Terry Gilliam (2009)

Dr Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) is a very ancient man who, as a young(er) man, made a deal with the Devil.  Parnassus is the éminence grise of a rather dilapidated travelling show.  The members of his small troupe are his daughter Valentina, a young man who’s in love with her, named Anton, and a dwarf called Percy.  The small cart on which the show travels is Tardis-like on an infinite scale:  once you pass through a backstage mirror (made of tinfoil), you enter the physically limitless world of the imaginarium.  For all that we’re told about Parnassus’s deals and wagers with the Devil, I could never get the hang of these.  The Devil is due to claim Valentina on her (imminent) sixteenth birthday in return for something but I’m not sure what.  Is it as simple as everlasting life?  Or is the Devil’s gift to Parnassus that he can, by having people pass through the magic mirror, enable them to give free rein to their imagination in a way they couldn’t otherwise?   Or does he wish to control the imagination of others?  In any case, I missed why Parnassus wanted his side of the bargain.   I wasn’t clear either about Parnassus’s (im)mortality profile.  He’s a thousand years old but, when he tells Valentina about how he was restored to youthfulness and flashbacks appear by way of demonstration, they’re a bit baffling:  Christopher Plummer (actually now in his eightieth year) looks younger than the geriatric Parnassus but he’s no spring chicken.

The Devil, known as Mr Nick, and Parnassus first meet when the latter is, in his own words, ‘a young monk’ (Plummer looks fifty-odd in this sequence).  The order to which he belongs appears Oriental, vaguely Buddhist.  When Mr Nick intervenes, the monks are all contributing to the telling of a story, which seems to be part of their ritual.  The Devil’s bad magic stitches up their mouths but Parnassus insists that Mr Nick will never succeed in silencing all the storytellers of the world – that people telling stories is what keeps the world going.   Christopher Plummer speaks these words with a weight that leaves you in no doubt they’re an essential message of the film but the underpinning narrative emerges fitfully.  I began to wonder if storytelling – in the sense of making things up as you go along – was Gilliam’s subject to such an extent that the spasmodic, clumsy narrative didn’t matter (to him at least, or to Charles McKeown, with whom Gilliam wrote the screenplay).  The emotional structure of Dr Parnassus is similarly shaky:  at times, the picture feels like a put-on – a spoof variation on the Faust legend; at other moments, we seem to be meant to take the characters’ emotions seriously.

The film’s visual scheme is incomparably stronger than its storyline although what’s on screen comes over as a mélange of striking images from Gilliam’s past work (and I’ve not even seen many of his films).  Sequences within the universe of the imaginarium suggest his surreal animated collages for Monty Python on a much bigger budget ($30 million for the whole production, according to Wikipedia).  They’re hugely various, inventively developed, amusing and sometimes alarming; but they’re not satisfyingly integrated with the theme of imagination or the main story.  A semi-transvestite chorus line of policemen also looks to have wandered out of Python.  Parnassus’s vagrant aspect and outfit are reminiscent of Parry in The Fisher King.  The same goes for the more specific set-up of the ragged doctor’s watching his daughter and her happy family through the window of a posh restaurant.  A chase-cum-fight sequence in and out of a news conference, up and down balconies and staircases, recalls a scene in Twelve Monkeys.  All this will please auteur theorists but these elements aren’t fused to any great effect.  They seem to be there essentially because they’ve served Gilliam well before.

There are some effective things in Dr Parnassus – the landscapes beyond the mirror are not the whole show.   The opening location is precise enough – ‘London, England’ – but Gilliam quickly and strongly disorients us in terms of when the action is happening.  The first (nighttime) shots of the London streets and the antique fairground look of the travelling show evoke an unspecified past time.  It comes as a shock when twenty-first century figures out on the town interrupt the Parnassus show.  (We and the aggressive drunk among this group are further disoriented when he goes through the magic mirror into the imaginarium.)   The performances in the film aren’t all equally successful but the performance style within the Parnassus ‘family’– a slightly exaggerated naturalism – is consistent and pleasingly unusual in a fantasy film.  (I often found it hard, though, to make out what the main actors were saying in the London locations.  It’s not a question of volume – the sound effects and the words of people on the margins of these scenes are perfectly audible – but the principals’ voices sound thick and furry.  The sound quality is much better inside the imaginarium.)

