Lost in La Mancha (2002), The Imaginaruim of Doctor Parnassus (2009)

Like Orson Wells, Terry Gilliam is a director with a long history of both unfinished and troubled projects, which is why its particularly ironic that both started filming on never finished cinematic adaptions of the story of Don Quixote. Gilliam's version was to have combined that story with elements take out of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court, with Johnny Depp a contemporary advertising man whisked back to Don Quixote's 17th century Spain. The production was plagued with problems, including a budget around half of what it should have been, and the ill timed health problems of the films Quixote, French actor Jean Rochefort. The film had to be scraped in the early weeks of shooting, but a 'making of' documentary crew happened to be on hand to capture the projects implosion. This is interesting, but not as interesting as I was hopping it would be, much of the film is standard pre production stuff, which has worn thin because I've seen so much of that kind of thing, and the doc plays long at just over an hour and half. I'm glad this doc exists, at least Gilliam got something out the experience and I know this film has some devoted fans, but to me it was just kind of so so. Which is a real shame because I waited so long, years, to do my review of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus Because I wanted to review these to films together.

The Imaginaruim of Doctor Parnassus, like Gilliam's earlier Don Quixote project, could have very easily been an unfinished film. The movies star Heath Ledger died around a month into production, but the bazaar nature and structure of the project made it perfectly suited for some unusual recasting. Much of the movie takes place in 'The Imaginaruim', an ethereal realm where dreams can become reality, and where a person may not look the way they do in the outside world. This enabled Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law to all play Ledgers character Tony inside The Imaginarium. Fortunately the 'real world' sequences were largely shot first, so except for the fact that Ledger never returns as Tony at the end of the film, and they find a pretty good method of justifying this within the logic of the film, it's pretty air tight and coherent. Or rather the casting and editing are, the story is intentionally not that coherent, but works well enough as one of Gilliam's oddities. Andrew Garfield, oddly kind of a successor to Ledger, is here in an early role, with Christopher Plummer, Vern Troyer, and the striking but unusual looking English model Lily Cole rounding out the cast. Tom Waits plays the devil.


Lost in La Mancha (2002) **
The Imaginaruim of Doctor Parnassus (2009) **1/2