IMAGINARIUM OF DR. PARNASSUS, THE

Rating: 5

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DR. PARNASSUS is a massive sprawling explosion of a film, rife with hyperbolic visuals, and a story that dares to consider the contradictions of good and evil as played out in the hearts and minds of every human being on the planet. Co-writer and director Terry Gilliam, through the mouth of one of his characters, explains that it’s hard to understand it the first time, but that’s hardly an failing. Intrinsically entertaining on first viewing, is becomes with each subsequent immersion, a richer, more rewarding experience.
The stage on which this plays out is the eponymous traveling show, one that has been on the road for a very, very long time, ever since Mr. Nick (Tom Waits), a creature without horns, but with a bowler, seductive growl, and tufts of hair at the top of his ears, made a bet with a rash monk (Christopher Plummer, who brings the right mythic quality to the role) about who could first gather around him 12 apostles. Mr. Nick’s enticement was fear and the bliss of ignorance, that of Parnassus was illumination and the joy of imagination. Theirs has been a contentious relationship of temptation ever since. One such pact that Parnassus made with Mr. Nick involving custody of Parnassus’ daughter, Valentina (Lily Cole, with a face that Boticelli could have created) is about to come due on Valentina‘s 16th birthday in three days‘ time. Mr. Nick, a sporting man, or perhaps just one who enjoys toying with Dr. Parnassus, makes a new bet with him. The first to accrue five souls before Valentina’s birthday wins Valentina. Addled by regret, immortality, and a taste for strong liquor, Parnassus accepts the bet.
Enter Tony Shepherd (an ebullient Heath Ledger), found hanging from a bridge in London, where Parnassus’ wanderings have brought him. In Shepherd’s pockets are a bar of gold and a tarot card, the same one that that came up for Parnassus as he dealt the deck after striking his latest bargain with Mr. Nick. There are also strange red symbols on his forehead, and something about him that makes Percy (Verne Troyer in a performance that is as subtle as it is solid), Parnassus’ loyal companion, mightily uneasy. Uneasy is also what Shepherd makes Anton (Andrew Garfield), the member of the troop tasked with portraying Mercury and drawing the crowd. His reasons are more concrete, Shepherd is handsome, flirting too much with Valentina, who longs for a conventional life, and is very agile when telling a lie, even a lie told in a good cause.
Gilliam’s imagination here is more than just the CGI that brings them to life. It is the juxtaposition of the divine, the damned, and the ennui of eternal life. The traveling show is a rinky-dink mobile theater, impossibly thin, impossibly, tall, and resembling nothing so much as a Spanish galleon weathering unfriendly seas. The Imaginarium itself, the mirror that transports people to a world governed by ethical rules, but effected by the imagination of the transportee, is a flimsy frame with two curling foil sheets that look deceptively pedestrian, considering that on the other side, they are presented with a choice, the correct one of which will result in enlightenment, the wrong one, well, something less pleasant.
The troupe, while placed firmly in the present of short-sighted materialists, drunk on liquor or acquisition, flits about in Renaissance frippery that is as shopworn as it is out of step with the audience the show wants to attract. Shepherd, in an effort to help the troupe save Valentina as well as get them their next meal, tellingly strips away all the color.
As for the other side of that mirror, anything is possible. A river transmutes into giant cobra that looms as angry as it is impotent, a couple box-steps on a lily pad that ripples along both above and within an ocean of excess, a chorus line of policemen in skirts, pumps, and stockings hawk the joys of law enforcement with a sprightly ditty. And Ledger becomes, in turn, Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell, a move devised by Gilliam as a work-around when Ledger died during filming, but that makes the story more piquant, and more moving, particularly when Depp as Shepherd tells a middle-aged woman who has stepped through the looking glass that nothing is permanent, even death.
The action begins on Christmas day, a holiday that has, for most people, exchanged the spiritual for the mundane. It’s no coincidence that even as the sublime has been lost in the rush to spend money, the spiel Anton, decked out at the god Mercury, uses to attract an audience, is that the world is full of enchantment for those who have the eyes to see it. The film’s opening sequence sums it up with imagery that is arresting while still being rife with pathos. A show, painfully out of synch with the times, offering the magic of gods, myths, and the mystery of the sublime jeered at by a drunken crowd pouring out of a bar and seeing and seeking only the mundane. THE IMAGINARIUM OF DR. PARNASSUS is a vibrant cautionary tale, a morality play, and a vivid brush with the very enchantment Gilliam cherishes.