Terry Gilliam goes to
town with CGI in Heath Ledger’s final film.
I’d like to think of Terry Gilliam as the feral, less elegant cousin of Tim Burton. They share kindred reputations as the elder fantasists of American cinema, but whereas Burton’s been bringing in the dough at a consistent rate, poor Gilliam’s been lucking out, the victim of one colossal misfortune after another. The untimely death of Heath Ledger, the star of his new fantasy opus The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, is the latest cruel twist of fate to afflict the director and, while the final
film isn’t a complete write-off, the seams do show, and what can I say – it’s a freakin’ mess. And not one that’s glorious or awe-inspiring.
With Ledger’s departure leaving gaps in the production, pals Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell filled in. Unfortunately those bits don’t feel particularly well-integrated into the narrative, at least not in an organic manner. They’re inserted in as the three different transformations of Ledger’s character, Tony, an amnesiac who’s found hanging from a bridge by the immortal Dr Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) and his mobile carnival show troupe which consists of his 16-year-old daughter Valentina (Lily Cole), Anton (Andrew Garfield), and token midget
Percy (Verne Troyer).
Parnassus’s magical portal allows people to explore their deepest imaginations, and it’s a good excuse for Gilliam to conjure textbook phantasmagoria that plays like Dali, Seuss and Bosch arbitrarily mashing into one another without rhyme or reason (someone keep him away from CGI!). At worst, Imaginarium is Gilliam- (or Burton-, shudder) by-numbers, assembled from better parts of his other films, and ultimately undone by a flabby, inscrutable story that we don’t really care about. There are some neat performances – Ledger’s good, and his absence is felt when he’s off-screen, while Tom Waits is fun as a pencil-moustached devil in bowler hat. But give me a Gilliam room-clearer like Tideland any day over this spotty bore.