An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
The show has suddenly become quite wonderful, and the galvanising factor is the terrific stage debut of Melanie C
Blood Brothers
Music
The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
Muse
I was smitten by both Gilberts enormous luxuriant moustache and the intelligence and nuance of this highly entertaining play
I totally recommend Babbo to anyone who is looking for really good and traditional Italian food
Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Andrew O'Hagan's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Terry Gilliam.
Cast: Andrew Garfield, Tom Waits, Christopher Plummer, Colin Farrell, Heath Ledger, Jude Law, Verne Troyer, Lily Cole, Johnny Depp
Description: Immortal soothsayer Doctor Parnassus bargained with the Devil many centuries ago and now Old Nick has come to collect the soul of the old man's teenage daughter, Valentina. She is an assistant on a travelling circus fronted by Parnassus which also features assistants Anton and Percy. To keep the Devil at bay, Parnassus must win the souls of five strangers by inviting them through his magic mirror.
Country: FR/CAN/UK. 2009. 122mins
Model performance: Lily Cole plays the daughter of Dr Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) with big-eyed charm
Final film: Doctor Parnassus was Heath Ledger's last movie
I wonder if I am alone in thinking Terry Gilliam has a Dickensian mind. It will seem unlikely if you think of Dickens as the arch realist. If you think of him as the great imagineer, a Victorian fantasist, a master of comic extravagance, then he and Gilliam might well be neighbours.
Gilliam is an end-of-the-pier conjuror, a very English sort of magician, whose films show pluck, jollity, darkness and a great fertility of invention. But are they ever coherent?
After Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Münchausen, this is Gilliam’s third collaboration with the writer Charles McKeown. Set in the present day, it seeks to tell the story of Dr Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), the head of a travelling theatre troupe that includes the young actor Anton (Andrew Garfield), a tetchy short person called Percy (Verne Troyer) and Parnassus’s daughter, Valentina (played with captivating big-eyed charm by model Lily Cole).
Parnassus has a wild ability to transform everyday banality, usually by harnessing the dreams of his audience members, and by sending them through a magic mirror into a world of colourful madness.
Gilliam is good at madness — he’s a Python, after all — and the encounters on the other side would make the writings of Lewis Carroll seem like an episode of EastEnders. The drunks and strays who pass through the mirror generally end up sliding down rainbows and being blown over exotic deserts that resemble landscapes in Salvador Dalí. The Doctor has the ability to guide imaginations but who is guiding his?
A bad gambling habit put Doctor Parnassus into the debt of the Devil, Mr Nick (Tom Waits). In exchange for immortality, the Doctor would have to surrender his daughter on her 16th birthday. Valentina will be 16 very soon. Everything slides into a quagmire of unreason from then, which is the way it is with Terry Gilliam: surrealism takes over to plaster the cracks of a rather dodgy story.
Much of the talk surrounding the film will focus on the fact that it was Heath Ledger’s final and uncompleted film. He plays Tony, an outsider who joins the troupe and causes Valentina to fall in love with him. When Ledger died during production, Gilliam, always inventive, got Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell to share the part between them and the picture got finished.
Actually, the multiple-Tony is one of the best things in this almost insanely patchy film. They bring joy and camaraderie to the proceedings, and you feel the effort of the three replacements will stand as a fitting tribute to Ledger’s talent.
The film is visually thrilling and there are times when the mixture of characters feels like it is working. Andrew Garfield, in particular, continues to provide powerful evidence that he is the best and most thoughtful young actor in Britain. The Dickensian part of Gilliam’s mind is able to see urban landscape as being dramatic and connected to strange moods, and he manages very well to render the troupe as exaggerated players in the carnival of everyday life. Each has the stamp of individuality — another Dickens trick — while seeming part of an urban stew.
Yet overall, you feel the makers of this movie are lost in their material, confused by the richness of what they have imagined, and unable to shape it. The people who blow into the narrative often seem wildly amateur, as if disconnected from the film in which they are appearing. The first 10 minutes almost derails the film completely, when drunken louts, played poorly and unconvincingly, storm Doctor Parnassus’s stage. The balance between the real and imagined spaces is dodgy from the start and with the best of intentions, and quality performances, it never truly recovers.
There would be no point in calling for minimalism with Terry Gilliam: it would be like asking Dalí to tone down his imagination. But as a film-maker Gilliam shares the surrealists’ eternal problem: idea-management. He has so many ideas and so many of them must seem so pleasingly bananas that reeling them in might feel like a compromise.
But that is what producers and editors are for.
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Audiences will love the flights of fancy in this film but they will quickly lose sight of the plot those flights are meant to be serving. The Devil becomes a growling mishap in the shape of Tom Waits, but you find you don’t care about his relationship with Doctor Parnassus. Where the film should ride on a feeling of high jeopardy, it just pootles confusingly along from one extravagant set-up to the next.
Some directors can think beautifully, they just can’t manage their thoughts. In Gilliam’s case, we got to see the problem in slow motion with the documentary about his failed attempt to make his “dream” film, Don Quixote. The production was dogged with problems and closed down after a week. You can’t blame Gilliam for bad luck or for financiers’ bad faith, but with Quixote, as with all his films, he hadn’t solved the puzzles in the writing before shooting. He’s the sort of film-maker who often has problems, in any case, and sometimes they work to the benefit of the film and sometimes not. He recovered brilliantly, on this picture, from the sad loss of Heath Ledger which is what bumps it up to three stars for me. But no amount of visual pyrotechnics can cover the fact that The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus never quite knows what it is doing, where it is going and why. The pencil hadn’t done its work before the digital geniuses moved in.
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What an atrocious shambles. A terrible incoherent mess. All the actors performed well, it looked gorgeous and the conceit of changing Tony's appearance as he passes through the mirror was a happy outcome forced by Heath Ledger's untimely demise. The plot and composition however make Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me look like an episode of Midsomer murders. I only stayed until the end because I was convinced that it had to get better. It got worse. This film absolutely blows and thank Heavens Ledger will be remembered for Dark Knight. Don Quixote - no chance.
- Squiz, Islington
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