The actor Terry Gilliam called magnificent: “All the heads of Mount Rushmore rolled into one”
What’s there to say about Heath Ledger that hasn’t been said before? He won Oscars, the love of moviegoers everywhere, not to mention unanimous praise from his colleagues, and died before he had the opportunity to tarnish his legacy. We all know him from The Dark Knight, obviously. You may have also seen Brokeback Mountain (at least the Academy did) or 10 Things I Hate About You, a tongue-in-cheek reimagining of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew as a teen comedy.
Well, Terry Gilliam still had something to say. He directed Ledger in his final role with 2009’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards for art direction and costume design but did not win the one for the clothes. It’s an awful shame that Heath Ledger could fill out a jacket.
If you remember the movie, it had Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law improvising the scenes that Ledger couldn’t complete before his death. Depp felt conflicted about standing in his old friend’s shoes, but it was a Terry Gilliam film about a psychedelic carnival, so switching between actors fit the general tone of the thing. It didn’t make sense in the first place and wasn’t supposed to. In so many ways, art directors have it easy.
For his part, Gilliam only had kind words to say about Ledger. He recalled, “Oh, he’s magnificent. He’s all the heads of Mount Rushmore rolled into one. He gives dignity to even the silliest of situations. Parnassus’s show is so shabby, so squalid, and yet there’s this genuine, beautiful graveness at the centre.” And that’s the general flavour of his movies: squalid and beautiful.
He added, “And I like the contrast between him and Verne Troyer, who plays his assistant like he’s Jiminy Cricket. It’s as important a double-act to the film, I think, as his relationship with Tom Waits,” referring to Tom Waits’ role as Mr Nick, a character who’s meant to be the devil. He’s never called so much in name, but he’s just clearly the devil.
If you’ve ever watched a Terry Gilliam joint, you know that he could recast any role on a whim and still thematise the movie with some coherency. They don’t make sense, and they’re not supposed to. This is where critics use overwrought cliches like “dreamlike” and “hypnotic”.
But Heath Ledger’s performance in Doctor Parnassus is an interesting one. Due to his passing, the movie is reworked into a story of a man with many faces. Someone who was impossible to pin to a frame like a work of taxidermy, who made a deal with Tom Waits (the devil) to go on just a little longer past his prime. He still didn’t make it. Spoilers abound, but at the end of the movie, Parnassus is living in destitution, and all the phantasmagorical fancy of his carnival is hushed. It’s more than Heath Ledger got.
