The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

[jast]

I watched this one today.

Let me describe the opening scene for you. A few slightly rowdy and less slightly drunk folks are kicked out of some sort of club in a rather dingy and dreary neighbourhood. Our attention is drawn towards a horse-drawn wagon that doesn't look like much, except that it obviously seems very out of place. Slowly, its walls retract to reveal first a ceiling covered with obviously well-aged light bulbs in bright colours, then decoration you might have expected on a carnival decades ago, and it becomes clear that we are looking at a mobile stage. In its centre stands a cheap two-sided mirror made of reflective foil. A showman dressed up as Hermes enters the stage and announces to nobody who's listening that this is the chance to enter Doctor Parnassus's astonishing Imaginarium, a truly unique experience of never-ending wonders.

Cue a stool entering the stage on a rail. On it sits Doctor Parnassus, a very old man. He appears to be made out of nothing but wrinkles and white hair with heavy make-up added for no apparent reason. His eyes are closed and for all we can see, he's asleep or drunk. Perhaps both. At roughly the same time, a girl dressed, like Doctor Parnassus and Hermes, in the flashy fashion of times long gone, appears in front of the mirror.

The passers-by are visibly unimpressed, despite Hermes's apparent enthusiasm. Except for the previously mentioned rowdies, one of which seems to find the stage incredibly hilarious. He boards the stage uninvited, throws Hermes and another showman off of it and proceeds to chase the girl around the stage, until she walks through the mirror. The guy follows... and finds himself in a forest of painted trees. A forest that's significantly larger than the whole stage.


I don't think you'll benefit from getting a summary of the entire plot from me. I can tell you this much: it's a very dark experience, yet at the same tinged with precisely the wonders promised in the first scene, delivered mainly through breathtakingly phantasmagorial visuals. Still, death and regret are prominent themes and the actors, especially Christopher Plummer as Parnassus, are doing amazing jobs of them. Parnassus is almost the epitome of the burden of past decisions drowned in drunken stupor.
There are layers upon layers of depth here, too. The true colours of some of the characters are never made explicit; I wasn't sure what to believe about Tony (Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Colin Farrell) even when it was all over. Even Doctor Parnassus, who I suppose is the protagonist, is not left with a clear verdict in the end. One might imagine that he changes, but he could just as well be doomed to make history repeat itself, despite the horrible tragedy his life has been by no fault but his own.

The power of stories has intrigued me for quite some time now, and Imaginarium makes a strong case for it. That alone, I suppose, was enough for it to leave a mark on me. What really clinched it for me, however, was that especially towards the end, the story developed so ambiguously that I, already immersed completely, left the cinema profoundly confused and at the same time feeling something very important just happened. If you think that the confusion part of that is a bad thing, I suspect Imaginarium might not be for you. This is not a motion picture to think about, or to distract yourself with. Don't look for a neatly packaged moral or a grand conclusion. Just experience it.

I suppose I'll be watching it again, and it might advance to one of my favourites.

[Lunkhead]

I really liked most of Terry Gilliam's past films so I was eager to see this. I had seen "The Brothers Grimm" and thought it was pretty terrible, though, so I wasn't getting my hopes up. I liked it a lot over all. Visually it was quite up to or beyond the standards he set in his older movies like "Brazil" and "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen". I felt like the scene near the end where Tony's fantasy world starts literally breaking apart was straight out of the old playbook, and I liked that. He really utilized CGI to great effect, too, in the imaginarium scenes. Story-wise I felt like it gave you some food for thought but it kind of rambled and left a lot of loose ends. The pacing definitely felt a little uneven. The acting was generally good and the way they handled four actors playing the same character came across as if they had meant to do it that way all along, rather than as a gimmick they had to use because of Heath Ledger's death. All in all I'd give it a B+ but it's probably more enjoyable to fans of Terry Gilliam than your average movie goer.