So it bugs me when I read dozens of reviews (and yes, I know the real problem is that I’m reading too many reviews) that all start with the premise that this is all an allegory about Gilliam himself as a misunderstood genius artist fighting for imagination against a cold unappreciative world. Gilliam may have asked for it somewhat by having made a movie about Baron Munchausen and having tried to make one about Don Quixote, but still, that’s not what this damn movie is.
If there’s one thing that comes across crystal clear in this admittedly ramshackle script, it’s that Doctor Parnassus, although he’s on to something with his life-changing thingamajig, is a really bad artist. He’s sort of trying to convey something unique to the world, and he feels unappreciated, but he doesn’t exactly have his own unique creative vision—he mostly functions as a kind of mystical sweat lodge where other people can figure out their own thing—and more importantly he doesn’t know anything about anyone else in the world outside of his immediate family, and in the last 2000 years he’s apparently never tried to. He has no idea who his audience is or how to connect to them, and seems to be only going to places where there’s absolutely no chance that he’ll find any appreciative weirdos. Despite what he says about the importance of his work, half the time he’s doing what he does for totally selfish reasons or to fix the consequences of his terrible decisions. He’s so clueless about how his ideas comes across that he thinks a Python-style singing police drag act is a good way to impress Russian gangsters. And his whole magic thing requires that he be unconscious throughout the show, so he relies on a backup crew of people who actually have some theater skills, except they still can’t make the show into a thing anyone might ever want to go see on purpose, because they’re so blindly devoted to the old guy and his message; it takes a guy like the Heath Ledger character, who doesn’t believe in anything at all, to get them to try anything different (even if what he comes up with is incredibly tacky, and the audience they take it to is just a different kind of yahoos). And without saying too much about the ending, what the ending looks like to me is that the guy may finally have a slight chance at not being a total failure when he starts listening to his hard-headed colleague and simplifies things right down to the bone.
So I’d be really surprised if Gilliam, who in spite of a history of erratic productions has had a really successful career and a huge cult following, either sees himself as Parnassus or thinks that would be a good way to be. I can’t understand that reading of the movie except as a shallow response to aspects of style: Gilliam (or Wes Anderson, or fill in the blank with whoever’s getting pigeonholed as pretentious or too cool this week) likes theatrical contraptions and has some visual obsessions that can be lazily summarized as “retro”, so that must be what he thinks the whole world ought to be like. I don’t think critics have to be artists but when they talk about this kind of thing, it’d help if they had ever tried to be, because then they’d know that you don’t get to choose your stylistic tics; you do your best to tell interesting stories with, around, or in spite of them. And one thing I liked about this movie is that it’s mostly about a guy who’s not doing his best at all.