 "Photo: Molly Raskin")
It’s that time of year again when the holiday blockbusters are still lingering around the January box office, the Oscar-hopefuls have come and gone and a palpable sense of mediocrity has settled down at the local mega-plex. You don’t even need to consult Moviefone for evidence, just ride the el and take note of the plethora of absurd billboards. We’ve got angels with Uzis, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as the Tooth Fairy (the role he was born to play) and the return of Mel Gibson in Edge of Darkness, a movie that seems almost desperate to hit every possible bad-cop cliché.
Given this insipid cinematic environment, it initially seemed surprising to me that more people haven’t been turning out to see the much-anticipated posthumous Heath Ledger film The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Originally, I wanted to blame this on the film’s almost nonexistent promotion, but after spending an utterly befuddled hour and a half inside director Terry Gilliam’s Imaginarium I’ve come to realize why this mess, despite its tragic back-story and pitch-perfect casting, has failed to draw even modest indie audiences.
After Imaginarium, I still can’t help but think of The Dark Knight as Ledger’s last film (the last film that he completed, an important distinction), which makes this mess some kind of eerie, absurd time capsule for Ledger nostalgists. The film’s musings on death and spiritual choice are heavy-handed and lost among ridiculous, incoherent conceits. I know what you’re thinking: “Who is this joker to criticize The Joker’s last film, especially after Ledger won the second-ever posthumous Oscar?” It is, after all, incredible that this ever came out at all, exactly two years after its star and partial financer died of a prescription overdose midway through production. Yet, whoever does go to see this carnival-esque film will undoubtedly do so for the same reason past audiences came to see sideshows: morbid curiosity. Even in absentia, Ledger’s performance remains one of the more redeemable factors in a film that tries so vainly for profundity that it almost makes the audience wince. It takes a director like Gilliam to squander such potential. It would be wrong to hang any fault on the actors, many of whom are clearly trying their best with such haphazard material. The fault here lies entirely with the director, leading me to conclude what many people have known since the earlier Gilliam/Ledger collaboration, 2005’s The Brothers Grimm, that Terry Gilliam is really, really losing it.
The only time Gilliam’s Imaginarium seemed to elicit a palpable audience reaction was the collective discomfort felt when Ledger was introduced hanging from a bridge mid-suicide attempt. Unfortunately, little else in this movie is able to conjure up any response other than boredom, due to both a lack of narrative clarity and the inclusion of frequent dead end scenes, as well as a laundry list of other complaints (Verne Troyer, a.k.a. Mini Me, really?). However, the narrative problems presented by Ledger’s death are credibly worked around, one of the benefits of an already nonsensical fantasy film. Ledger’s unfinished scenes were famously replaced by his friends Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Ferrell, with their portions of the proceeds going to Ledger’s daughter, Matilda. These stand-ins, though disconnected and naturally disorienting, each do a passably decent job. Some of the other supporting roles are downright wonderful, especially musician Tom Waits’ appearance as the bowler-cap wearing devil (the role he was born to play, no sarcasm this time). But Imaginarium, in the end, is more about Gilliam’s idiosyncratic and often-alienating aesthetic than Ledgers, or anyone else’s, performance. His persona swallows up the film, and every shot, every little detail, is unapologetically Gilliam, i.e. wacky and unforgivably hard to follow.
Leaning too heavily on tired allegory and visual splendor, Terry Gilliam, the iconic Monty Python animator and renowned director of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, here forgets to explain major plot points. Rookie mistakes. Although I once considered myself a Gilliam fan, especially for Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (still one of the weirdest kids movies of all time), Imaginarium can’t help but feel more than a little contrived, overly absurd and cloyingly self-referential. Dr. Parnassus, a cursed and under-appreciated mystical showman, is likely meant to represent Gilliam himself, a director who once held great promise but now, cursed by failure and misfortune, can’t get anyone to share in his vision. Gilliam’s ambitious failures are even the subject of a documentary, The Man of La Mancha, about The Man who Killed Don Quixote, a project that has since been resurrected and is set to be released in 2011, starring Robert Duvall. It’s hard not to feel for Gilliam as a hardworking artist lost in Hollywood, but after the three strikes of Brother’s Grimm, Tideland and Imaginarium, all I feel toward Gilliam is disappointment. We’ll see if the cinematic Don Quixote hits his windmill next time.
Be the first to comment on this article!