CGI, and Gilliam has yet to comfortably nail that technology, but his fierce imagination wins the day.
In the end, Dr. Parnassus is another odd love letter to the power of storytelling as viewed through Gilliam’s off-kilter lens. I fancy he sees a lot of himself there within Parnassus, the old man who wants the whole world to dream with him and keeps being disappointed by the demanding reality of life that nibbles the edges off his enchantment. When he pulled Ledger in to help him realize his vision, he couldn’t have imagined how the path would end. But here we are, and this Imaginarium is one that both Gilliam and Ledger may be quite proud of.
Rating: 
