Pan's Labyrinth
Rated: R
Runtime: 1 hour, 52 minutes
Directed by: Guillermo del Toro
Starring:
Ivana Baquero - Ofelia
Sergi López - Capitán Vidal
Doug Jones - Pan / Pale Man
Maribel Verdú - Mercedes
"Beautiful" and "Grotesque." "Heartfelt" and "Heartbreaking". "Magical" and "Genuine." Lesser directors would find their film torn asunder trying to work with these opposing themes. At best, they could only frame these concepts as dualities and recenter the story to avoid a thematically jarring experience. Only the confident hand of one of today's best directors could not only embrace all these concepts, but mix them all together in a fairy tale that is both ancient and modern. Director Guillermo del Toro does not hide from complicated worlds of moral and existential ambiguity. He masters them and in doing so, he's created one of the year's best films in Pan's Labyrinth.
The story presents us with a brief prologue about a princess who will one day return to her kingdom in the Underworld. The story then seamlessly shifts to the tale of Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) and her pregnant mother (Ariadna Gil) who must live with her new stepfather Vidal (Sergi López), a captain in the Spanish Civil War who is as dogmatic as he is cruel. While her mother strugles with an increasingly difficult pregnancy and Capitán Vidal attempts to wipe out the guilleras surrounding the camp, Ofelia wanders into an old stone labyrinth outside the camp where she meets a faun (Doug Jones). The faun tells her that she may be the Lost Princess of the Underworld but she must prove herself by accomplishing three tasks.
From there, del Toro weaves his plotlines effortlessly. Despite the surface distance for stories about coming-of-age, the suffering presented in the Spanish Civil War, and a lost princess set seeking to return to her kingdom, nothing seems out of place. The confidence and precision of Guillemo Navarro's cinematography makes the alternate dimension of the Pale Man (a creature truly made from nightmares) to the storehouse of the camp all seem from the same world. Javier Navarrete's melodic and haunting score blends perfectly with del Toro's world
Those expecting a film similar to del Toro's previous film, the comic book romp Hellboy, should go further back in his filmography to his previous foreign language film, The Devil's Backbone, a story about a ghost who haunts an orphanege in 1939 Spain. Pan's Labyrinth is an amalgam of the two films, taking Hellboy's Lovecraftian creatures and bringing them into the magic and tragedy of mid-20th Century Spain as seen from a child's perspective. And yet such a description sells the film short because del Toro goes far beyond a simple reworking of his previous accomplishments. He takes various elements and transmogrifies them into something familiar yet entierly new.
Some may find Pan's Labyrinth to be a frustrating film because it lacks a clear thematic organization where they can feed at any particular idea-trough and ignore the others. But del Toro demands more of his audience and we should thank him for delivering a film that cannot be understood only psychologically or morally or aesthtically without understanding the film holistically.
Del Toro has embraced the fantastic and the real, the universal and the unique, and a whole host of contractions to create Pan's Labyrinth. He challenges us to join him in this embrace and film-lovers everywhere should find this monster of a masterpiece a worthy challenge.
Words by
Matt Goldberg
11.14.06
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