Those of us who love the work of director Terry Gilliam have to admit that our love largely grows from his third and fourth features, Time Bandits (1981) and Brazil (1985). His other films have their virtues, but none is quite as Gilliamish as one would wish.
His second feature, Jabberwocky, is rather ramshackle and perhaps too close to his first as director, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, though it does have some wonderful moments. The films that came after Brazil engendered Gilliam’s reputation for wild excess and, hence, budgets that spiralled way out of control — an outgrowth of his ever-expansive imagination. The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen (1988) was horribly expensive to make, and indeed it looked great in that extraordinary Gilliam way, but the story didn’t exactly hang together.
Gilliam’s more commercial and somewhat less “personal” movies — The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — are good, and if they had come out signed with the name of almost any other director we Gilliam fans would probably have hailed them as masterpieces. But, again, they didn’t feel quite Gilliamish enough. The more recent The Brothers Grimm (2005) was fun, but it’s perhaps best seen as Gilliam Lite.
In the meantime, between those projects, Gilliam famously tried to make his version of the Don Quixote story, and, as the excellent documentary Lost in La Mancha (2002) details, it was disastrous. A series of accidents, coupled with unsteady financing, meant that the film collapsed just as it began shooting. Johnny Depp, who was to have starred in The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, promised that if he had a big hit he’d return to the project; now that he has ascended to the highest of Hollywood heights with the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, it’s surely time to make good on his promise. The resuscitation of the movie has been announced, but there’s no Depp on board, it seems — instead, we have Robert Duvall and Ewan McGregor as leads, but the details (and probably the financing) seem far from firm.
Certainly, Gilliam’s reputation for being a very tricky investment as far as filmmaking goes was only enhanced by the catastrophe that struck his new film, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, in mid-shoot: its star, Heath Ledger, died of an accidental drug overdose in January 2008. Such things, along with the flash floods and sudden near-mortal illnesses that killed the Quixote project, are beginning to make it look as though there is some kind of curse on the director.
And yet, with amazing fortitude, and in the belief that Ledger himself would have wanted the film to be completed, which he surely did, Gilliam and his cohorts managed to finish The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus. Depp, along with Colin Farrell and Jude Law, stepped into the Ledger role, which meant the film could be wrapped up.
This was serendipitously possible because of the storyline of the film. One could even argue that it was the very nature of Gilliam’s imagination, and the work of scriptwriter Charles McKeowne in bodying forth that imagination, that made such a manoeuvre possible. It may be a clinching argument, in Gilliam’s terms, for the amazing power of the imagination. And it’s down to the film’s central symbol of that imaginative power — a magic mirror.
The titular imaginarium is a travelling show, housed in a strange travelling house-cart-theatre contraption, which has the magic mirror at its centre. The Dr Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) who runs the show is kind of pretending that that’s all it is — a bunch of old-fashioned performances and tricks, presented in a way that is quite alien to the technological 21st century. His imaginarium is a throwback to a much earlier era, even older perhaps than vaudeville, itinerant preacher-conjurers and snake-oil salesmen.
But the mirror is, in fact, truly magical. As a thrilling and scary early scene demonstrates, if you go through the mirror you find yourself in an entirely other world. Moreover, it’s your imagination that determines what you experience there, for good or ill. Or something like that.
This is not entirely coherently worked out in the schema of the film, and that’s a problem, but the idea of the magic mirror makes it possible for the Ledger character to be transformed into Depp, Farrell or Law when he passes through its shiny surface. These alter-Ledgers are, you might say, variant personae of a character who is, from the start, a mysterious figure.
In fact, he’s a blank, and some of the film’s narrative has to do with finding out who he really is. When first encountered he’s a would-be suicide rescued at the last minute, a Boudu saved from drowning; but this near-miss has wiped his memory. So he’s an amnesiac when he is saved and absorbed, at least temporarily, into the odd little group that lives in and runs the imaginarium.
They are Dr Parnassus (Plummer doing a sort of King Lear in his dotty phase), his daughter with a heart-shaped face, Valentina (Lily Cole), an assistant called Anton (Andrew Garfield) who is, naturally, in love with Valentina, and, as there should be in all such fairy tales, a dwarf (“Mini-Me” Verne Troyer). Popping up now and then as this motley troupe traverses a London that would make Dickens’s seem quite tidy is a certain Mr Nick (Tom Waits), a devil with whom Parnassus has made a sinister gamble — as, indeed, one tends to do in fairy tales.
Tony, the Ledger character, may have lost his self but he at least has some residual entrepreneurial flair, and he wants to get the imaginarium functioning a bit more like a going concern. This provides some comedy, with Ledger rising most enjoyably to the occasion. But the real story has to do with who Tony really is, what he has to do with the diabolical deal, what happens to him beyond the mirror, and what it all means.
And there, I’m afraid, we come a little unstuck. It’s fairly clear that the imaginarium and the mirror are metaphors for the artistic imagination, and that the exercise of that imagination has something to do with artists making deals with the devil, like blues legend Robert Johnson at that famous crossroads. But the riotous assembly of visual magnificences that Gilliam throws at the screen do not help the viewer to add things up or come to any specific conclusions about it all. Perhaps there’s a narrative imagination and a visual imagination and the twain do not always coexist; certainly, in the quixotic mind of Gilliam the latter seems to crowd out the former.
The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus is certainly glorious to watch in a purely visual sense. This glory (combined with his dark humour) is what I mean by the essentially Gilliamish quality we Gilliam fans so love. Whether working with the traditional tools of a teeming, textured mise en scène or rejoicing in the nearly unlimited possibilities of computer-generated imagery, Gilliam’s imagination runs riot. He piles Ossa upon Pelion, and scene after scene of almost overwhelming splendour follow one another in quick succession.
Given that fantastic richness, it seems churlish to wish that Gilliam and his editors had dispensed with some of it (keep it for the DVD extras, dammit!) and focused instead on shaping the storyline into a more comprehensible and satisfying form. Churlish, maybe — as churlish as Percy the Dwarf. But not unreasonable.