Get Lost in the Labyrinth

Pan’s Labyrinth

(R)

originally published January 24, 2007

Only the most hardened genre critics could argue against Guillermo del Toro’s promotion into the foreign auteur ranks of his pals, Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men) and Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel). Though I enjoyed del Toro’s Cronos, Mimic, Blade 2 and Hellboy, only The Devil’s Backbone could support assertions of the genre filmmaker’s quality. In that film and his current masterpiece, del Toro, often beset by fanboy enthusiasm, innocently plays with the reality of childhood while flexing his visionary muscle. In Pan’s Labyrinth (and The Devil’s Backbone, though as a referent, I leave it here), the atrociously bloody, horrifying Spanish Civil War means to slice youth from out the gullet, a war crime del Toro’s fantastical imagery and fairy tale can only delay but not deny. A devourer of Happily Ever Afters, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) must have sensed the first chapter of her own tale ensuing from the death of her father and her mother’s marrying the fascist Captain Vidal (Sergi López of Dirty Pretty Things). Brought with her pregnant mother (Ariadna Gil of Belle Epoque) to live with the Captain as he flushes the hills of their Republican rebels, Ofelia discovers an old stone labyrinth, which one night opens onto a cavernous staircase leading to the underworld. There waits a creaky faun (Doug Jones, Hellboy’s Abe Sapien and the Silver Surfer in this summer’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer), motivations veiled and sinister, who tells her she is imbued with the spirit of the underworld’s deceased princess. He asks of her three tasks to prove she has not wholly succumbed to the mortal overworld. With guerrilla warfare raging, her mother slowly dying, and the Captain not-so-subtly vying for title of Worst Stepparent Ever, Ofelia escapes into the equally dangerous but strangely more welcoming underworld.

The adventures of Ofelia - a Spanish Alice in a terrifying Wonderland, a desperate Dorothy escaping war-torn Kansas for a darkened Oz - have all the tropes of fantasy fiction, but the magic realism, augmented by the film’s being in Spanish, causes the little girl’s success to mean so very much to her and the audience. Not to sympathize with this child is not only impossible, it's inhuman. Del Toro takes the loneliness of childhood, dines that monster on the blood of war so it grows up big and strong, and then offers only one perilous path to safety. The shockingly, viscerally violent real world is not a place to which Ofelia can return. The stakes are life or death. If she fails, she will die.

Del Toro’s masterful imagining of the underworld creatively pummels his fantastical peers to their knees. Even his overworld, where even bath time becomes haunting, seems otherworldly. Pan’s Labyrinth materializes the nightmarish creatures I’ve conjured while reading the fiction of Clive Barker. Del Toro’s devourer of children - a saggy-fleshed, spindly-legged monster whose eyes reside in its hands - terrifies not merely as a make-believe closet dweller but as metaphor as well. The ownerless shoes piled beside the sumptuous feast, left to tempt the weak-willed into awakening the monster, intimate the Holocaust concurrently happening elsewhere in Europe.

As a writer, del Toro, always a visualist rivaling even Cuarón, has matured well beyond his previous six efforts, all underserved somewhat by his structure, pacing and characterizations. (Another fan favorite, Robert Rodriguez, has yet to escape the similar Peter Pan tendencies of his writing.) Only in The Devil’s Backbone has del Toro ever achieved such a multi-layered understanding of humanity. With Pan’s Labyrinth, he creates a film equally rich in gut-wrenching emotion and blinding beauty, and his wonderful young charge, Baquero, with her perfectly manicured innocence, vulnerability and resolve, is the ideal heroine for the filmmaker’s adult fairy tale. Inhabiting two worlds, Ofelia must face the monsters of both. At an age dangerously close to adult understanding, Ofelia clings to fairies, fauns and giant toads susceptible to magic rocks. Yet del Toro's narrative assurance shows not only in how deeply he trolls the fantasy, but in how harshly he portrays life in 1944 Spain and how well he balances the two. The inner struggle of resistance fighter Mercedes (Maribel Verdú of Y tu mamá también) to protect her people - including her brother - from the Captain for whom she must wait hand and foot feels no less vital, suspenseful or life-threatening than Ofelia’s tumble into the labyrinth. The del Toro of Hellboy could not have pulled off such a feat.

I’m at the end of the line for doling out post-2006 best of accolades, but I would be remiss not to include Pan’s Labyrinth, which is the greatest fantasy film in quite some time (I won’t quite verbalize, but I’ll definitely intimate, since The Wizard of Oz). The not-remotely-for-children film broke my heart. I found no solace at the end of del Toro’s maze, but I’m sure that says as much about me as it does the film. Part of the film’s majesty lies in interpretation. My heart ached; mayhap yours will soar. After Pan’s Labyrinth, the tremendous work of an imagination in which I’d love to remain lost, no one should doubt del Toro again.

Drew Wheeler