Elyzabeth Lauryl Nagode Film & Cinema Eric Robert Wilkinson 05/29/2011 Final Film Analysis The Imaginarium

of Doctor Parnassus What a fool I've been to think I could change the world. That I could make it different. Give people hope. What an arrogant idiot. --- Tony Shepherd Given the untimely death of principal, Heath Ledger, that occurred in the middle of shooting The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, perhaps it should come as no surprise that so many reviews focused their attention on the relative merits of how director Terry Gilliam chose to deal with the actor's absence in order to complete the film for release in 2010. In doing so, however, Gilliam's vision has gone largely unrecognized for its epic, and highly ambitious scale as a remarkably effective piece of visual story-telling that subtly, provocatively, and often very cleverly addresses a number of those themes fundamental to the vitality of the Christian faith itself. Gilliam's narrative appears to be based on an idiosyncratic interweaving of traditional Judeo-Christian archetypes with the cyclical concepts found in more Eastern systems of belief like Hinduism and Buddhism. The universe is sustained by the constant telling of an eternal story in a secluded monastery somewhere lost in the mountains and time itself. There is God in the form of Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), the one-time head of the monastery who was granted immortality after winning a bet with Mister Nick the Devil (Tom Waits) that he could get twelve disciples faster with his philosophy (the power of imagination to

transform and illuminate our lives) than Nick could with his (the necessities of danger, fear, and the fabled bliss of ignorance). Through the centuries that ensue, theirs remains a relationship between two men who like a good bet, and for whom no ante appears too great. The story begins, in fact, with Nick preparing to collect his most recent win: Parnassus's own daughter, Valentina (Lily Cole), hastily promised years earlier in exchange for a short-lived chance at youth and love. Parnassus is plying his trade as a side-show mystic on the streets of modern-day London from an antiquated, commedia dell arte stage that doubles as the horse-drawn, gypsy caravan home he shares with his daughter and two assistants, Anton (Andrew Garfield) and Percy (Verne Troyer). For five quid, he offers the curious a chance to walk through his magic mirror, and live in the heaven of their own imagination for a few brief moments. But, business in the post-modern industrial age of reason is slow, and, facing the loss of his daughter, Parnassus is quickly losing interest in the game. Enter Mister Nick: first to remind Parnassus of his debt; then to place in his path, for rescue, a mysterious hanged man (Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell) who symbolizes Christ-like sacrifice and renewal in the tarot; and, lastly, to offer the old man a chance to win his daughter's freedom by being the first to collect five souls in the twenty-four hours that remain before his debt is due. The manner in which Parnassus wins, or is actually given the chance, by Nick, to win this bet, reveals the diversity of things for which humanity yearns in its search for happiness. But it is in the character of the mysterious hanged man that

Gilliam raises the most profound questions about Christian doctrine. His very name, Tony Shepherd, makes direct reference to the numerous times Christ is characterized in the Bible as having been sent to serve in that role to mankind. With a powerful gift for persuasive verbal rhetoric, he convinces Parnassus to modernize the sideshow and play in places people would never expect to generate more interest, larger audiences, and greater income. He barkers the new production himself, proclaiming it's a good day to be reborn, and promising that those chosen to experience the delights that awaited them inside the mirror would emerge purified. He is physically transformed, as the guide in each of those experiences, into an embodiment of perfect love. Escaping from the past into his own imagination, however, that love turns out to be reserved largely for himself and his own glorification regardless of the pain, suffering, and loss it brings to those who so innocently believe in his claims of righteous selflessness. The duplicitous effect of this particular cult of personality, it turns out, creates enormous problems for Mister Nick who gives Parnassus one last chance to save Valentina's life by removing Shepherd from the game altogether - a decision Parnassus ultimately gets Shepherd to make of his own free will with the help of a cheap, sleight-of-hand parlor trick. Nick relinquishes his claim to Valentina, releasing her to live a life of her own choosing that, sadly for Parnassus, includes having nothing further to do with him at all. But, assured of her happiness, and with nothing else to do, he sets up shop on a street corner with Percy and to once again hawk his philosophy of the imagination to the crowd. Gilliam's take on Christian eschatology is, at once, both lovingly reverent and bitingly cynical. He handles set, costumes, lighting, sound, and character with a

tender nostalgia for the elegance and ritual of the past, while turning that same past, as understood in the Judeo-Christian tradition, completely on its head. He gives us a God made miserably immortal and divine by the power of Satan, whose interaction with the world at large takes place in the form of an anachronistic, highly-suspect carnival sideshow, and whose personal life is in shambles. His is a God near-destitute, who drinks to excess, has a weakness for gambling, is superstitious, and not above the use of a little deception when it suits his purposes. His Christ is not the Son sent by God to redeem mankind from sin, but a man rescued by God, and torn constantly between choosing to use his gifts for the betterment of humanity and achieving his own selfish gain, whose death is less the penultimate sacrifice depicted in the New Testament than a simple mistake of gullible human pride. Their story plays out in quiet desperation, relatively hidden behind the scenes, on the margins of society, rather than on the well-lit and grand stage of universal significance in which it is traditionally set, and it is a story, that Gilliam makes clear, no one really even wants to hear anymore. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus bears the same mark of Gilliam's ineffable story-telling style as Time Bandits (1981), The Adventures of Baron Von Munchausen (1988), and The Brothers Grimm (2005). It is a darkly whimsical fantasy drenched in stunning visuals whose complex narrative score of metaphor, symbolism, allegory, double entendre, paradox, and humor hints suggestively at its deeper levels of meaning. In that context, perhaps no line in the film more directly captures Gilliam's own understanding of the fundamental problem with contemporary Christian eschatology than the one spoken by Percy when he says of Parnassus that he doesn't want to rule the world; he wants the world to rule

itself. It is an idea that is, at once, both insightful and provocative, but one that, like Parnassus's stories themselves, was apparently of far less interest to today's public than how the film dealt with the death of one of its celebrity principals which, I suppose, in retrospect, ultimately served to make Gilliam's point about the relative importance of such ideas to the world in which we live afterall.