How to explain the emaciated thinness – the essential nothing-there-ness – of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus? The film is a puzzle, an obviously big-budget fantasy built on expensive (and often imaginative) visuals but only a wisp of narrative. I don’t mean it’s done badly, I mean there’s (almost) nothing there at all. If they made a music video of Chris de Burgh’s ‘Spanish Train’ – the song about God and the Devil playing poker, then chess, for the souls of the dead – it might have roughly the same content, except it would be 119 minutes shorter. You don’t just wonder how it ended up the way it did; you wonder how it got made at all.
The answer, I suspect, lies in the closing dedication: “A Film From Heath Ledger and Friends” – because Parnassus was the film Mr. Ledger was making when he died in January 2008. At the time, the outpouring of sympathy extended to director Terry Gilliam, whose projects have often been marked by misfortune, but in fact I suspect that Gilliam – who re-jigged his script and finished the movie, with Ledger’s role completed by a combination of Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell – may eventually have seen his lead actor’s death (however tragic) as a blessing in disguise. A former Monty Python cartoonist whose films include Time Bandits, Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Gilliam’s always been more showman than storyteller – and now, for the first time, he didn’t need to draw people in with a story. The film’s morbid status as Ledger’s Swansong assured it of an audience; Gilliam could afford to indulge his taste for loopy spectacle – and so he has.
Of course it’s impossible to know what Parnassus would’ve been like without its star’s demise; maybe it was always going to be a film of set-pieces over settled narrative. What’s clear, however, is that almost all its best scenes are the fantasies taking place inside the “Imaginarium” – most of them starring the Depp/Law/Farrell triumvirate, i.e. shot after Ledger’s death – in which various people have their imaginations guided by Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) while being stalked by the Devil (Tom Waits), who tries to win them over to his side. These scenes are grandiose, cartoon-like, often surreal. Ladders disappear into the clouds. Giant jellyfish appear in the sky. One fantasy (a little boy’s) is adorned with bubbles and huge pieces of fruit; another (a middle-aged woman’s) features tiaras and high-heeled shoes, crowned with enormous water-lilies.
Visuals are strong, the plot not so much. Satan and the Doctor have a wager to see who’ll be the first to win five souls, the prize being Parnassus’ teenage daughter Valentina – but there’s no real sense of competition, except in one priceless scene where a bunch of Russian gangsters are caught between the twin temptations of tap-dancing cops singing a song about police brutality (shades of Monty Python) and the skirts of a giant peasant babushka. Outside the Imaginarium, meanwhile, is modern-day London – as in Time Bandits, Gilliam likes to place the outlandish side-by-side with the mundane – where Parnassus’ theatre troupe ply their trade before Saturday-night drunks and kids with their noses buried in computer games.
There’s a theme in that last detail, the theme of modern kids ruined by consumerism and technology, blind to the Magic of Stories – a theme Gilliam raises again when Doctor and Devil argue over “the eternal story that sustains the universe”. The Devil points out that no one story can sustain the universe, and ‘proves’ it by silencing the monks who are telling the story – but Parnassus counters that the story will continue as long as we have Imagination. Gilliam is big on Imagination (he peddled a similar theme in The Brothers Grimm), and casting Satan as pedantic rationalist may be his answer to those who’d like more plot in the movie; on the other hand, it’s hard to believe his plea for the Magic of Stories when he himself is such a sloppy storyteller. Random example: the climax raises a clever dilemma – is the Devil trying to trick Parnassus into killing Tony (the Ledger character) so that he, the Devil, can claim his all-important fifth soul? – reminiscent of the climactic twist in Seven back in ’95. In Seven, that twist was unforgettable. Here, on the other hand, it just fizzles out, and absolutely nothing comes of it.
Bottom line? Parnassus may elicit four distinct stages of audience response. Stage One is a kind of hushed awe at Gilliam’s fevered visuals and (especially) the posthumous sight of Heath Ledger. Stage Two is the slow realisation that, despite the spectacular images, not much is actually happening. Stage Three may be a growing impatience with the film’s incoherence – and Stage Four, assuming you last the course, is a kind of resigned acceptance where you simply gape at the visuals and forget about plot (the climax, with Colin Farrell in the Heath role, is truly dreamlike, with classic dream-detail like irrational chases and standing on the edge of an abyss). Then there’s Stage Five, where you’re driving home and thinking about the film, wondering what you got for your 7.50 Euros – and find yourself unable to recall very much, beyond a vague impression of visual grandeur. At its best, Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is like a dream – but that’s the trouble with dreams. After you wake up, there’s nothing there.
