The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)

3/5 stars

I’m not sure what just happened. This story seems like something Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, and director Terry Gilliam cooked up while baked, wrote down and, the next morning, put verbatim into a movie script. The cast, especially those playing the many faces of the Hanged Man, is incredible. The combination of Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp and Jude Law in one film is what attracted me to the movie. It’s unfortunate that Colin Farrell got the most screen time.

At first, this story seems like Across the Universe (2007) without the pretense of a discernable narrative and twice the drugs. The film teases at an underlying intelligence, perhaps literary references to Dr. Faustus or a clever combination of the Bible and Eastern philosophy. Dr. Parnassus seems to be a man selling the story of Jesus (though that’s not directly stated) with love and the imagination at the center of the universe, but he has a problem: gambling. He can’t resist when the Devil proposes a bet. This escalates into a race for who can gather five souls first; however, what those souls are being converted to is lost between the gondolas and a large Russian mother.