Sympathy For The Hanged Man
I was expecting The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus to be a beautiful wreck—the kind of film you watch out of curiosity after the actor dies before filming finishes. Heath Ledger was in the middle of it when he overdosed, and Gilliam somehow convinced Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law to rotate in and out to complete the role. By all logic it should have fallen apart. Instead, Gilliam made a film where reality shifts between actors in dream sequences, and it feels less like damage control than like the actual shape of the thing.
The movie is set in a traveling carnival with a magical mirror and a ringmaster who’s been alive for centuries. It’s baroque Gilliam—visually impossible, operating on dream logic rather than narrative sense. Christopher Plummer as the doctor, Verne Troyer, Lily Cole—the cast seems to understand they’re in something that requires commitment to strangeness rather than verisimilitude. Every shift between Ledger and the others somehow serves the film instead of undermining it.
I came out of it unsettled in the specific way Gilliam’s work unsettles you. You haven’t watched a standard movie. You’ve been inside something dreamlike, visually impossible, resistant to easy interpretation. It stays with you.
The strange thing is how okay with it I was. Not okay like it’s fine, but okay like this is one of those films that actually connected. I’ve probably spent my annual allotment of being moved by cinema on this one movie, which means I’m officially free to hate everything else for the next year. Except maybe whatever Gilliam does next.