The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus

Starring Christopher Plummer, Heath Ledger. Directed by Terry Gilliam. PG.

Welcome to the latest addition to the movie imaginarium of Terry Gilliam, for whom the screen is a magical mirror through which moviegoers can enter fanciful and phantasmagorical worlds.

His movies – Brazil, Time Bandits, Jabberwocky, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King, 12 Monkeys, The Brothers Grimm and Monty Python and the Holy Grail – are strange and surreal, crazy and chaotic, bizarre and baffling, but mostly soaring flights of fantasy.

Too often, however, Gilliam's storytelling ability doesn't match his visual panache and creative daring. But none of his movies is forgettable; rather, they are cinematic eccentrics with psychedelic personalities and a paradoxical sense that whatever sanity they have is steeped in madness.

Dr Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) is a Faustian figure who makes deals with a Mephistophelian character named Mr Nick (Tom Waits) – for immortality and to win young love, but in exchange giving Mr Nick the soul of any child who reaches age 16.

When we meet Dr P, he has a daughter named Valentina (Lily Cole), just a few days short of her 16th birthday, who has been helping him – along with assistant Anton (Andrew Garfield) and midget Percy (Verne Troyer) – with the travelling show he operates from a ramshackle wagon in today's London. It features a stage which has an obviously fake mirror but through which people can pass, like Alice's rabbit hole, into wonderlands of their own imaginations.

To save Valentina, Dr P makes a wager with Mr Nick, and success for Dr P could well depend on a mysterious young man named Tony (Heath Ledger), who was saved when found hanging under a London bridge and subsequently joined the show.

The problem Gilliam suddenly faced halfway through the film's production was Ledger's death, but Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell stepped in to cleverly play Tony in Wonderland – where, as Gilliam sets up early in the film, a person's face can change.

While the movie will be partly remembered as Ledger's last, his performance is merely adequate – not through any fault on his part but because this is not an actor's movie (only Plummer has a few chances to dig deep). But whether intentionally or coincidentally, it has one fantasy sequence indirectly reminding us of Ledger's passing: a woman is given the chance to gain the kind of immortality the likes of Rudolph Valentino, James Dean and Princess Diana (and now Ledger) have – dying young and thus never growing old.

The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus ranks neither best nor worst among Gilliam's films, but vibrates between the two extremes. Its dreamscape sequences entrance and entertain; by comparison, the morality tale with Dr P back in the real world becomes a rambling shambles whose meaning is obscure, except for "Don't make deals with the Devil".

At times, Gilliam also offers reminders of his Monty Python artistry, especially a skit featuring policemen in a Join the Fuzz song that could be a companion piece to Python's singing waiters with naked backsides, or gay lumberjacks.

The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus is not a mainstream movie but one for fans of the kind of oddball film-maker the cinema needs – one in whom imagination, and the more wildly whimsical the better, thrives and inspires.

- © Fairfax NZ News