The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus
122 minutes,
France/Canada/UK (2009), 12A
Average user rating 
(3.9 / 42 votes)
(3.9 / 42 votes)
A small rag-tag band of itinerant performers travel the country with Doctor Parnassus and his Imaginarium - a walk-through mirror where anything you can imagine can come true. But Mr Nick is hot on their tail and he's come to claim the soul of the beautiful 16-year-old Valentina. Johnny Depp, the late Heath Ledger and Tom Waits star in Terry Gilliam's fantasy
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The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus Review
A small rag-tag band of itinerant performers travel the country with Doctor Parnassus and his Imaginarium - a walk-through mirror where anything you can imagine can come true. But Mr Nick is hot on their tail and he's come to claim the soul of the beautiful 16-year-old Valentina. Johnny Depp, the late Heath Ledger and Tom Waits star in Terry Gilliam's fantasy
It would take powers stranger and more awesome than even than those of Heathrow Terminal 5's staff on opening weekend to lose the baggage accompanying Terry Gilliam's latest fantastical film, The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus. The picture itself doesn't even begin to try: dedicated to the memory of actor Heath Ledger and producer William Vince, both of whom died in 2008, this is black border cinema.
The set-up is the stuff of fairytale, dumped unceremoniously in grimy contemporary London. Dr Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) is a man with a magic mirror which provides a gate into a realm of imagination and fantasy. He travels in an old time fairground wagon containing the mirror and his small band of followers: his daughter Valentina (Lily Cole), her would-be boyfriend Anton (Andrew Garfield) and truculent small person Percy (Verne Troyer).
In hot pursuit is the film's most engaging character, Mr Nick, a part not so much played as intensely relished by Tom Waits. In film, much like music, the devil gets all the best parts. This bowler-hatted Beelzebub and his sleazy pencil moustache have come to claim the fruit of a wager made by Parnassus that means the lovely Valentina is soon to become Mrs Nick, thus providing the film's main narrative spur. Incidentally, the laws governing soul ownership are surely due an overhaul; it's a grotesque anachronism in the legal system that a boozy dad can gamble away his daughter's soul without her knowledge or consent.
Said cavalier attitude and an ongoing self-pitying tendency mean that Dr Parnassus is not a desperately sympathetic character, despite his alignment with the forces of imagination and old-fashioned story craft. A King Lear figure once proud and powerful, by the time we meet the good doctor, he's dwindled into a poor old man, as full of grief as age, and wretched in both, but as bloody minded as ever. Like Lear, he sees himself as more sinned against than sinning, but it doesn't really wash, and so Gilliam must conjure a more definite sinner as a foil. Enter Heath Ledger.
The set-up is the stuff of fairytale, dumped unceremoniously in grimy contemporary London. Dr Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) is a man with a magic mirror which provides a gate into a realm of imagination and fantasy. He travels in an old time fairground wagon containing the mirror and his small band of followers: his daughter Valentina (Lily Cole), her would-be boyfriend Anton (Andrew Garfield) and truculent small person Percy (Verne Troyer).
In hot pursuit is the film's most engaging character, Mr Nick, a part not so much played as intensely relished by Tom Waits. In film, much like music, the devil gets all the best parts. This bowler-hatted Beelzebub and his sleazy pencil moustache have come to claim the fruit of a wager made by Parnassus that means the lovely Valentina is soon to become Mrs Nick, thus providing the film's main narrative spur. Incidentally, the laws governing soul ownership are surely due an overhaul; it's a grotesque anachronism in the legal system that a boozy dad can gamble away his daughter's soul without her knowledge or consent.
Said cavalier attitude and an ongoing self-pitying tendency mean that Dr Parnassus is not a desperately sympathetic character, despite his alignment with the forces of imagination and old-fashioned story craft. A King Lear figure once proud and powerful, by the time we meet the good doctor, he's dwindled into a poor old man, as full of grief as age, and wretched in both, but as bloody minded as ever. Like Lear, he sees himself as more sinned against than sinning, but it doesn't really wash, and so Gilliam must conjure a more definite sinner as a foil. Enter Heath Ledger.
"A eulogy, a polemic, an intriguing mess"
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