The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, featuring Heath Ledger's poignant final bow, is just too madly self-indulgent
Heath Ledger takes a poignant final bow in Terry Gilliam's loopy, sweet-natured but madly self-indulgent fantasia The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, showing here at the Cannes film festival out of competition. Halfway through shooting, Ledger had made a desperately sad early exit, so the director ingeniously re-invented his character as a series of personae. Jude Law, Colin Farrell and Johnny Depp gamely stepped into the breach.
The Dr Parnassus of the title is played by Christopher Plummer, an ageing swami-showman who rattles around in his "imaginarium", a kind of Gypsy-wagon-cum-mobile-fairground theatre, with his fellow players: dyspeptic Percy, played by Verne Troyer, his daughter Valentina (Lily Cole) and leading man Anton (Andrew Garfield) who's obviously deeply in love with Valentina. When members of the audience are invited up on to the stage, they slip back through the ratty old curtains which lead them to a Narnia-like wonderland in which their imaginations can be set free. Dr Parnassus is engaged in a deadly duel with the devil (Tom Waits): Parnassus wants to claim souls for glorious, imaginative freedom – Satan wants to chain them to banality and dullness.
This contest is made more interesting when Parnassus and his troupe rescue a mysterious stranger from a Roberto Calvi-style attempted suicide-by-hanging under a bridge. He is "Tony", played by Ledger et al, evidently a leading charity campaigner and public figure – but soon revealed as shallow and insidious. A newspaper headline, Tony Liar, hints that he may be inspired by a certain former prime minister of tarnished memory.
When Gilliam shoots off into his surreal wonderland, his film has a kind of helium-filled jollity and spectacle. The moments when Plummer's face looms hugely out of the hallucinatory landscape are great: a reminder of the old Python magic. But the film's convoluted curlicues are tiring, insisting too loudly on how "imaginative" everything is. And when it descends into the real world – Lucy out of the sky without diamonds, as it were – the film can frankly be a bit ho-hum, with some very broad acting from the bit-part crowd players. Gilliam's previous movie Tideland showed he still has teeth, and he bares them occasionally here. The dark side reveals itself, time and again, in the ruined, unsentimental locations in London. But this movie, though perfectly amiable, could be for fans only.
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