Mishap in the Imagination Station

I thought I'd take a stab at writing a Michael J. Nelson-esque (if I may flatter myself) film review. Well, it's actually more of a complete, though somewhat inaccurate, recounting of the movie, since it gives away every single plot point, plus the climax. Uh, spoiler alert, I guess. Also, this synopsis may not make a lot of sense if you haven't seen the film in question: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

A paean to the inspirational power of creativity, imagination, and sassy midgets, the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is the story of the titular wandering occultist, portrayed with wizened aplomb by old-as-the-hills Christopher Plummer, and his Leary-esque quest to spread psychedelic awareness to the world. We learn that Plummer, along with the gnomelike Verne Troyer (Warrick Davis was unavailable due to a scheduling conflict), was made immortal millennia earlier after Satan visited their mountain top monastery. Croaky songster Tom Waits appears as Old Gooseberry, who cruelly mocks Parnassus' quaint faith in the power of story-telling to sustain the world's creative energy. The scorned ascetic has his guard bird befoul Waits' immaculate felt bowler, but the potty humour is not enough to deter Beelzebub, as he tricks Parnassus and grants him his misguided wish of eternal life. Cursing his penchant for scatological hijinks, the old monk is doomed to wander creation for eternity, increasingly ignored by a jaded public benumbed by Michael Jackson and the films of Ivan Reitman.

Many years later, the dejected Parnassus is a drooling pisstank loitering in the bleak vicinity of London in a mossy caravan. Now he is accompanied by his moon-faced, nymphet daughter Valentina (Lily Cole), and a young sleight of hand artist named Anton. They squander their youths as unpaid barkers for Parnassus' whiskey-soaked spectacle, attempting to lure passersby into a magic tin foil door. The few hapless individual who blunder inside the Imaginarium enjoy a whimsical, lighthearted neverland where they realize in dazzling technicolour their wildest dreams, the only catch being that Satan seems to invariably capture and condemn their souls to damnation for all time. It's a fresh take on the traditional Christian concept of perdition, and I believe theologians of every stripe will feel the need to consider the concept that each person's eternal soul may in fact rest on the alcohol fueled fever dreams of a pseudo-eastern travelling magician. The terminally pert Valentina, harassed by the fervent attentions of her fellow junior huckster, Anton, longs for a life of domestic mediocrity, but loyally sticks around to perform her duty of parading her pubescent gams for her increasingly unstable father's depressing travelling circus. Valentina is kept in the dark about the fact that, in exchange for dear old dad's immortality, the Arch-Fiend is owed Valentina's soul upon her sixteenth birthday, now mere days away.

The downtrodden band comes upon a hanged but still attractive man as they cross the Thames. Aware that Heath Ledger is even better in death than in life, they use Verne Troyer's fishing rod to retrieve the pendulous hunk in a daring acrobatic operation. He's still alive, it turns out, and although his claims to amnesia seem about as plausible as a Flying Spaghetti Monster, the guillible quartet quickly adopts him, saddling him with uninspired handle 'George'. However, in the first of many confusing identity changes, Parnassus soon uses an ancient phrenological technique to discover that George's true name is Tony, and Tony and Anton set about obnoxiously bickering over the attentions of the underaged Valentina, the conflict exacerbated by their nominal similarities. The Lilliputian Troyer attempts to intimidate Tony with a long-winded moniker that bespeaks Sicilian lineage, then immediately backs down and offers the more concise 'Percy' as an alternate form of address.

The nefarious Waits returns to Plummer three days before Valentina's B-day, and eager for sport, hoarsely proposes a kind of spiritual pissing contest. The first to capture five souls will be the winner, and therefore will have rights to the never-autonomous Valentina.

By this point, the viewer can't help but realize that Christopher Plummer is merely performing a wrinkly modern reimagining of his role as Captain Georg Von Trapp. Saddled once again with a coterie of rancorous youngsters, and harried at every turn by the raspy taunting of the archfiend (= the humorously bumbling Nazis), the booze-soaked Parnassus is tried to the limits of his patience until, in a fit of pique, he flings the diminutive Troyer to one of the muddy patches of gravel which constantly surround the insolvent travellers. Enter Tony as Julie Andrews who uses his infectious enthusiasm to cure the youngsters' grumpiness, leading them in a song about a few of his favourite things: occultism, autoerotic asphyxiation, and sex with minors.

Tony, whose facade of relative wholesomeness is almost cracking by now, is still fairly bursting with cheeky charisma, and modernizes the clunky sideshow by moving it to a shopping mall and dressing Anton as a husky woman. Percy is transformed into a minstrelsy tar baby and ensnares the morbidly curious, well-heeled London shoppers who crowd the stage for the chance to experience the orgasmic acid trip offered by Parnassus, who appears poised to win the metaphysical wager. Things quickly go south when a gang of Russian gangsters appears and, mysteriously eager to rearrange Tony's face, plunge into the Imagination Station after him, sending Parnassus' liquor addled mind into a tailspin.

The rest of the movie mostly takes place against an outlandish backdrop of shifting absurdist fantasies which only confirm for the viewer that you can take the Terry Gilliam out of Monty Python, but you can't take the, etc. Tony transforms into Orlando Bloom, and then into George Clooney, and finally we see him as Cary Grant.

Newly buxom Anton rescues the feckless shapeshifter from the Slavic hoodlums, and Tony repays him by spiriting away the love of his life. Tony performs a statutory rape upon Valentina as their barge rocks sordidly down a river of Kool-Aid, and then things get weird. New shit comes to light. We realize that Tony is some manner of mischievous phantasm who has no concern whatever for the plight of children in reduced circumstances. Parnassus feebly falls down a couple of times. Waits harps away with his wirebrushed vocal cords. Finally, Valentina discovers that her eternal soul is being toyed with, and in a fit of childish pique over the fact that her father would risk consigning her to eternity in Hell she decides to spite him by choosing an eternity in Hell.

But the Prince of Darkness is sorry in the end to see the game finish, so he makes yet another deal with Captain Von Trapp, and together they cheerfully preside over Tony's lynching at the hands of an angry mob of black-tie fundraiser patrons.

So, Valentina is saved from unending malediction, and the film closes with a shot of a grubby, unkempt Parnassus peeping through a plate glass window at Anton and Valentina as they cloyingly dote on their soon-to-be unmanagably self centered child in a hip Soho eatery. The doctor beams down at Percy and resurrects the film's odd anti-joke wherein, in moments of warm commiseration between the immortal odd couple, Parnassus muses winkingly through his ungovernable facial hair, “What would I do without you, Percy?”, to which his bantam companion, with the apparent intention of jocosity, replies, “Get another midget.” Why aren't you laughing?

If the ending, in its portrayal of staid domestic normalness, seems to be a contradiction of everything the film has appeared to previously advocate, then deal with it. Nobody said Terry Gilliam movies were supposed to make sense.