Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

Official movie poster

Step right up, ladies and gentleman to the fantastical, the extraordinary, the unusual Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Come on a journey of wonderment through the looking glass as director Terry Gilliam blurs the line between fantasy and reality.

Everything you could ever imagine exists in this make-believe world—for better or for worse. You could end up drunkenly wading through a see of glass bottles only to free fall through a tangle of neon jellyfish to then stumble into Mr. Nick’s saloon. Or you could find yourself dancing through an exquisite land of high-heel shoes, Faberge eggs and pearls before floating down a lazy river escorted by a handsome gondolier. Either way, once you enter, you can never return the same.

Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) himself is an old soul—an immortal soul to be specific—who travels around from tavern to carnival to home repair shop with his pint-sized, sharp-witted assistant, Percy (Vern Troyer); his beautifully ethereal daughter, Valentina (Lily Cole); and a street-savvy runaway, Anton (Andrew Garfield). But because he is a gambling man with a penchant for making deals with the devil, Parnassus must choose whether to relinquish his daughter on her 16th birthday as he promised or re-up with the devil.

Enter Tony (Heath Ledger), a silver-tongued, charming fellow with eyes for Valentina and a past shrouded in mystery. Ledger delivers his last performance before his untimely death both brilliantly and hauntingly. In the scene when the audience first encounters Tony, he is hanging by his neck off a bridge. But he is not dead, and as one rescued by this odd band of carnival entertainers, Tony’s character mirrors the audiences curiosity and confusion surrounding the Imaginarium. When he first awakens from his deathly sleep, his reaction to his new surroundings parrot the thoughts of the audience: “What is this?” he questions as he looks at the travelling circus that also serves as their home. “Who are you?” he asks of the midget Percy standing before him. “Who am I?” In a comical attempt to regain his memory, he sits outside holding a plucked chicken (at Valentina’s request) and his breath wearing an odd mind-reading hat (at the doctor’s request). In that moment, Tony is the audience, who no doubt find themselves asking “What is this? Who are you? Who am I?”

Despite the oddity of watching the now-deceased actor in his final onscreen appearance, the film, in some small way, serves as a sort of homage to Ledger and his body of work. The difficulty for Gilliam in reshaping the film in Ledger’s absence is no difficulty for the audience to watch. For in the Imaginarium, Tony is viewed in whichever way his traveling companions have imagined him. In his first trip through the mirror, “Imaginarium Tony #1” as the credits bill him, is played by Johnny Depp. The second time, Jude Law takes a turn. And in his final trip to the other side, Tony is played by Colin Farrell. In essence, he is a shape-shifter. And not only physically. Though his brush with death seems to have left him with little memory of who or where he is, pieces start to fall into place–a newspaper clipping here, a whisper from the devil there. And Tony shifts from benevolent to malevolent from one scene to another.

In this world where old is new and right is wrong, nothing is what it appears to be. There are brief allusions to Greek mythology, a nod to Alice in Wonderland and Mary Poppins and plenty of Biblical parallels throughout the film. There is an overarching theme of light versus dark and all of its nuances. Who is truly good and who is truly evil? There are no absolutes, only grey areas.

Additionally, there are hints at the 10 plagues mentioned in the Bible and a charity named from the words of Jesus, “Suffer the Little Children.” Though these are hardly overt and more like a scavenger hunt for those who would recognize such allusions.

But perhaps the most noteworthy Biblical theme is that of immortality. Dr. Parnassus is an old man in a new world, one he never would have guessed could exist. His extensive past is woven through the narrative as he relates pertinent events to Valentina as his way of informing her of her fate. And though the concept of immortality holds a certain allure for most, he inquires of his daughter “Why do people want to be immortal? Immortality is a curse.” But this contrasts sharply with a scene in the Imaginarium in which Tony tells one of the patron’s that she can be immortal as pictures of Princess Diana, Rudolf Valentino and James Dean float by. Perhaps this immortality is more what people crave more than a never-ending life. It is, to be sure, the kind Heath Ledger has secured.