Pan's Labyrinth Review
by [email protected] (dnb AT dca DOT net)January 25th, 2007
PAN'S LABYRINTH
A film review by David N. Butterworth
Copyright 2007 David N. Butterworth
*** (out of ****)
Squeaking in amidst much hullabaloo for year-end Oscar(r) consideration--and playing to a standing-room-only art-house crowd who had no doubt gotten a heady whiff of some of that pre-awards hoopla--the fantasmagorical Spanish-language film "Pan's Labyrinth" ("El Laberinto del Fauno") is an uneasy mix of childlike, Tim Burton-esque imagination and brutal Spanish war-torn drama.
Whereas much can be anticipated of the former via all that hyperbolic word-of-mouth, those visually arresting images from trailers, the press, and official websites, and an uncommon saturation on hundreds of critics Ten Best lists, nothing can quite prepare you for the latter.
The couple sitting behind me certainly hadn't pre-screened the film for their pre-teen daughter sat squirming next to them. "Is it scary?" she asked nervously. "I won't be able to sleep if it's scary." "No honey, it's not scary," replied her clueless father, clearly searching for the right word. "It's supposed to be... like 'Alice in Wonderland'!"
Where, I wonder, in Lewis Carroll's classic does one of the main characters pound at a man's dental work with a beer bottle as many as seven or eight times straight? Or where another forces a paring knife inside a man's cheek, gutting it like a hapless mackerel? Or where the gutted unfortunate, sometime afterwards, sews up the six-inch gash in his cheek in glorious Technicolor (actually drab blues and grays) close-up?
Don't be fooled by the enticing poster art or the inventive, labyrinthine creatures or the spunky young girl at the center of this tale terrible, "Pan's Labyrinth" is not a film for children. It's rated R and rated R for a reason.
Ofelia (a delightful Ivana Baquero) is the young girl who creates her own fantasy world to escape the horrors of Franco's fascist, post-war Spain. As the film opens she travels with her ailing--and heavily pregnant--mother (Ariadna Gil) to meet her new "father" Capitán Vidal (Sergi López in a memorably sadistic performance) still fighting the resistance in the north. On his property lies an old stone labyrinth into which Ofelia descends and meets an old goat named Pan (Doug Jones) who instructs her to complete three tasks to determine whether she's actually the Underworld's long lost princess royal. And while Ofelia's retrieving a key from inside a humongous cane toad, or placing a curiously lifelike mandrake root under her mother's bed, or entering doors drawn from chalk lines, the captain's brutalizing peasants and torturing the militia and generally being not very nice to everyone, including his new wife Carmen and his put-upon nursemaid Mercedes (Maribel Verdú, "Y Tu Mamá También"'s sexy catalyst).
Writer/director Guillermo del Toro ("Hellboy," "Blade II," "The Devil's Backbone") lovingly establishes the gothic elements of his hoary fairy tale but might have gone further with some scenes (such as when Ofelia ill-advisedly snarfs a couple of grapes; seems like a lot of make-up effects for so little screen time) and cut back on others (the sewing sequence, for instance). And frankly I liked the noisy stick insect a lot better before it morphed into Tinkerbell.
Having a mean Dad is one thing but Ofelia doesn't witness half the horrors going on around her. That makes her raison d'être less compelling and del Toro's film less the masterpiece it might have been.
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David N. Butterworth
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