The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

I've been waiting to see this movie for a long time because as an art director, Terry Gilliam is brilliant. His best work is the physical odds and ends that go into the scenes, even though the CGI dream worlds are pretty.

Basic premise: Dr. P gets to live forever at the cost of giving his daughter to the devil when she turns 16. On the cusp of her birthday, he makes another bargain with the devil to try to win her back. First person to win over 5 souls wins. In the Imaginarium, people live out their greatest fantasies. They are all faced with choices, temptations for good and for evil. Whichever they choose determines who gets the soul.

It's a unique idea. There's lots of movies about people who live forever and how they would perceive the world differently. This movie focuses on the idea that if you lived thousands of years, the thing that would wear on you most is having to make choices all the time.

Despite all the chaos surrounding this film with Heath Ledger's death and Terry Gilliam just being so strange, the movie held together fair enough. Visually, stunning. Characters were good. Sometimes the story did veer off to unexpected places. Thematically, it's pretty traditional fairy tale of making a bargain with the devil and trying to save your kid. Through the film, you're trying to figure out who is lying--the devil or the crook, and I'm not entirely satisfied with the over simplified result. I think they could have made Tony a much more complex character and made more twists along the way. But then there's this ending that I don't know how to interpret. You could just take it at face value, but then you look at the puppet and devil symbolism and it suggests something that makes you want to look back at the whole movie to see what's really going on behind the scenes.

It's interesting what they did with Ledger. Since they filmed all the non CGI stuff first, they replaced him in the dream world with three actors--Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Ferrell--depending on who was looking at him. They made this believable by adding a first scene where a guy goes into the imaginarium and his face changes. So by the time Tony goes in and his face changes, it's not out of place.

The humor is subtle but extremely well delivered.

Also, I thought "Wow, the devil sounds a lot like Tom Waits the singer, but I guess that's what you sound like when you smoke too much." But then the credits came up and I was like "Oh. That was Tom Waits."