Dr Parnassus is already notorious as the picture that Heath Ledger was making at the time of his death and that Gilliam eventually decided to resume with Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law all standing in for Ledger in the sequences that he never completed.  (It’s a bit jarring when Depp – the first reincarnation of Ledger that we see – reassures a visitor to the imaginarium that Rudolf Valentino, James Dean and Princess Diana are all immortal because they died young.)  Ledger plays the mysterious Tony, whom the Parnassus troupe first come across suspended from Tower Bridge (and whose presence is repeatedly linked to the appearance of the hanging man card in the Tarot pack).  Tony, the disgraced head of a children’s charity, is clearly a shrewd operator:  he wins Valentina’s heart (temporarily) and takes the Parnassus show upmarket.  Tony’s personality and morality are nevertheless hard to fathom.  (The quote on Wikipedia that Gilliam and McKeown based the character on Tony Blair, who ‘would say the most insane things and probably he’d believe them himself’, doesn’t help much.)  And this is nothing to do with the multiple incarnations.  In fact, the time- and shape-shifting nature of the film, combined with its incoherence, makes it seem quite natural that the same character is played by four different actors.

According to Gilliam, Heath Ledger improvised many of his lines and he certainly makes them sound fresh (even if his London accent often reverts to Australian).  To be honest, though, it’s very difficult to watch him here without just feeling sad.  (The Joker’s make-up in The Dark Knight put him at a distance in a way that seeing his face as it really was doesn’t allow.)   Perhaps this was why I felt relieved when Johnny Depp materialised:  he’s so smoothly confident in what he’s doing (and he’s not doing it for long) that you enjoy being in safe hands, even if they’re relatively bland ones too.  On the strength of what he does here (and did in, say, Chocolat), Depp looks to be the kind of star who’s stronger when he doesn’t seem to be trying to do much.  As with his underrated work in Road to Perdition, Jude Law shows himself remarkably able to combine human and cartoon character qualities.  Even if Colin Farrell’s histrionics are relatively forced, the Depp-Law-Farrell running order is logical:   Tony gets increasingly worked up in the successive versions of him.  As Parnassus, Christopher Plummer is greatly accomplished; if the performance doesn’t eventually add up to much, the fault lies more with the way the role is written than the way it’s played.   Tom Waits is witty enough but casting him as the suited and hatted Mr Nick somehow neutralises the character:  Waits’s eccentricity is too familiar, his presence too reassuring.

The revelation in the cast is Andrew Garfield as Anton, the young inamorato and master of ceremonies.  Garfield gave a good performance in Red Riding earlier this year but the comic flair he shows here comes as a delightful surprise.  He gets going (and sustains) a terrific, funny vocal rhythm, and connects with whomever he’s playing a scene with.   There’s something spiritually beautiful about Anton, which Garfield communicates whether or not he’s in costume and make-up for the show.   Watching her here, I realised that, having seen only her doll-head and shoulders in Rage, I’d wrongly supposed that Lily Cole was the height of a doll too:  she turns out to be pretty tall.  As Valentina, Cole has a look but you’re wondering by the end if there’s much more than a look to her.  The real dwarf in the cast is Verne Troyer, as the loyal, sharp-tongued assistant Percy.  Troyer has emotional range, although it was he more than anyone whose words I struggled to decipher.   In the smaller parts, Maggie Steed stands out.  Her tendency to overdo things works well for Steed here – she’s rather winning as an overexcited posh woman (the ‘Louis Vuitton woman’, as the credits describe her) who goes behind the mirror.

27 October 2009