Moving Pictures, Forward and Back

As the Academy Awards season swings into high gear, I thought it might be useful to take a closer look at a couple of releases that give might give us some insight into where the art form is going and where it really shouldn’t – for the sake of the audience and to a lesser extent, the filmmaker’s own good.
Directed by Terry Gilliam, “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” stars Christopher Plummer, Tom Waits and Heath Ledger in his final role. Mr. Gilliam succeeds on almost every level with this film, delivering a complex and nuanced story about an itinerant and immortal magic-show proprietor and his family as they dodge the law and the Doctor wages a centuries-old battle of wits against the Devil (played to the mustache-twirling hilt by Mr. Waits). The plot of this story is relatively simple, although dressed up as it is with wildly rendered fantasy landscapes one gets the impression of not getting the entire picture with only one viewing. Wagering with the Devil doesn’t get you exactly what you expect and even if you win the bet, you’ll still lose is the summary I came away with, although others may see it all differently. It’s a fairy story, a morality play and very old-fashioned in sentiment, even if the techniques used to realize the world of imagination are quite modern. The best thing about “Imaginarium” is that the audience is asked to suspend disbelief entirely and just go with the flow of the story, no matter where that may take you.
As a result, we get to see all sides of each character – vanity, protectiveness, and pride, irredeemable lust for power, duplicity, self-sacrifice, petty anger, and even pure bliss. It’s up to you whether bliss produced by a world made of jewels is better than one made chocolate, and that essential respect for our ability to make up our own minds is where Mr. Gilliam succeeds most powerfully.
The film isn’t entirely even – using three actors to complete the story as a result of Mr. Ledger’s untimely death during filming led to some confusion as to what’s what and who is who – but when the story is so inventive and gently asks so much of the audience in the first place, one can forgive a few wrinkles that never get smoothed out. As for the Oscars, “Imaginarium” garnered two nominations (art direction and costume design) but may not win anything because the film was released in the same year as “Avatar” (which I have not seen and will not comment on). The best chance for Oscar gold may lie with the costume design, which in “Imaginarium” is top-notch and adds subtly to advance the story in each scene, whether the setting is gritty modern England or an absurd chase to a mountaintop. Of course, going up against a film all about clothes and a designer (“Coco Before Chanel”) might make “Imaginarium” a long shot for a statuette. Nonetheless, I would hope this movie gets repeated viewings over the years and becomes something like a “Wizard of Oz” for a new generation. It deserves that kind of adoration and is in my view, just that good.
On the other hand, “The Wolfman,” directed by Joe Johnston (whose best-known credits to date include “The Rocketeer” and “Jumanji”) takes in hand new film technology and an old, old story to create one of the least memorable entries into the venerable canon of lycanthropy lore. Benecio del Toro and Sir Anthony Hopkins team up for this campy, hokey thrill ride full of gratuitous blood-splattering that makes the phrase, “over the top” even more clichéd than the whole production. Although Mr. Johnston stays true to the Universal Studios werewolf tradition in most places, nothing new that was really worth seeing was left in the film. We do learn a little more about why that poor sap Larry Talbot was such a poor sap, but ultimately we’re left in the dark as to why his family was cursed in the first place. Yes, there’s a bit of mumbo-jumbo about finding something not-quite-human in India or somewhere, but the whole thing just doesn’t add up. The only two places this film succeeds are in the visual effects and its pacing which is truly pulse-pounding. Mr. del Toro’s transformation from man to Wolfman is stunning and quite riveting, but this ground was covered by “American Werewolf in London” to much more credible effect. Mind you, that film was released nearly 30 years ago.
“The Wolfman” suffers most from the curse of the remake, where the audience is doomed to see every plot twist coming and the thrills have to come from upping the violence ante at every turn. At any rate, the essential question at the heart of “The Wolfman,” has to do with what separates man from beast and it is a good question. In the end, anyone seeking the answer in a movie is probably better off renting a copy of the 1941 original (“His hideous howl a dirge of death!”) and watching it with the lights off. You won’t learn much about human nature, but you’ll see a far better film.

©David Mark Speer