Source: ABC Australia
By Martyn Pedler
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus arrives dragging some heavy baggage: Heath Ledger died halfway through filming; Terry Gilliam’s difficulties of late in banging his fantastical imagery into the shape of a story; and the worst title since Troy McClure’s The Contrabulous Fabtraption of Professor Horatio Hufnagel.
Despite all that, it actually works. The beautiful special effects sequences can drag on, but Gilliam’s crafted an intriguing, old-fashioned fairytale framework for them. Doctor Parnassus, immortal leader of a travelling theatre show, is about to lose a contest with Tom Waits’ excellently pencil-moustached devil. Then his enormous-eyed daughter demands they save a stranger found hanging half-dead from a bridge, played, at first, by Ledger.
The surreal dream-logic created inside the ‘imaginarium’ allow all-star replacements to finish the scenes that Ledger, sadly, couldn’t. This works better than it has any right to. Doctor Parnassus might end with more of a whimper than a bang, but after playing the Joker, Ledger’s last film was bound to feel a little anticlimactic.
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Sunday, 1. November 2009
Anticlimactic — hmmmmm, I see his point. While the film itself does have a rather lowkey ending, it’s not so much a whimper for Heath’s career and life, more a gentle and loving farewell embrace.
Sunday, 1. November 2009
“It actually works” — he sounds surprised. And mini, your take sounds intriguing. If anyone deserved “a gentle and loving farewell embrace” it was Heath.