The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)

1 month ago

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)

HAPPY ENDINGS NOT GUARANTEED

I should state here and now that I am a big, big fan of Terry Gilliam. This has been so ever since I was mesmerised by Time Bandits as a child, and when people ask me what my favourite film of all time is (and when I don’t feel like dodging the question) I tend to instinctively reply: “Brazil”. I’m not sure if he’ll ever top that film, in my estimation, but whatever he does he’ll remain a director always worth watching — a true auteur, one of the few film-makers who still retains a certain cinematic genius in whatever he makes, however flawed and inconsistent it may be.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is both of those things, but it’s also (literally) marvelous entertainment, a complex and multi-layered work fizzing over with ideas and themes both new and familiar. Gilliam said that making it was a process of ‘trying to think the way I did in Python, in fact introducing everything I’ve ever done before,’ and throughout there is the sense of the film as a justification for why his work is still utterly vital and relevant. After a single viewing I suspect it’s his broadest and richest film since 12 Monkeys, and though it’s hard to say whether it’ll be ranked critically with his best work, I’m sure it will find a wider audience than the criminally misunderestimated Tideland.

At first, the film bears a superficial resemblance to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, but here the plot is considerably more complicated. Doctor Parnassus, played by Christopher Plummer, is an aging dreamer whose mythical life (he may or may not be thousands of years old) is now the main attraction of a traveling show. Along with his daughter Valentina, their assistant Anton and the mysterious Percy, they drive their horse-drawn wagon around contemporary London by night, setting up their act before nightclubs and in the car parks of DIY superstores. At the heart of their absurd, baroque music-hall performance is a mirror which leads into the dreaming mind of Parnassus. To venture through the mirror is to enter a world created by one’s own imagination, but the participant must ultimately make a choice: either embrace a revelation which will change their life for the better, or give in to temptation, sell their souls to the demonic Mr Nick (played with relish by Tom Waits) and never return to the real world at all.

Things become a great deal more complicated for Parnassus and his little band when they pick up a mysterious stranger, hanging by his neck from Blackfriars bridge (a nod to Roberto Calvi). He’s alive thanks to a brass pipe mysteriously secreted in his windpipe, but though he claims to have lost his memory, Tony soon proves quite adept at selling the dreams of his audience back to them.

(And yes, that is a blacked-up Verne Troyer.)

Together, Tony, Parnassus and Mr Nick form a triangle of ‘real phonies’: all are adept at seducing disciples and sustaining their own mythology, telling tales at the heart of which lies a sublime, terrible magic. Parnassus has something of the light, whimsical quality of Munchausen, but this is a much darker, more complex film; in the end, it’s perhaps more like Time Bandits than anything he’s done since, and not just because it contains some of his most Python-esque touches. Like the figure of ‘Evil’ in that film, Tom Waits plays a villain who effectively stands in for the cold, enlightened rationalism of a world which no longer seems to believe in stories. The moral heart of the film is a flashback sequence where we see Parnassus leading a group of meditating monks suddenly interrupted by the presence of Mr Nick. When questioned as to what it is they are doing, Parnassus tries to explain their view that the whole universe is one endless, infinite story, but Mr Nick shrugs this off with a bit of Dawkins-esque anti-theology: ‘It’s just incredible to me that you can believe something that can be so easily disproved.’ Why don’t they do something better with their time, like y’know, buy stuff?

Parnassus could be said to be a surrogate for Gilliam himself — like the magic mirror, his films lead us into surreal, dreamlike worlds, his imagination working as the facilitator to reveal that which would otherwise be buried in our own subconscious. And on a more prosaic note, the story of Parnassus’ brief fame and later rejection seems akin to the director’s struggles to retain his reputation, not to mention his ‘failure to get his films finished’, as the man himself put it. But whereas Time Bandits, Brazil and Munchausen had the dreamer as boy, young man and old man respectively, there is something enchantingly circular and cyclical about Parnassus’ plot — it’s weirdly convoluted, constantly twisting and turning on itself like a Möbius Strip. Like James Cole in 12 Monkeys, Tony seems unable to understand where he has gone wrong, doomed to repeat his own mistakes for eternity. The film is full of strange intimations of his mortality and rebirth. Most chilling of all is a moment where the images of James Dean, Rudolph Valentino and Princess Diana drift by on a Styx-like river, all figures whose presence in our cultural consciousness has been shaped by the modern myths of celebrity. As Tony explains: ‘All of them have achieved a kind of immortality. And we love them all the more for it. They won’t get old or fat. They won’t get sick or feeble. They are beyond fear. They are forever young. They are gods. And you can join them.’ Remarkably, all this was in the original script even before Ledger’s tragic death.

