The Wake

Tom Waits fans rejoice; Heath Ledger fans pay your respects. Both, for sure, should head to the theater to see director Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Yes, it is rated PG-13, but here Gilliam has successfully created a reflective, mature, and narratively sophisticated movie that didn’t need to tone itself down to garner the box office boosting rating from the MPAA. It is only showing at the Lagoon Theatre in Uptown, and you had better get there quickly because it probably will not run much longer—and it’s surely a film best seen on the big screen: the standout aspect of the film is its visual appeal. This is an imaginarium we are buying into, after all. The actual imaginarium is quite beautifully imagined and depicted, and The Imaginarium is worth seeing for these creative and, yes, imaginative special effects alone. Or you could go see Avatar for the second (or third) time, but in that world will be felt a staggering lack of Tom Waits.

Finally, somebody cast Tom Waits as the Devil. As in Lucifer, the son of perdition, the tempter. Here, he is called Mr. Nick, a No. 2-mustachioed, top-hatted, cigarette smoking villain. Waits’ lines take on the distinct, timeless quality of a man not of this world, and his performance drives the comedic playfulness of the film, providing it with its most memorable dialogue. He plagues the life of the powerful Dr. Parnassus, a former mage/monk turned alcoholic mobile sideshow street attraction proprietor and performer. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) is tragically flawed: he likes to gamble, and his usual opponent accepts nothing but the juiciest of stakes. The great doctor’s past catches up with him and he and his sideshow crew, with the dubious aid of Heath Ledger and company, must out-magic the Devil while dealing with their own stressed relationships and dreams of life beyond the imaginarium circuit.

The film, due to the untimely death of the talented Heath Ledger, had to undergo plot alterations which at times convolute an already fantastical story. As a Gilliam film it was never going to be easy to follow or entirely preoccupied with plot resolution and clarity, but the extra layer added by a character whose face repeatedly changes—for the other characters as well as for the audience—cannot be said to be smooth, but despite the fact that it is clearly unplanned, this does not detract from the narrative too strongly, and the situation lends to the film the chance for Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law to play short parts, paying tribute as fill-ins for Ledger in the scenes he left unfinished.

It is not a movie for everyone, but for every Terry Gilliam, Heath Ledger, Tom Waits, or anything-but-the-same-crap-movie fan, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus should be a treat.