Consequences of our personal choices in life.

http://www.doctorparnassus.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_Cole

It’s about the power of imagination to transform us, the need to tell our stories and listen to those of others and the danger of ever accepting received wisdom from the forces of authority and convention. It is also about death and immortality: a theme that resonates all the more because it was the last, film Heath Ledger worked on before his untimely passing left it half finished.

In the present day, immortal thousand-year-old Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) leads a travelling theatre troupe—including a sleight of hand expert, Anton (Andrew Garfield), and a dwarf, Percy (Verne Troyer)—that offers audience members a chance to go beyond reality through a magical mirror in his possession.[5] Parnassus had been able to guide the imagination of others through a deal with the Devil (Tom Waits), who now comes to collect on the arrangement,[6] targeting the doctor's daughter, Valentina (Lily Cole). The troupe, which is joined by a mysterious outsider named Tony (portrayed by Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell),[7] embark through parallel worlds to rescue the girl.[8]

Director Terry Gilliam and screenwriter Charles McKeown wrote the script for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus,[9] their first collaboration since The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988).[5] When he was approached with the basic concept by Gilliam, McKeown thought of the central character of Parnassus "as a semi-eastern medicine man evolved"[14], and in retrospect he further said about the script's sensibilities, "[i]t is about the theme of imagination, and the importance of imagination, to how you live and how you think and so on. And that's very much a Terry theme. [...] I like the idea of storytelling being the thing that sustains the universe."[14] Gilliam described the premise as a "fun and humorous story about the consequences of our personal choices in life",[6] and explained his goal for the film: "It's autobiographical. I'm trying to bring a bit of fantasticality to London, an antidote to modern lives. I loved this idea of an ancient travelling show offering the kind of storytelling and wonder that we used to get, to people who are just into shoot-em-up action films."[5] Gilliam and McKeown based the character of Tony on former British prime minister Tony Blair, who "would say the most insane things and probably he'd believe them himself".[10]

Gilliam repeatedly said in interviews that the character of Parnassus was meant autobiographically, a tale of an aging man with a vivid imagination in a world that doesn't listen anymore.[15] Still being caught in depression over the disruption of his last self-written project The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, his constant struggle with the established studio system, as well as becoming aware of his progressing age, worried that he was going nowhere with his latest projects and that he might not have much time left, Gilliam put a number of references to sudden, tragic, and premature death into his script before the loss of Ledger became a reality. In fact, Gilliam felt compelled to emphasize time and again that upon the film's release many things might be mistaken as references to Ledger's fate but that the script wasn't changed apart from re-casting Ledger with Depp, Farrell, and Law.[16][17]

Behold an unintentional metatextual triumph, Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. The metatext, and the unintention, are provided by Heath Ledger, who died before his time. His genre-warping, Oscar-winning performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight was the funeral. This film is the wake.

There is no way around it, and ultimately, Parnassus makes good use of it: the context around the actor supercharges the text. Ledger was last seen dangling from the Gotham City skyline before disappearing into the wind like smoke; when we meet him here, he is still dangling, but now dead. The motley band of Doctor Parnassus' Imaginarium revive him, and the motley crew of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus do the same.

Ledger plays (an incarnation of) Tony, a role appropriate to a ghost. He is the trickster adopted into Parnassus' travelling attraction. The Imaginarium is a gateway into the mind of Doctor Parnassus, and when Tony steps inside, he becomes the actors who took up Ledger's mantle after his death. Johnny Depp, particularly, retrieves the juiciest plum from the tragic situation, meditating on death and immortality even as we, the audience, are still becoming accustomed to seeing Depp's face atop Ledger's splendid white suit.

The film is like mainlining Gilliam. Even including Tideland, the director has not made a film so intrinsically bound up in his unique sensibility in nearly twenty years. This is Gilliam straight from the pipe, in that description's full meaning: we get the bad, and the good.

The bad, as usual, is a weakness in story. Parnassus' deal with the devil is left underdeveloped and underexploited throughout the critical first act. Characters do not so much develop, as exist to motivate sequences and scenes. There's a lot of nonsense and needless confusion here.

But behold the good. Unchained and emboldened, Gilliam's images are almost indescribably beautiful, ripe and lush; they are as unmediated an explosion of imagination as has been seen on cinema screens lo these many years. After a career marked by so much heartbreaking compromise, it is touching to see so undiluted an expression.

