Pan's Labyrinth

[Dave Monroe]

December 29, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW | 'PAN'S LABYRINTH'
In Gloom of War, a Child's Paradise
By A.O. SCOTT

Set in a dark Spanish forest in a very dark time —
1944, when Spain was still in the early stages of the
fascist nightmare from which the rest of Europe was
painfully starting to awaken — “Pan’s Labyrinth” is a
political fable in the guise of a fairy tale. Or maybe
it’s the other way around. Does the moral structure of
the children’s story — with its clearly marked poles
of good and evil, its narrative of dispossession and
vindication — illuminate the nature of authoritarian
rule? Or does the movie reveal fascism as a terrible
fairy tale brought to life?

The brilliance of “Pan’s Labyrinth” is that its
current of imaginative energy runs both ways. If this
is magic realism, it is also the work of a real
magician. The director, Guillermo Del Toro,
unapologetically and unpretentiously swears allegiance
to a pop-fantasy tradition that encompasses comic
books, science fiction and horror movies, but fan-boy
pastiche is the last thing on his mind. He is also a
thoroughgoing cinephile, steeped in classical
technique and film history.

This Mexican-born filmmaker’s English-language,
Hollywood genre movies — “Blade 2” (2002), “Hellboy”
(2004) and the ill-starred but interesting “Mimic”
(1997) — have a strangeness and intensity of feeling
that sets them apart from others of their kind. In his
recent Spanish-language films, “The Devil’s Backbone”
(2001) and this new one, he uses the feverish
inventiveness of a vulnerable child’s imagination as
the basis for his own utterly original, seamlessly
effective exploration of power, corruption and
resistance.

“Pan’s Labyrinth” is his finest achievement so far and
a film that already, seven months after it was first
shown at the Cannes Film Festival, has the feel of
something permanent. Like his friend and colleague
Alfonso Cuarón, whose astonishing “Children of Men”
opened earlier this week, Mr. Del Toro is helping to
make the boundary separating pop from art, always
suspect, seem utterly obsolete.

“Pan’s Labyrinth” is a swift and accessible
entertainment, blunt in its power and exquisite in its
effects. A child could grasp its moral insights
(though it is not a film I’d recommend for most
children), while all but the most cynical of adults
are likely to find themselves troubled to the point of
heartbreak by its dark, rich and emphatic emotions.

The heroine is a girl named Ofelia, played by the
uncannily talented Ivana Baquero, who was 11 when the
film was made. Ofelia is the kind of child who eagerly
reads stories about fairies, princesses and magic
lands, longing to believe that what she reads is real.
Mr. Del Toro obliges her wish by conjuring, just
beyond the field of vision of the adults in Ofelia’s
life, a grotesque, enchanted netherworld governed by
the sometimes harsh rules of folk magic.

That realm, in which Ofelia is thought to be a
long-lost princess, may exist only in her imagination.
Or maybe not: its ambiguous status is crucial to the
film’s coherence. Like the Japanese animator Hayao
Miyazaki, Mr. Del Toro is less interested in debunking
or explaining away the existence of magic than in
surveying the natural history of enchantment.

The forest around the old mill where Ofelia and her
mother come to live is full of signs and portents: old
carved stones and half-buried, crumbling structures
that attest to a pre-modern, pre-Christian body of
lore and belief. In much of the West that ancient
magic survives in the form of bedtime stories and
superstitions, and these in turn, as Mr. Del Toro
evokes them, lead back through the maze of human
psychology into the profound mysteries of nature.

Ofelia’s second reality — inhabited by a wide-browed
faun, a man whose eyes are in the palms of his hands
(both played by Doug Jones), a giant toad, some
mantislike insects and many other curious creatures —
can be a pretty scary place, and on her visits to it
the girl is, like many a fairy-tale heroine, subjected
to various challenges and ordeals. Still, this vivid
world of fairies offers her an escape from the
oppression of a day-to-day existence dominated by her
stepfather, Captain Vidal (Sergi López), an officer in
Franco’s army who seems to live by the maxim that
fascism begins at home.

A patriarch both by temperament and ideology, the
captain treats Ofelia’s mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil),
with chilly, humiliating decorum, making it clear that
she is of value to him only because she is pregnant
with his son. He takes pleasure in the exercise of
authority and in the trappings of military discipline,
addressing himself to the torture of captured
resistance fighters with sadistic relish. He seems
happiest when he is inflicting pain.

The partisans up in the hills — and their sympathizers
in the captain’s own household, including the
housekeeper, Mercedes (Maribel Verdú) and the doctor
(Alex Angulo) who attends to Carmen — represent one of
the film’s alternatives to the militarized,
hierarchical society taking shape in post-civil war
Spain. Their easy solidarity and ragged mufti stand in
emphatic contrast to the crisp uniforms and
exaggerated obeisances of Vidal and his men. At his
dinner table the captain gloats that Franco and his
followers have defeated the “mistaken” egalitarianism
of their republican opponents.

Like “The Devil’s Backbone,” which also took place in
the shadow of the Spanish Civil War, “Pan’s Labyrinth”
is not overly concerned with moral subtlety. In Mr.
López’s perversely charismatic performance, Vidal is a
villain of the purest, ugliest kind. For Mr. Del Toro
the opposite of evil is not holiness, but decency.

Ofelia serves as her stepfather’s foil not because of
her absolute goodness or innocence but rather because
she is skeptical, stubborn and independent-minded. Her
rebellion is as much against Carmen’s passivity as it
is against Vidal’s brutality, and she gravitates
toward the brave Mercedes as a kind of surrogate
mother.

Mercedes’s surreptitious visits to the rebels often
coincide with Ofelia’s journeys into fairyland, and it
may be that the film’s romantic view of the noble,
vanquished Spanish Republic is itself something of a
fairy tale. To note this is merely to identify a
humanist, utopian strain in Mr. Del Toro’s vision, a
generous, sorrowful view of the world that is not
entirely alien to the history of horror movies. (Think
of James Whale’s “Frankenstein,” for example, a film
linked to “Pan’s Labyrinth” by Victor Erice’s “Spirit
of the Beehive,” one of the few masterpieces of
Spanish cinema made before Franco’s death.)

Fairy tales (and scary movies) are designed to console
as well as terrify. What distinguishes “Pan’s
Labyrinth,” what makes it art, is that it balances its
own magical thinking with the knowledge that not
everyone lives happily ever after.

The story has two endings, two final images that
linger in haunting, unresolved tension. Here is a
princess, smilingly restored to her throne, bathed in
golden subterranean light. And here is a grown woman
weeping inconsolably in the hard blue twilight of a
world beyond the reach of fantasy.

“Pan’s Labyrinth” is rated R (Under 17 requires
accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has graphic
violence and occasional obscene language.

PAN’S LABYRINTH

Opens today in New York.

Written (in Spanish, with English subtitles) and
directed by Guillermo Del Toro; director of
photography, Guillermo Navarro; edited by Bernat
Vilaplana; music by Javier Navarrete; production
designer, Eugenio Caballero; produced by Bertha
Navarro, Alfonso Cuarón, Frida Torresblanco and Álvaro
Augustin; released by Picturehouse. Running time: 119
minutes.

WITH: Sergi López (Vidal), Maribel Verdú (Mercedes),
Ivana Baquero (Ofelia), Ariadna Gil (Carmen), Alex
Angulo (Doctor) and Doug Jones (Pale Man).

http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/12/29/movies/29laby.html

Welcome to the official Pan’s Labyrinth movie site.

http://www.panslabyrinth.com/

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