For the first 20 minutes or so of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Terry Gilliam's latest labor of love and chaos, I fought off the suspicion that I'd rather be watching a documentary about the film's blighted production. This is partly Gilliam's fault -- the introductory sequence is painfully oblique, laborious in its attempts at whimsy and off-kilter charm -- and partly that of Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, whose Lost in La Mancha, a chronicle of Gilliam's disastrous attempt to adapt Don Quixote, was as layered and entertaining as the director's best work, all of which is over a decade behind him. Famously hamstrung by the January 2008 death of its star, Heath Ledger, Imaginarium was saved by the subbing-in of three actors to cover Ledger's unfinished scenes; the film then faced the death of one of its producers and continuous funding and sale snags. The Gilliam curse was beginning to outpace, in reputation and dramatic flair, the actual films he had so much trouble making. In deciding to complete and release Imaginarium, Gilliam and Co. had accepted a challenge from the gods; this demands respect. Audiences will be similarly challenged to accept this film on its own terms, of which there are plenty, and separate its already sizable mythology from its more meager, but perfectly respectable, mortal offerings.
Pulling into a modern London parking lot late at night, the Parnassus roadshow -- a giant, careering, traveling stage that is one of the film's more delightful visual set pieces -- is completely out of its element, an almost embarrassing relic. The team determinedly set up shop anyway: there is Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), made up like a kabuki genie, who sits on stage in silent meditation with a middle distance stare; his daughter Valentina (Lily Cole), teenage eye candy who lends mild assistance and ineffable mystique to the proceedings; Anton (Andrew Garfield), the carny barker who, in theory, explains the show to would-be participants, ever clenching his raging crush on Valentina between his molars; and Percy (Verne Troyer), the requisite little person with sass to spare.
The least impressive installation on the Imaginarium stage, in fact, is the makeshift mirror (really a curtain of reflective strips) through which customers pass, entering a world in which their own ids are run through the imaginative filter of Parnassus. Or something. "Don't worry if you don't understand it all immediately," we are told, and apparently "immediately" is relative: very little about the nature of Parnassus's powers or how they actually work comes clear, and the thematic play ranges from blatant self-indulgence to breakneck incoherence. Yet the combination of Gilliam's reliably stunning visuals and complex, involving performances help him build unlikely narrative momentum; one begins to care about the clear-eyed characters more than the muddled story.
Unlikely, perhaps, because Heath Ledger's death underwrites so much of the pathos of what is really a film about Gilliam himself. Parnassus, a sort of philosopher-mystic who won a life-extending bet with the devil (played with ravenous, grinning appetite by Tom Waits) several centuries ago, now regards immortality as a curse: he has outlived his use as a storyteller, as people no longer care. That this is their failing and not that of the storyteller is supposedly understood, and Plummer, extraordinary as the weary but headstrong old gypsy, certainly wears the burden of unjust irrelevance well. But it's an analogous conviction that is not convincingly developed -- it is merely one idea among too many bobbing in a narrative riptide.
In one of Gilliam's most unfortunate and presumably stubborn choices, Ledger enters the film swinging -- from a noose. Discovered by the hapless caravan as they cross a bridge, Valentina insists on saving him (he is immediately revived) and taking him in. As Tony, Ledger plays a conniver who may or may not have amnesia, and who joins the group to maintain a low profile. Very quickly, however, his inner huckster kicks in, and Tony is leading the Imaginarium to a successful run at a local mall: middle aged women clamor for their turn inside Parnassus's magical portal, where their dreams of handsome suitors and unlimited shoes come true. The devil, ready to collect on a wager that involves tendering Valentina to his clutches, renegotiates with Parnassus, and the two set about seeing who will win the souls of five people first -- that is, Parnassus must keep his customers from crossing over to the dark side while under his influence. Like I said, the rules of this universe are never quite clear. As a result, the script's occasional lunges at resonance (this is Gilliam's third collaboration with Charles McKeown) are either baffling or heavy with dissonance.
When Tony enters the Imaginarium with a portly older woman, for example, he is wryly transformed into a better-looking version of himself, which in this first instance happens to be embodied by Johnny Depp. Trying to rid himself of his besotted charge, Tony floats her down an impromptu river (Gilliam's creepy/crazy/cool headscapes put Peter Jackson's custom-made afterlife in The Lovely Bones to shame) with a hard sell about the dead icons of our time -- Dean, Di, Valentino -- and the immortality that early death brought them: "They're gods," he says, "They'll never get old." Lines like that seem to hold nothing more than idle provocation, lacking a justifying argument or ideology.
And yet the film survives. It does not prevail, but it endures, hitting a disarmingly sweet note of resignation after a wildly conceived climax that involves bobbies in knee skirts and fishnets and Tony's unmasking as a very bad man. Even in rags, even while gambling his daughter away, Plummer maintains his officially unshakable dignity; Waits has got diabolical glee wrapped up and tied with a pencil moustache bow; and both Cole (a model and first-time actress) and Garfield (already an up-and-comer in Britian) give terrifically witty, impassioned performances despite the very tricky material. Ledger, in fact, seems the only discordant piece of casting, if not due to any inherent fault of his own. It seems cosmically beside the point to say it, but he simply does not look well; yet his charisma powers through Gilliam's knottiest scenes. His literal lacking, both on screen and off, pulls what would otherwise be a melancholy lark into the lower, more memorable depths of sadness -- a place it neither wants nor deserves to be.