The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

No stranger to strangeness, Terry Gilliam has splattered the dreamlike excesses of his imagination all over celluloid during the span of his entire career. From his involvement in the wacky world of Monty Python to his eccentric epic Brazil, Gilliam has spent a lot of time in the rewarding realm of fulfilling fantasy. But after so many years dedicated to toiling in his own invented reality, Gilliam's movies are beginning to look a whole lot less brilliant and a whole lot more ridiculous.

His latest movie, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, is almost a metaphor for Gilliam's career. It begins as an exciting and eye-popping wonder, but eventually sputters out and slowly transforms into a limply uninspired mess. The potent visuals and intriguing narrative potential get the movie off to a great start, but it isn't long before the promise of something special unravels in tepidly transparent fashion. What initially appears to be a profound meditation on the importance of storytelling and the curse of immortality is eventually revealed to be a pile of knotted nonsense with nowhere to go but down.

The story wraps itself in conflict and seems refreshingly full of possibilities in the beginning, but it slowly turns rotten at its core. The basic plot revolves around a travelling sideshow led by the ancient Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer, one of the movie's few lasting highlights), who claims to be well over a thousand years old. The sideshow is both the source of the movie's title and a dangerous mixture of cheap parlour tricks and soul-swallowing magic.

The magic is unveiled whenever a character steps through a flimsy-looking mirror, which acts as a doorway into a fantasy world created by the imagination of the visitor and powered by Dr. Parnassus himself. Or something along those lines. Gilliam stops trying to make sense of the Imaginarium mirror relatively early on. There are some rules intended to lend dramatic importance to the mirror world, but they are promptly broken, so nothing really adds up in the end.

To heap further complications and conflict on to the story, Dr. Parnassus just happens to be locked in a seemingly unending war of wagers with the Devil (Tom Waits, deliciously creepy and cool with his gravelly voice and cacophonous charisma). The moments between Parnassus and the Devil, whose alias is Mr. Nick, are the freshest and most engaging in the movie. Watching Plummer and Waits match each other's towering presence is a lot of fun, even though the script (written by Gilliam and Charles McKeown) provides them with increasingly less to do as the narrative progresses.

There's also a love triangle involving Parnassus' beautiful daughter Valentina (Lily Cole), sideshow performer Anton (Andrew Garfield), and mysterious charmer Tony (Heath Ledger, in what is sadly his final role). Based on a plot synopsis, it would seem that The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus has a little bit of everything: romance, fantasy, adventure, mystery, and an eternal battle between good and evil. So where exactly does the movie go astray? Well, for starters, it doesn't make a lick of sense. And I don't mean that in a suspension of disbelief kind of way, but rather in a "what the hell was that about?" kind of way.

Gilliam has previously proven that he can take disparate nonsense and pull it together into one exciting package, but with his latest movie, he gets far too wrapped up in the loopy joys of the mirror world to notice that the entire narrative is careening off the rails. None of the characters have particularly interesting arcs, which leaves the mostly talented cast (what is Verne Troyer doing with the likes of Ledger and Plummer?) wandering from scene to scene in an aimless pursuit of purpose. Things get even stranger when Ledger is replaced by a trio of actors (Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Colin Farrell) during his character's three journeys into the mirror world.

When Ledger tragically died during filming, Gilliam was forced to make a decision to either shut down the production or find a way to complete the movie without his star. He came up with the idea to alter Tony's face whenever he entered the mirror world, allowing for Depp, Law, and Farrell to take over. In the finished movie, Gilliam even goes so far as to change the face of the first person we see enter the mirror world, in an attempt to justify Tony's impending facial alterations. But since nobody else ever undergoes such a transformation, it all feels a little bogus in the end.

From the fascination with storytelling to Parnassus' deal with the Devil to even the changing faces of Ledger's character, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is overflowing with possibilities. But sadly, Gilliam soon becomes lost in his own Imaginarium and so he drives every hopeful opportunity into a dead end. By the time the credits are prepared to roll, any potential dramatic power derived from the plight of each and every character is gone and even the fantastical Imaginarium itself is looking rather stale and boring. The movie has an energy early on that is slowly sapped and eventually drained entirely.

The visual design of the mirror world is certainly impressive, as the movie's colour palette explodes in a rainbow of madcap fury. There are dancing policeman and rivers that transform into snakes and jellyfish in space and... the craziness goes on and on. When I think about the visual freedom of the wonderfully weird fantasy world, I cannot help but yearn for a movie that gives such mayhem some meaning. It is with great disappointment that I do not regard The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus as that movie. It just keeps spinning in circles until it becomes so drunkenly dizzy that it falls completely apart. Terry Gilliam certainly has a wild and wacky imagination, but perhaps he should have kept much of this fractured, nonsensical dreamscape to himself.