I slipped into a 6:40 show of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus at 6:50, hoping to have only missed some previews; instead, I apparently missed out on half the plot. Unless the director, Terry Gilliam, has devised a newfangled approach to storytelling that condenses an hour or more of exposition into a five-minute intro, I can’t really blame tardiness for my ensuing 112 minutes of befuddlement. That said, befuddlement has its perks. You sort of lean back smiling, and say, “Uh-huh.” To borrow from Anthony Lane, you know that Gilliam’s train of thought is going nowhere; but that’s not so bad when you’re riding first class.

Christopher Plummer, playing the immortal Dr. P., is at the center of the director’s three-ring circus. Looking like a rag-and-bone Father Time, he trucks around London in a mobile theater, footlights and all. At show time, the doctor (made up like a swami) meditates—in a (typically, alcohol-induced) stupor—while his 15-going-on-16 daughter Valentina (Lily Cole) and a teen-tramp straggler they’ve adopted, Anton (Andrew Garfield), incite on-lookers to hop onstage and push through the shiny plastic flaps of their mirror—the titular “imaginarium.” And in there is where the head scratching starts. It is apparently an entry into the doctor’s imagination; but it’s also a manifestation of the visitor’s. Alrighty. But let’s shove on.

The troupe, which its diminutive driver (Verne Troyer) describes as being “on the margins of society,” rescues another straggler: Tony (the late Heath Ledger), a smooth-talking amnesiac with some sort of connection to children’s charities and the Russian mob. And then, of course, there’s the devil (Tom Waits—who’s as suitable to play Satan as Morgan Freeman is God), who got the doctor—a montane monk-cum-slakeless gambler—into this mess. He granted Parnassus immortality on the condition that if the doc had a daughter, the devil would inherit her on her 16th birthday. To ensure that Valentina doesn’t celebrate her super-sweet 16 in Hell, Parnassus shakes on another wager: If he can collect five souls faster than the devil can, he can save the girl.

It goes without saying that Ledger’s untimely death in 2008 hampered this production; but the actor had completed all the “real-world” shoots beforehand, so needed only to be replaced in the imaginarium sequences. Resourcefully, Gilliam and company recruited some of Ledger’s friends (Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Colin Farrell)  to take his place in a world in which men can change their face. (You can tell how this giddy dreamworld has affected me. I might need to consult a doctor other than Parnassus.) Gilliam is free to fiddle with the physics of his fantasy scenes, but he ought to throw us a bone in “reality.” Ledger’s swan-song performance is energetic and full of slippery delight; but Tony’s motivations are so obscure that it doesn’t amount to much of a role. From the 92+% of the movie that I managed to see, I was unable to discern whether Tony was actually amnesic, or just pretending, and for how long. I wasn’t sure what the significance of his flute was, or what relationship, if any, he had to the devil. Were any of his motives in helping the troupe unselfish, and if they were self-serving, then how?

If I was to list all the unsettled questions I had about Parnassus, I’d fill up a ledger of my own. The ending has a bittersweet tang, but what—if anything—has been resolved? It’s as if Gilliam hired the writers of Star Trek to pen the end of Parnassus, and exile the good doctor in a parallel universe. When the director flailed about hammering Hunter Thompson’s meanings into celluloid with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he didn’t quite succeed; but readers of the book could see what Gilliam was aiming at. Here, he’s working with his own material (co-written with his frequent collaborator, Charles McKeown). When Parnassus tells the devil, with religious assurance, that “You can’t stop stories being told,” you know that Gilliam is working with his familiar theme: the importance of storytelling. There’s a disheartening morsel of self-pity in his identifying with the feeble doctor, whom everyone considers a whack job, because this story is so terribly incoherent. Definitionally, Parnassus is bad storytelling. The best explanation we get of the imaginarium’s inner workings comes from Anton—after a few swigs of vodka.

Gilliam has said in the past that “There’s room for far more irrationality than people are willing to admit exist in their lives. It’s all around them. They don’t recognize it. They don’t have words to describe it.” More recently, interviewed on Fresh Air, he said: “I always get hauled up by the critics for being a bad storyteller, and yet, children invariably just fall under the spell of my films. They get them, and the adults often have a problem.” I don’t think this means that children are more in tune with his meanings; instead, they latch onto his work in the way that kids latch onto Monty Python, with which Gilliam got his start. Young kids don’t watch The Holy Grail for its socioreligious satire or picaresque Arthurian structure; they’re in it for that killer bunny. In other words, they’re in it for the inexplicable: for the adults who playact like children.

That sort of role reversal seems emblematic of Gilliam’s work. Here, we have a big-baby Methuselah whom the devil baits with bets. Plummer expertly reacts like a roly-poly kid lunging for a chocolate bar. The doctor’s daughter reprimands the coot for his weakness—and so does the imperious dwarf, who, at one point, is mistaken for a black child.

Twenty years ago, Pauline Kael claimed that Brazil (1985) “attacked reality”; Gilliam seems to want Parnassus exempted from it. That, of course, it cannot be. Nor is this movie anywhere near in stature to his precision-constructed 12 Monkeys or synapse-bursting Brazil. But Gilliam’s romantic determination to immigrate to his  imagination no longer bears any enmity for the real world; it seems instinctive rather than a conscious rebellion. (In Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman seemed to betray a similar predilection, but rebuked himself for it.) Aside from its fuzzy notions of self-pity, there’s no ill will in Parnassus; Gilliam even embraces Satan. There’s talent and good will leaping out from the corners of the frame. It all seems an organic outgrowth of the director’s vision; and it seems to have inspirited the cast—particularly Garfield and Cole, who give winsome performances. In another life, Garfield’s Anton might have been a troubadour—a few centuries later, Shakespeare’s clumsy Romeo. The same, I’m sure, goes for the director.