The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus
Director: Terry Gilliam
Pontypool
Director: Bruce McDonald
Considering the dramas that bedevilled its production off-set – the sudden death of leading man Heath Ledger – Terry Gilliam’s typically overstuffed fantasy-extravaganza The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, while far from the director’s best work, is also by no means the disaster many had predicted.
Although it runs out of steam some way before the end, there’s much to like about this loopily episodic fable about Dr Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), a 1,000-year-old mystic who arrives in modern-day London – he lodges amid the spectacular industrial ruins of Battersea Power Station – with a horse-drawn, portable mini-theatre that possesses magical powers. Those who pass through a flimsy-looking stage-mirror find themselves transported to the weird universes of their own wildest imaginings. These shenanigans are somehow connected with a bargain struck between Parnassus and the Devil, Mr Nick (Tom Waits, having fun in bowler-hat and 1920s-St-Louis-dandy garb) – a Mephistophelean deal involving Parnassus’ teenage daughter (Lily Cole) that is drawing imminently close to pay-up time.
The emergency casting strategy implemented to mask Ledger’s absence from the shoot – whereby his amnesiac character, a possibly nefarious charity-organiser named Tony, is played in various alternate-reality sequences by Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell – works sufficiently smoothly that you’d be forgiven for presuming it was always the plan. And whereas Ledger’s accent wanders waywardly from “Cockerneeland” to Australia and back (his demise preventing the industry’s now-standard post-synching of dialogue), the stand-ins keep much tighter diction control. Depp’s cameo in particular is a deftly disarming delight – so much so that it’s a bit of a shame he only gets a few minutes of screen time. And while the picture falls apart during the longer Farrell interlude towards the end, that’s a failing of the script rather than the actor.
Among numerous diverting details, one particularly pleasant surprise is the contribution of model-turned-actress Cole, whose winsomely pre-Raphaelite looks belie her spirited, invaluable dynamism – crucial in what’s too often a flabby, unstructured rodomontade. The nebulous nature of the whole millennium-hopping Faustian-pact premise means it’s frequently hard to work out what’s going or why. And it’s regrettable that while the film harps on about the importance of imagination and free-thinking, it does so while recycling countless fantasy-picture ideas and tropes dating back at least as far as Jack Clayton’s Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) and even George Pal’s 7 Faces of Dr Lao (1964).
Indeed, many aspects are naggingly over-familiar from previous Gilliam enterprises from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) to his previous Ledger collaboration, the similarly wayward The Brothers Grimm (2005). In the present decade, Tarsem Singh’s The Fall (2006) and Dave McKean’s MirrorMask (2004) exuded more genuine originality and more nimbly transcended their budgetary limitations. That said, neither of those films managed to find much of an audience, lacking the tragic circumstances that threatened to derail this particular enterprise but also (a slight silverish lining to a pitch-black cloud) ensured it enormous inadvertent publicity.
Sneaking into a much smaller number of cinemas than – and with only a fraction of the hoopla accorded to – Parnassus, is a movie rather more deserving of your cash. From Christopher Plummer’s homeland of Canada comes Pontypool, an admirably inventive low-budget horror comedy from director Bruce McDonald.
McDonald’s previous features made little splash beyond the film-festival circuit, and his CV is chock-full of small-screen work. Now 50, he’s unlikely to eclipse David Cronenberg among Canadian auteurs – but with the ‘”King of Venereal” Horror’ increasingly concentrating on more mainstream projects, such as Eastern Promises, there’s a gap in the market for offbeat and gruesome chillers from the frozen north.
Based on a sophisticated script by Tony Burgess, who has adapted his 1998 novel Pontypool Changes Everything, the showcases an irresistible turn from veteran Nova Scotian thespian Stephen McHattie. A craggy-faced supporting-player in Hollywood fare such as Watchmen, McHattie was memorable as the older gangster in A History of Violence.
Here, granted a rare leading role – half the movie consists of close-ups of life-worn features under a snazzy cowboy hat – he rips into his lines with barnstorming gusto.
This fits his character perfectly: Grant Mazzy is a larger-than-life, eloquently erudite (he quotes Roland Barthes – on air) former big-city DJ now broadcasting – from a station in a former church – a breakfast show to the folks of Pontypool, a real-life town “100 kilometres from Toronto”.
The setup nods to John Carpenter’s masterpiece The Fog (1980), but whereas Carpenter intercut his DJ sequences with action-scenes unfolding in the surrounding area, McDonald prefers the cost-cutting approach of keeping his cameras almost entirely within the station walls. Pontypool might actually function best as a War of the Worlds-type radio play and an edited version of the soundtrack has been broadcast in Canada.
As well as mining some rich, deadpan-droll humour from the mechanics of live radio – the interplay between presenter, producers, technicians and guests – this claustrophobic, verbal-centric method leaves the viewer to imagine (in a throwback to previous genre classics of cinema and literature) the horrors that are engulfing the hapless townspeople, as relayed to Mazzy by his team of roving reporters.
Discovering the exact nature of these horrors, and experiencing the gradually escalating nature of the cataclysm, is part of the fun. The infection is spread by a manner so weird and unusual it doesn’t really matter that it doesn’t quite make convincingly plausible sense. Suffice to say that McDonald and Burgess manage to find new angles on the clapped-out zombie sub-genre, while also endorsing the title of a well-known 1986 Laurie Anderson track. It’s all very amusing midnight-movie fun, although the score is somewhat over-emphatic and, as sometimes happened with early Cronenberg, things do fall apart in the final act.
Neil Young
