I've been in love with Terry Gilliam's work for a long time.  The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Time Bandits were some of my favorite movies growing up.  Brazil was a real cinematic awakening for me, and both The Fisher King and 12 Monkeys are movies that I can watch any time.  It was disheartening to watch his Don Quixote movie fall apart, but even worse to watch him phone in a major studio film like The Brothers Grimm.  His latest film is an even stranger disappointment.  On one hand, it's pure Gilliam and it's coming from the same place as most of his films that I love.  But on the other hand, it's a bit meandering and it never comes together in a way that is completely satisfying.

Gilliam returns to his trademarks--a rich and visually-inventive fantasy world that is an escape from a grimmer reality, a young an innocent lead who is kind of stumbling through the story, fanciful animation--and there is no denying that this film is kin with with his earlier works.  But where Brazil had a clear through-line that followed a single character, it is sometimes hard to know which character Parnassus is actually about.  Dr. Parnassus would make a great protagonist if the story ever focused on his journey, but too often it wanders off to follow his daughter.  The daughter would make a good cipher, but the movie never commits to telling her story as it veers off to follow Tony.  Tony is a catalyst and there's clearly more going on with him than anyone in the film knows, but the audience is kept in the dark too, making it hard to care about the decisions he is forced to make.  In the end when all of these story arcs are weaving together, the film falls apart by trying to eek some meaning out of the place where everyone ends up.

I've grown tired of Tim Burton's "look," so much so that something like his upcoming Alice in Wonderland holds no appeal for me because I feel like I've seen it all before.  Gilliam is in danger of falling into that trap too, as the look of his films continues blur into sameness.  He does some impressive things inside the Imaginarium, but none of it is rendered with the kind of budget that would make it really jaw-dropping.  Sometimes the cartoony backdrops look fun but they don't work as well as the models and practical effects in his earlier films.  I wonder if the digital realm allows directors like Gilliam a little too much leeway to follow fantastic paths that don't really serve the story?  In interviews, Gilliam seems keenly aware that tools are just tools, but when there are effects that are so off-putting that that pull you out of the movie, maybe the wrong tools are being employed.

I want to love every Gilliam movie and I had high hopes for this one.  It's not terrible by any stretch, but it just doesn't connect the way that it should and that seems to be the fault of the story.  For a movie about the power of storytelling, it's incredibly frustrating to get to the end and realize that all the technique in the world can't save a story that doesn't know where to go.