Terry Gilliam, 2009
A centuries-old monk (Christopher Plummer) must enlist the aid of a mysterious stranger (Heath Ledger) in order to collect five souls before his daughter's (Lilly Cole) sixteenth birthday. If he fails, the devil (Tom Waits) will come to claim her.Poor, poor, Terry Gilliam. Every time he tries to make a movie, fate intervenes and tries to stop it by, say, killing one of his lead actors. Parnassus is undoubtedly compromised by Heath Ledger's death and the hoops they had to jump through to get around it, but, as tempting as it may be, we can't really excuse the faults of the film on those grounds. After all, the way in which they integrated Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell into the role is nearly seamless - a triumph of luck and ingenuity. Where Parnassus goes wrong, it does so in unrelated ways. Even if Heath Ledger had finished the movie, it would have been the same basic experience of highs (Everything involving Tom Waits, Parnassus's defeat of Tony and his subsequent surreal journey) and lows (everything involving Verne Troyer, the almost offensively cheap look of the inside of the Imaginarium, and the gratuitously Python-esque musical number). I want to like the movie a lot, especially because Gilliam and Waits have given us what may be the greatest on-screen depiction of the Devil since - well, ever, but the whole thing really just doesn't hang together. It's a particular shame, given Gilliam's gift for imaginative visuals, that nearly everything he devises for the Imaginarium itself is horribly compromised by the awful CGI used to create it. An Imaginarium created with sets and miniatures, even if vastly more modest in scope, would have been much more effective. In fact, the first bit of the Imaginarium that we see, a large indoor forest of cardboard cutout trees, is a perfect example of what I wish we had seen throughout. All in all, it's worth watching for the good stuff, but it's mostly a sad collection of missed opportunities.
6/10
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