Pan's Labyrinth

Before tonight's AFI sneak preview of Pan's Labyrinth, writer/director Guillermo del Toro gave a brief introductory speech. He described the film as a fairy tale for adults, a parable designed to teach a moral lesson about following one's own heart and refusing to conform. It's a fairly accurate description, and one that captures the film's successes and flaws succinctly. Like a good fairy tale, Pan's Labyrinth is fanciful and imaginitive, told using unpredictable dream logic. But as you'd expect from a movie derived from these kinds of simple, old-fashioned and familiar stories, it's also broad and overly simplistic, relying on stock characters and convenient gimmicry to move ahead a plot that's largely perfunctory.

The tremendous worldwide success of Del Toro's previous two Spanish-language genre films, Cronos and The Devil's Backbone, has made Pan's Labyrinth one of the year's most hotly anticipated movies by film fans. It has already been chosen as Mexico's submission for Best Foreign Language Film and won raves at Cannes and the New York Film Festival. As a longtime fan of Del Toro's (particularly the aforementioned Spanish-language horror films), it gives me no pleasure to say that I found the film a significant disappointment. It feels more like the work of the ambitious and well-intentioned, but occasionally clumsy, Hollywood director behind Hellboy and Mimic than a genuine follow-up to The Devil's Backbone, one of the best horror films of the present decade.



As in Cronos and The Devil's Backbone, two parallel stories - one realistic and one supernatural - unfold in Pan's Labyrinth simultneously. Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) moves to a country house in Northern Spain in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Her father died in the conflict, forcing her widowed and pregnant mother (Ariadna Gil) to remarry. Her vile new husband (Sergi Lopez, the terrific heavy from Dirty Pretty Things) leads a company of Spanish Fascist soldiers, stationed in the area to decimate a local underground resistance movement hiding in the local forest. Ofelia, terrified and alone in her new home, befriends a maid (Maribel Verdu, of Y Tu Mama Tambien) and a friendly doctor (Alex Angulo) who harbor a dangerous secret.

While this tragic story of bloody combat, torture and intrigue takes up the bulk of the film's midsection, most of the attention the film has received thus far focuses on Ofelia's possibly imaginary adventures with a magical faun (Doug Jones) who also lives in the apparently enchanted woods. The faun tells the storybook-obsessed and troubled little girl that she is actually descended from the King of the Underworld, who will happily allow her to return to her throne if she can complete three increasingly dangerous tasks.

All of this sounds complicated, and for a while Del Toro seems to be building a complex and extended historical metaphor as he did in Devil's Backbone, which was also set during the Spanish Civil War.

But there just isn't nearly as much going on under the surface here. Del Toro has a fairly straight-forward message to convey. An ode to nonconformity, Pan's Labyrinth uses the Spanish Fascist movement to represent the forces in everyone's lives that try to make them fit a pre-selected mold. It's not a very difficult fit, and it becomes obvious fairly soon what Del Toro clearly has it mind. (After an early scene in which Ofelia's mother urges her to put down her storybooks and adopt a more realistic worldview gives away pretty much the entire film's perspective in one two-minute exchange).

Beyond this rather vacuous central motif, the movie just kind of plods along on its two occasionally interesting narratives. The fantasy segments, in which Ofelia battles a ferocious toad, challenges a mutant at a fancy underground buffet and eventually faces a near-impossible choice, at least have an interesting look and rely on well-realized special effects. (That scene with the mutant, a grotesque humanoid being with no face and hands in its palms, is by far the film's most memorably surreal and visionary.)

There isn't a lot of internal logic to the fantasy universe of Pan's Labyrinth. Generic fairy tale tropes like intricate lockboxes, golden keys and, well, fairies add up into a story that approximates the familiar formula but fails to capture what makes these stories worthwhile or interesting. It's strange, as well, how the individual quests don't really link up all that well or have any individual reason for being. (Ofelia battles the toad to obtain a key to obtain a knife that winds up being used to teach her an elaborate lesson about self-sacrifice.) There's not a lot of sense to the proceedings. They're imaginative, sure, but kind of meaningless.



The realistic story about the fascists fighting the resistance doesn't fare much better. Lopez is always a great choice for a scene-stealing movie villain, but as with most of the other characters, his Captain Vidal is more a type than a character. Those black leather gloves say more about Vidal than anything Lopez says or does in the role. He's probably still the most dynamic character in the film, but aside from a nice little subplot about his father's old war watch, Vidal is the definition of one note - he's pure malice, embodied.

He's so cruel, in fact, that his story becomes repetitive quickly. One of his soldiers disobeys him and gets shot. Some innocent farmers are suspected of aiding the resistance so they are shot. He suspects someone working for him of being a spy for the other side and threatens to have them shot. He tells the doctor that, if presented with the choice between his baby's life and that of his wife, he should save the baby. He can always have it shot later, I suppose.

These sequences are extremely bloody, more gruesome and focused on violence than was really necessary. I'm not a person who's offended by violent movies, but Pan's Labyrinth gets to feel gratuitous after a while. (A late scene features a character sewing up his own wound for no reason other than the fetishization of pain.) Before the film, Del Toro referred to the movie as an adult fairy tale, but I assumed he meant that it dealt with complex issues in a mature and frank fashion, not that it was super-gory. The final 30 minutes of this film has more torture scenes than the dailies for Hostel 2.

It does give the movie an unsettling, dark feeling of atmosphere, aided by Guillermo Navarro's able cinematography. But for all their wrenching melodrama, these scenes don't add up to all that much because the characters are too thin and broadly sketched. The subtlety of The Devil's Backbone, in which the backstory gradually becomes illuminated over the course of an intriguing investigation carried out by plucky orphans, has been replaced by cartoonish exaggerations lifted from old WWII movies. Del Toro was aiming for Army of Shadows meets Wizard of Oz but ended up with The Keep meets Return to Oz.

(Actually, there are numerous parallels with Michael Mann's non-classic The Keep, in which Gabriel Byrne plays a sadistic fascist overseeing a camp being haunted by a Golem. The fact that I could draw comparisons between Del Toro's film and Michael Mann's cheesy cautionary tale pretty much demonstrates my point about this new movie without even saying anything further.)

I'm disappointed.

As with numerous other recent movies I've seen by talented, established directors (Babel, Tideland, The Prestige), Pan's Labyrinth did not live up to my lofty expectations. The fact that it took Guillermo del Toro 2.5 years to make is even more disheartening. But I suppose there's always Hellboy 2.