This is a new weekly review each Tuesday where I pick a film coming out on DVD that I haven’t reviewed before and highlight it.  This week that pick is Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) is a man who’s been alive for centuries playing with Mr. Nick (Tom Waits), the corporeal form of The Devil, at games for souls.  Parnassus is worried because he’s in the next three days going to have to make good on one of his deals with the devil and turn over his daughter, Valentina (Lily Cole), on her sixteenth birthday.  However, Mr. Nick comes by and decides to give Parnassus a second chance to win his daughter’s freedom with one last bet for a race to five souls before her birthday.  Along with a new recruit, Tony (Heath Ledger), the Doctor takes this opportunity to try and win this final wager.

I’ve never been the biggest fan of Terry Gilliam.  Yes I see where he’s a genius and he gets a pass in my book anytime I don’t like it just because he directed a Monty Python film, but sometimes he gets way too enthralled with how weird visually and narratively he can make a film rather than actually getting the story across.  However, in the case of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus it seems that he was able to ground his own imagination in the real world in a way that I actually enjoyed a lot.

Heath Ledger’s performance was so enjoyable I can’t even begin to express how happy I am that his final film didn’t end up sucking.  I was even happier to see how much of the film he was actually in.  After the news of his death over two years ago, knowing he was working on this film at the time, I was very worried as to the status of the production.  Then it was announced that Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell would be filling in the gaps for Ledger’s character.  To say that I was worried at first as how this would work into the story would be putting it mildly.  However, Gilliam found a way to utilize what he had already shot with Ledger in a way to make the story work so well that I have to applaud him.  I’m actually very curious as to how different the end product is from his original script, especially in regards to the ending, because the film feels so well crafted that unless you were following the news at the time you wouldn’t even think that anything major went wrong during the production of the film.

Where the movie tries to be most ambitious is in the actual imaginations of our characters.  When we see inside the mirror, or The Imaginarium, we get to see exactly what people truly desire.  Some may see Tony’s transformations inside in the mirror as layers of the character but I see more like how it’s shown in other films (like The Matrix).  These are projections of himself, sometimes created by those who control the fantasy and sometimes controlled by himself.  The most introspective version of himself is definitely my favourite, it’s when you see Jude Law and we’re seeing Tony’s true fantasy.  It’s a dream of most men that we all at time eventually forget or give up on and move on to the real world.

In the end this is a fantasy movie made for one and all to see.  When you’re done you may want to go buy a huge box of crayons and some massive paper and go to town on making your own fantasy that Gilliam can put on screen for you to see.

VERDICT: DON’T BE STINGY GET IT ON BLU-RAY NOW

IMDB says 7.2/10

Rotten Tomatoes says 65%

I say: 9.0/10