It’s often a flawed and frustrating film. The script meanders tediously in certain sequences (perhaps because Gilliam encouraged the actors to improvise much of their comic dialogue) and the performances in general are solid and workmanlike without being really exceptional. Andrew Garfield is the only one who is genuinely remarkable, playing the relatively marginal role of Anton with wit and flair. It’s harder still to know what to make of Heath Ledger: it doesn’t seem fair that he only ever gets the chance to play his character ‘straight’, and though there are shades of the Joker in Tony’s teasing, sleazy side, I frequently wondered what more he might have done with the role had he only more time. As I’m sure you already know, once Tony passes through the mirror the more elaborate, deceptive sides to his personality are revealed in the forms of the film’s very special guests: this is handled with remarkable skill, and Jude Law and Colin Farrell are perfectly fine, but it’s Johnny Depp who steals his one brief appearance with the masterful, feline flick of his eyes that must surely have become his trademark by now.

I found it hard to shake the sense that Lily Cole had been cast for her striking looks rather than her acting ability. But perhaps as a result of her experience as a model, she takes on the physical aspects of her part with poise and vigor, whether that means plucking chickens, jostling with Anton or dancing with Mr Nick against a glimmering background of shattered mirrors. Women in Gilliam’s films have always been relegated to difficult and controversial positions: one thinks of Jill Layton in Brazil or Lydia in The Fisher King, strong figures in their own right but so often defined in relation to the dreams of the men around them. Tideland turned much of that on its head, and here Valentina takes on a great many roles — mother, housewife, sister, lover — loved variously by Anton and Parnassus, admired by Mr Nick and exploited by Tony. Though it’s a testament to her strength that she endures all of this with grace and composure, I do wonder if Gilliam’s suggested solution to her dream of escape is entirely satisfying.

There’s also a dubious and disturbing subtext running through the film as to what it is women dream about — is it really all shoes and sunshine on the ‘good’ side, and one-night stands with Johnny Depp on the ‘bad’? Perhaps, Gilliam seems to say, but though what we find in art is ultimately a product of our own imaginations, it’d be wrong to think that Tony’s presence within the dream-world doesn’t affect our feelings too.

Everything comes back to Tony, then, or at least revolves around him. He’s the wild card of the group, the proof that to try and impose one’s imaginative visions on the world can lead to disasters as well as wonders. Ledger’s character was partly inspired by ex-PM Tony Blair, described by the director as ‘the kind of man who would say insane things and probably believe them himself,’ and the film hints heavily at this in the glimpse of the headline ‘TONY LIAR’ on a crumpled sheet of newspaper, an echo of the ‘Tony Bliar’ slogan associated with the protests over the war in Iraq. But here, Tony is a deceitful head of a children’s charity rather than a politician, and in the arena of Parnassus’ mind, the stories he spins out about regarding his idealised self and his intentions eventually come to conflict with the truth of his personality. His world cracks and falls apart in a spectacular sequence which rivals Lowry’s hallucinatory nightmare at the end of Brazil.

Both films teach us that though our dreams are precious and powerful, they can no longer be relied upon as an effective response to the uncaring, technology-driven beaurocracy of the modern world. To believe in contemporary myths is to invest ourselves in people like Tony, and his character, Heath Ledger — figures who will inevitably frustrate, disappoint, deceive and confound our expectations. But can we ever choose not to dream, to tell, to listen, or is giving up a choice in itself? So often we settle instead for a comfortable escape from our problems, only to suddenly find that we are back where we began, halfway along life’s path, lost in the midst of a dark forest. The film’s solution to all this confusion is something akin to Prospero breaking his staff and drowning his book, the old prophet stepping aside for a new generation to take its place; but if The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is anything to go by, I for one hope the director isn’t so quick to follow that example.