IN THEATERS
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)
Directed by Terry Gilliam
For those who already know Terry Gilliam’s films, it wouldn’t come as a surprise that his latest, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, is another filmed fairy tale. After all, it seems that Gilliam hardly does anything else that filming fairy tales. If the tragic death of his lead actor, Heath Ledger, altered radically his Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus project, written with his long-time collaborator Charles McKeown (credited for the Brazil script, for instance), the film still owes a lot thematically to a classical fairy tale, even if it doesn’t necessarily follow all the steps of a fairy tale plot. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus actually resembles those fairy tales in which fabulous objects are to be found in the most mundane circumstances: in Gilliam’s and McKeown’s script, the pretext for the plot comes in the shape of a magic mirror, that has the amazing powers of literally introducing yourself to your own imagination, and of an obscure and itinerant magician, Dr. Parnassus, who at the first glance doesn’t seem to be nothing more than an impostor; as in the fairy tales magic rings and lamps don’t seem different from cheap rings and lamps, the extravagant magician and his mirror look more like a scam, if it weren’t for the script to prove us wrong very early in the film. But Parnassus is not only a magician; he is also something more mythically relevant: the stranger who seems to follow Parnassus and his few companions seems to be the Devil itself, dressed in old-fashioned clothes and behaving like a trickster; it seems that a while ago Parnassus has sold his soul to the devil in order to gain immortality. But nobody seems to be aware of devil’s apparitions except his faithful companion, a midget. What everybody is aware of, though, is the actual powers that Parnassus holds and the revelatory quality of the mirror; after all, one of the film’s major meanings is that one’s imagination, depicted in vivid images and shiny colors and surrealistic imagery by Gilliam, is mirroring accurately one’s psychology, hence, the act of passing through the mirror and looking into your own imagination is depicted as an act of self-knowledge (of course, a few images look like contemporary views of the paradise, others, quite the opposite). Furthermore, imagination seems to occupy an important position regarding one’s fate, since there is a lot of talking in the film about stronger imaginations and weaker imaginations, generally using imagination as a way of defining one’s strength and, in the meanwhile, addressing one of the general problems of the film in a metaphorical manner.
In a way, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus looks for Gilliam like Big Fish looked back in 2003 for Tim Burton: they both made a few more or less tolerable films and, as a response to a creative crisis, they both returned to what they used to do best: fantasies, excessively focused on imagery and having fairy tale motifs. But these films seem less focused, compared to previous works. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, for instance, although carefully dosed and generally clever written, is less interesting when it comes to the “real world” (a world in which, for Gilliam, magic and accessing your imagination could be real), as it doesn’t manage to provide a rewarding story for Parnassus. Of course, once a character walks through the mirror, and Gilliam is clever enough to make those scenes suspenseful most of the time, the screen is all a giant world of wonders, while Gilliam can let his CGI team to do the work for him and translate his insane fantasies into images. One can go hunting for details during those scenes or just enjoy them, but with so many tricks, it comes as a disappointment that Gilliam hasn’t managed to decide for a convergent story that would have connected all the dots. Most of the time, you don’t actually know what story are you really following: is it the damnation and redemption story, or is the one about deceiving appearances, or is it the other one, about true love? All this isn’t even about mixing genres or styles, quite the contrary, Gilliam is at his best when he is mixing genres or when he’s quite eclectic. What The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus lacks is something beyond the main concept, of people meting their own imaginary spaces, something beyond scenery and CGIs. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus may be a tribute to Heath Ledger and a guilty pleasure, but it certainly needs more than that in order to become a memorable experience.
