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Heath Ledger and Lily Cole in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus |
Heath Ledger magic casts a spell over the Doc
THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS
Directed by Terry Gilliam
Certificate 12a
THERE has been a hoo-har surrounding the release of this film. With the death of its leading man, Heath Ledger, during its production, there has been an unsavoury amount of ghoulish curiosity about it.
Director Terry Gilliam and his cast have spoken of the awful events that overtook the making of this fantasy trip through rain-washed London streets, and how it affected them. Yet the show had to go on, they said, and I am afraid to say the effect of this is a product that is disjointed to say the least. How it would have fared if Ledger had not passed away is anyone’s guess – yet there is something distinctly rough around the edges with this film, and it suggests that the loss of Ledger was psychologically so upsetting that Gilliam did not eventually achieve what he set out to do.
First, there is a clunking great plot to contend with.
Dr Parnasuss (played by an excellent Christopher Plummer) is an immortal, white-bearded fellow, who heads up a caravan of performers.
They travel around wet and windy bits of Thameside London with their theatre on wheels. Helped by his daughter Valentina (Lily Cole), Anton (Andrew Garfield) and cynical sidekick Percy (Verne Troyer), he offers people the chance to step on stage, and walk through a special mirror where, using a telepathic mindwave, the Doctor allows them to enter a world crafted by their own imagination.
There’s more: we learn he got his immortality through striking a deal with the Devil, which means he has to give up his beautiful Valentina on her rapidly approaching 16th birthday.
Then Ledger’s character Tony appears. They rescue him when he is found hanging by his neck from underneath a bridge. He has lost his memory, and slowly we learn that he is a disgraced head of a children’s charity, with links to Russian gangsters. Got that? OK, there’s till more. The Devil appears to take Valentina, and Dr Parnasuss makes another bet with him to save his daughter’s life, involving the harvesting of five innocent souls for the Devil to take. Then there are a few side-plots, such as the rivalry between Anton and Tony for Valentina’s affections, which only adds to the colossal muddle.
There are some nice touches, but it only makes the extended bad bits feel even worse: you can’t help but feel that Terry would do much better to stick to visual arts which he is utterly compelling at.
He is a visual story teller and, while the film looks good in places, it is wholly undermined by a lack of coherence in the story telling, some odd lines and frankly laughable delivery from Lily Cole. She should become an art historian – she is studying the topic at Cambridge – or stick to being a highly paid model. While she is well cast in terms of her look, her acting is so wooden it detracts from those around her. Andrew Garfield looks particularly uncomfortable in her company. Listening to them natter in the opening scenes reminds of being at a sixth-formers’ party at six in the morning when all the decent booze has been drunk and there are just self-centred bores left to listen to.
As for the use of other actors to take on Ledger’s role – Gilliam roped in Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law to help out – there is so little of them it’s hard to judge. Depp slips in well, and prompts the question whether he should have been cast in the role in the first place, as Ledger’s performance is pretty non-descript. As for Farrell, he has an irritatingly small slot, while Law also has little to do except stride across an imaginary landscape on giant stilts. Essentially all they are asked to do is look handsome, and not much more.
This is no Brazil, or Time Bandits. Instead it is a hotch-potch fantasy, and one feels Batman Begins is a much more memorable tribute to Ledger’s talent.
It’s third time lucky for Gilliam
THE death of the actor Heath Ledger made headlines round the world: now, the long-awaited film he was working on with Highgate-based director and former Monty Python Terry Gilliam is released this week.
It has been well-documented how Gilliam called in three famous friends of the actor – Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law – to help finish his role in his fantasy flick, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. But the director has revealed that as well as losing Heath and his producer Bill Vince (he passed away from cancer while the film was being completed), Gilliam too was nearly killed one evening while in the midst of the shoot.
“It was last autumn and I was hit by a van,” he recalls. “It was in front of one of my favourite restaurants – Vasco and Piero’s in Poland Street, Soho.
“The guy pulled up and was about 15 feet away and I started walking across the street – there are cabs coming, so I hesitate and he was backing in because he had obviously spotted a parking space and I was standing in it and he didn’t see me. And wham! He hit me at speed. And I flew about 10 feet into the air. And it was like ‘oh my back!’ And I broke a vertebra. So I thought, it was third time lucky – they just didn’t get me. They got the star, the producer and they were going for the director and the f*****s failed on the last one.”
He was immobile for some time and a year later still has a physiotherapy regime to adhere to.
The director, who lives in Highgate village, says the film is littered with inspirations he found around Camden. One of them is a famous toy museum off Tottenham Court Road, which he used as the basis for the travelling “Imaginarium” caravan that is home to his characters.
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