The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

It's a Terry Gilliam movie all right. Dragged howling from the abyss of creative death, as per his idiom. Not since the hounded career of Orson Welles has a filmmaker suffered such an epic of adversity, although I think it can be said that the forces aligned against Welles were hardly as outrageous in their cosmic conspiracy. (See Lost in La Mancha if you know not the full tale.) Yet through and despite some nefarious pact of his own — every Gilliam film is autobiographical — the Maddest Python has birthed alive a squalling ruddy babe. Not the handsomest of his children, nor blessed with any especial felicity, but lucky to draw breath at all, and perhaps, in its weakness, to be more than usually doted upon by its mother.

Within the mutable Imaginarium Gilliam comes closest to recreating the architectural anarchy of the subversive Python cut-outs, and I found myself desperately hoping for tromping feet and angels trumpeting from the buttocks. Oh, were this film an explicitly self-reflexive journey into the mindscape of its maker! Like Stephen King's Dark Tower series. Wouldn't that be brilliant? Instead we visit the narrow imaginations of dullards, for the most part. Nevertheless the mood is dominated by essential Gilliam qualities — heedless incongruity and furious whim — beloved by me and yet confounding to the passerby.