It's unfortunate that Terry Gilliam's newest Faustian dreamscape of a film is best known as "Heath Ledger's last movie," because there's so much else actually within it for people to know it for.
The premise is this: Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) is a former monk who began making wagers with Mr. Nick (Tom Waits), the Devil. By winning these wagers, he managed to extend his life for thousands of years. Flash forward to the present day--Parnassus has a beautiful daughter, Valentina (Lily Cole), and travels through London in a horse-drawn traveling theater with her, his faithful friend Percy (Verne Troyer), and a boy named Anton (Andrew Garfield) whom he'd rescued from the streets as a child. The show they put on is always the same, and one viewer at a time is welcomed to enter their mirror into the imaginarium, in which they are faced with a choice between baser pleasures and higher aspirations (for example, a seedy bar or a twelve-step program). If they choose the former, Mr. Nick wins their soul. If the latter, Parnassus. The show is not very popular.
It turns out that Parnassus has made a wager that gives Valentina's soul to Mr. Nick on her 16th birthday. Knowing Parnassus wants desperately not to have this happen, Mr. Nick offers a bet wherein the first of the two to win five souls will get Valentina. Parnassus agrees. Valentina saves the mysterious, charming Tony (Heath Ledger), who allegedly can't remember his past, and he joins their troupe and agrees to help gather the five souls.
That's pretty much the simplest I can put it, although there's paragraphs and paragraphs more to write. It would be easy to say that the story is as simple as "man makes an ill-advised deal with the devil," but that's really not true. This isn't a film of simple, clean-cut morality. All of its central characters are at times ambiguous or duplicitous, and the eventual outcome is hardly what you'd expect going into the film. I love its story because it's not similar to how people remember Faust, it's similar to how Faust actually is. Mephistopheles is a friend as well as an antagonist, and Dr. Faust is no saint. Plummer's Parnassus is a weak-willed, blubbering drunk as well as a noble, god-like figure. And all of the people Mr. Nick wins seem to end up happy, despite their apparent damnation.
Visually, the film is gorgeous. There's tons of Gilliam's typical stylized decay, as well as the lush, bright fantasy world inside the imaginarium. Its visual effects are obviously artificial, but the characters still seem to physically inhabit them as much as they inhabit the gigantic, dingy wagon that holds the theater.
I bet you're dying to find out what I thought of Heath Ledger and his three all-star stand-ins (Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell). In short, they blend into the narrative beautifully and unobtrusively. There's only one scene where I found myself wishing that Heath Ledger were playing the role when he wasn't. Happily, Ledger has a lot of screen time in the movie, and he does a very good job. It's no Joker performance, but certainly one of the best roles of his short career. The other three do a fantastic job of adopting his mannerisms and voice, and you can clearly imagine that they're just Tony with a different face.
All in all, this movie comes highly recommended. As Adrian commented to me after it ended, "That totally makes up for Avatar."
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