Editor’s Note: This film review was originally written back in 2010.
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is the eleventh feature film from writer-director Terry Gilliam, and arguably one of his strangest to date. The Monty Python alum directed his own troupe in Monty Python and The Holy Grail in 1975, then went on to tweak the Weird-O-Meter with such memorable oddities as Time Bandits, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Twelve Monkeys and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
This time, he’s created a wonderfully bizarre version of a timeless mythos, the “deal with the devil”. Parnassus, a medieval monk, wins immortality in a bet with the devil (brilliantly played by oddball musician Tom Waits). Parnassus assembles a bizarre traveling performance show featuring a magic mirror, powered by super powers granted to Parnassus by the Devil, which submerges audience members in their own imagination worlds and ultimately forces them to make the ultimate choice, between good and evil, heaven and hell, for their immortal soul. Over the next thousand years, Parnassus and the devil continue betting one another. By the modern era, the devil has come to collect the soul of his rival’s daughter on her sixteenth birthday, which results in a new wager: first to collect five souls wins hers.
Christopher Plummer, who celebrated his 80th birthday a week before the film opened in the U.S., stars as Doctor Parnassus. Plummer has accumulated hundreds of acting credits over the last fifty years, but the first that comes to my mind is his role as wacky-pervert-cult-leader Rev. Jonathan Wirley in the horrible Tom Hanks/Dan Akroyd film version of Dragnet. That, and maybe the Klingon leader General Chang in the equally horrible Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (yes, that’s him under all that makeup, trading Shakespeare quotes with The Shat). My point isn’t that Plummer has made a lot of shitty movies, because nobody bats a thousand over fifty years, but rather that he’s got a long pedigree for playing odd roles, into which Doctor Parnassus fits perfectly.
Tom Waits is also no stranger to playing odd characters, with roles in everything from The Outsiders and Down By Law to Mystery Men and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The scenes between his Devil (aka “Mr. Nick”) and Plummer’s Parnassus are some of the strongest moments of the film. He plays the Devil as a quintessential gambler who develops an actual fondness for Parnassus over a millenium of competition.
Most people probably aren’t talking about the fantastic character interplay between Plummer and Waits. The driving force bringing the masses before this movie is the final screen appearance of actor Heath Ledger, whose death-by-overdose at the hands of Mary Kate Olsen in 2008 nearly killed the entire project, leading to a summer of inflated hype over his “final” performance in The Dark Knight (and the Academy finally granting him a guilt Oscar). I wasn’t a huge fan of Ledger, and still haven’t bothered to see his gay cowboy epic, but I was genuinely impressed by his performance in 1999′s 10 Things I Hate About You. Ledger plays Tony, a shady character who skirts the line between good and evil (and, ironically, is introduced in the film already dead, hanging by the neck under a bridge). His performance here is passable, but isn’t a compelling reason to watch the film.
Gilliam eventually finished the movie by recasting Ledger’s character in the Imaginarium sequences with not one, but three different actors: Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell. Depp was Gilliam’s friend, while Law and Farrell were both friends with Ledger, and all three re-directed their salaries for the film to Ledger’s young daughter, Matilda.
With incredible surrealistic imagination sequences, fable-like messages about morality and the power of human choice, great performances by Plummer, Waits and dimunitive actor Verne Troyer, as well as a musical number featuring singing policemen in drag, Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is one of the best and most original films from 2009. Skip the over-rated and over-hyped Avatar, and catch this one instead.
