Sympathy for the Hanged Man
Heath Ledger was found dead in his Manhattan apartment on January 22, 2008—an accidental overdose of prescription medications, six months before The Dark Knight opened and turned his Joker into something people will be arguing about for decades. He was twenty-eight. He had been in the middle of filming The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus for Terry Gilliam when it happened, and I remember thinking at the time that the film would either never emerge or arrive as something broken—stitched together from whatever existed and whatever compromises production could arrange around an irreplaceable absence.
I went to see it with Sandra last week. We were prepared for the broken thing.
We weren’t ready for what we actually got.
The film is built around Dr. Parnassus—Christopher Plummer, grandeur and exhaustion in precise proportion—who runs a traveling illusion cabinet, a ramshackle stage show capable of pulling its audience through a mirror into whatever their own imagination generates. It’s a Gilliam film in the fullest sense: chaotic, visually overwhelming, organized around a long-running bargain with the devil and the debts it’s accumulated over centuries. The story pivots when the troupe discovers Tony, a stranger hanging under a bridge, and the complications that follow his addition to their company.
Ledger played Tony for the portion filmed before his death. Gilliam’s solution was to cast Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law to play the character inside the Imaginarium sequences—where the mirror world’s fluid unreality gives the substitutions a logic they wouldn’t otherwise have. It shouldn’t work. It does. Verne Troyer is there as Percy, doing something genuinely strange and watchable. Lily Cole plays Valentina, Parnassus’s daughter, and is distracting in a specific way that made it hard to follow what was happening whenever she was onscreen. There’s a quiet sequence near the end—brief, almost incidental—that functions as a direct acknowledgment of Ledger’s earlier career, specifically A Knight’s Tale, and Sandra looked at me sideways when I went quiet for a moment afterward.
Gilliam made the right film. Not the one that would have existed if Ledger had lived—that movie is permanently inaccessible—but one that earns its own weight, that processes the absence into the fabric rather than apologizing for it. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is one of the few films I can think of where a production disaster became part of the work’s texture rather than a fact you have to bracket off in order to watch it properly.
I’ve apparently spent every positive word I had for the year on a single film. Everything else will disappoint from here. Except possibly Alice in Wonderland. We’ll see.