upcoming UK release : THE IMAGINARIUM OF DR PARNASSUS (2009) : [5/10]

Published on: September 27th, 2009

Considering its well-chronicled nightmares of production – principally the mid-filming death of leading man Heath Ledger – Terry Gilliam's typically overstuffed fantasy-extravaganza The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus isn't the disaster many had predicted.
   Though it runs out of steam some way before the end, there's much to like about this loopily episodic  fable about Dr Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), a thousand-year-old mystic who arrives in modern-day London (he pitches up amid the spectacular industrial ruins of Battersea Power Station) with a horse-drawn, portable mini-theatre that possesses magical powers. Namely that it can transport those who enter it into  universes of their own wildest imaginings - and this engagingly rickety contraption is somehow connected with a bargain struck between Parnassus and the Devil, aka Mr Nick (Tom Waits, having fun in bowler-hat and 1920s-St-Louis-dandy garb), which is drawing imminently close to pay-up time. 
   The emergency casting strategem implemented to mask Ledger's absence from the shoot – whereby his amnesiac character is played in various alternate-reality sequences by Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell – works sufficiently smoothly that you'd be forgiven for presuming it was the intention all along. And whereas Ledger's accent wanders waywardly from Cockerneeland to Australia and back with detours to the USA, the stand-ins keep tighter control over their diction. Depp's cameo in particular is a deftly disarming delight, so much so that it's a bit of a shame that he only gets a few minutes of screen-time. While the picture falls apart during the longer Farrell interlude towards the end, that's a failing of the script rather than of the actor.
   Another pleasant surprise is the contribution of model-turned-actress Lily Cole, who makes for a spirited, strikingly unconventional-looking leading lady – though she, like too many of the talented cast, doesn't get enough to do. A bigger problem is the nebulous nature of the whole millennium-hopping Faustian-pact premise (frequently hard to work out what's going or why), and it's regrettable that while the film harps on about the importance of imagination and free-thinking, it does so while adhering quite slavishly to countless fantasy-picture tropes and ideas dating back at least as far as Something Wicked This Way Comes and even The Seven Faces of Dr Lao.
   Indeed, many aspects are naggingly over-familiar from previous Gilliam enterprises from Baron Munchausen to Brothers Grimm. Among relatively recent variants, meanwhile, both The Fall and MirrorMask exuded more genuine originality, and more nimbly transcended their budgetary limitations. That said, neither of them managed to find much of an audience – lacking the tragic real-life circumstances that threatened to derail this particular enterprise but also (slight silverish lining to pitch-black cloud) ensured it enormous inadvertent publicity.

Neil Young
27th September, 2009

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DR PARNASSUS : [5/10] : UK(/Fr/Canada) 2009 : Terry GILLIAM : 123m (BBFC) : seen 25th September at Teatro Victoria Eugenia, San Sebastian (Donostia), Spain (press show) San Sebastian Film Festival / Donostia Zinemaldia.