Parnassus is played by Christopher Plummer as a thinly veiled caricature of Gilliam himself. Parnassus both speaks poetically about the fundamental need for storytelling to enable us to make our own choices, and makes decisions out of hubris which Gilliam at his wildest would find familiar. This, at least, shows some self-awareness to the self-aggrandizing raving lunatic of the cinema. With Gilliam, we have arrived at a point where whatever weaknesses might still exist on the table no longer matter. One wants to shout, Terry, keep making movies. Whatever he is doing, it is vitally, vitally needed.
He is first seen, in Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, as a shadow swinging across the River Thames — "doing a river dance," says one of the men who spots him. In fact, he's dangling from a rope, his hands and feet bound by miscreants unknown. They left him "hanging by the neck till dead," the other man says, adding sourly, "if he had any sense." The hanged man is saved, to make a final film. It's Heath Ledger.
When the 28-year-old Australian actor died in early 2008 of an accidental prescription-drug overdose, audiences around the world mourned his loss. He had achieved so much in The Patriot and Brokeback Mountain; he would reveal a wild, chilling side in The Dark Knight (which posthumously won him the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor); and he promised so much more over the long career people expected of him. But a smaller group of cinephiles grieved for an additional reason: at the time of his death, Ledger was in the middle of shooting Terry Gilliam's Parnassus. Oh no, his cultists cried, another Gilliam film bites the dust. (See pictures of Ledger.)
That's because, complementing the director's list of official movie credits — which stretches from Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Time Bandits through the magnificent Brazil and up to the giga-weird child nightmare Tideland four years ago — is a furtive, but nearly as famous, shadow filmography of unrealized projects. A purported Time Bandits sequel, an adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities and two stabs at filming Alan Moore's Watchmen all went awry. J.K. Rowling, a Gilliam fan, reportedly wanted him to direct the first Harry Potter movie; Warner Bros., not so much. Chris Columbus got the gig.
Gilliam's legendary doomed project was the 1999 The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, starring Johnny Depp and French doyen Jean Rochefort. When the 69-year-old Rochefort suffered a herniated disc, the insurance company pulled the plug on the production. (Ten years later, Rochefort is here at Cannes, looking as suave as ever.) All that remained of the film was a feature-length documentary, Lost in La Mancha, which shows the director as a persistently urgent, imaginative soul, sunny and funny even as Stonehenge-size dominos fall on him.
The problem with financing Gilliam's own grand imaginarium is that his movies are giant dreams requiring pricey sets and effects. What's kept him in business for the best part of 35 years is that big-time movie stars savor being part of those dreams. Depp rejoined Gilliam for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Brad Pitt headlined in 12 Monkeys, and Robin Williams swept through Grand Central Station during The Fisher King. Ledger and Matt Damon played the title characters in Gilliam's last large fantasy, The Brothers Grimm, in 2005. Last year, stars came to his rescue yet again. As a tribute to Ledger, Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell volunteered to film the uncompleted parts of the late actor's role. They also hoped to save Gilliam's bacon, or rather his producers' lettuce. The finished product was on display on May 22, out of competition, at the Cannes Film Festival. (See pictures of the red carpet at Cannes.)
Ledger is fine, parading loads of his grinning charisma, though the part offers him no last-testament revelation. He plays Tony, an entrepreneur of a kids' charity foundation (Suffer the Children) that gangsters had financed, then stolen the donations from. Given a second chance at life, he tries to revive a tatty but magical traveling act, the Imaginarium, run by an immortal lush named Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) and assisted by his daughter Valentina (Lily Cole), her would-be beau Anton (Andrew Garfield) and a mighty dwarf (Verne Troyer, who was Mini-Me in the Austin Powers series). Tony proves to be a natural salesman, a roguish charmer, and soon the Imaginarium has plenty of customers. The special ones step onstage through the Mylar mirror and enter a fantasy world tailored to their desires — until it leads to their doom. Parnassus, you see, has made a deal with the Devil (Tom Waits), and if he doesn't trap five souls by Monday and send them to hell, the Devil gets his daughter. (See the top 10 performances of 2008.)
At his death Ledger had finished most of the scenes establishing his character. The faux-Ledger actors have the majority of their scenes inside the Imaginarium. Depp escorts one enthusiastic lady through a lovely underwater empyrean that leads to the "One Nite Motel" (hell). Law, who scrambles inside to escape the Russian gangsters who hanged him, does a dexterous stilt walk on a million-foot-high broken ladder. Both appearances are brief. Farrell carries the bulk of Act Three, as Tony gets his comeuppance. Given that they're tripping through a fantasy-scape, the guest shots work pretty well. But casting multiple actors in the same role can't be considered an innovation. Todd Haynes split the main character in his 2007 Bob Dylan bio-collage I'm Not There into six parts — one of which was taken by Heath Ledger. (See the top 10 Cannes Film Festival movies.)
I've postponed this paragraph as long as possible; and I'd just as soon not write it, because I've been a Gilliam admirer for ages, since the Python days, and in theory I still am. But his new movie, which Gilliam dreamed up with his longtime writing partner, Charles McKeown, is mostly dismal. For an immortal monk, Dr. P has little magic and no grandeur; his MO is to get drunk and orate at his underlings. The pudding-faced Cole can summon no sorcery or teen sexuality, the role's two minimal requirements; and the only note Garfield can strike is jealous pique, an unattractive quality even in flashes, let alone for most of a two-hour movie. Troyer, the smallest actor, makes the biggest and best impression. He's a figure of saturnine power and towering comic skill.
Since his first films, in the medieval muck of Holy Grail and Jabberwocky, Gilliam has reveled in squalor; he loves nothing more than to rub his characters' (and the audience's) noses into the mess that antiquity forced most of humanity to inhabit, or into a fantasy world with a strong stench of the dystopian. This cynical vision can be cleansing, if cut with wit. But there's not much of that here. Certainly the Imaginarium scenes possess a visual splendor familiar to earlier Gilliam films. But similar effects were more fully achieved in his 1988 The Adventures of Baron Munchausen; further, they furnished an emotional core far richer than the one in Parnassus. One is left with the suspicion that Gilliam is less a director than a supremely gifted art director, and less a moviemaker than a confabulator of sensational stage sets and wondrous effects.
Parnassus touches the heart of a bereft moviegoer only at the end. The closing credit reads, graciously and feelingly, "A Film from Heath Ledger & Friends."