The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Review: Pan's Labyrinth

"Fairy tales now are so sanitized and castrated. If you read the original Hansel and Gretel, it took place during a famine, and it has murder and incest and eye-gouging."

-- Guillermo del Toro

With Pan's Labyrinth (already reviewed excellently by Andrew Clarke here, and opening in the States this weekend), Guillermo del Toro set out to make a scary fairy tale, but not just because the idea of a scary fairy tale is cool or edgy. Fairy tales used to be scary for a very specific reason, and the attempts to sanitize them, to make the stories more palatable to children, not only miss the point, but render them useless. It's not stories that traumatize kids, it's life.

Ofelia is a young girl whose father has died, and whose mother has remarried to a fascist captain who is in the midst of a campaign to wipe out a holdout group of leftist guerrillas hiding out in the mountains. Sergi Lopez plays Capitan Vidal with a stern cruelty, but also as a man who believes absolutely in the righteousness of his cause. He believes in absolute order and efficiency, as indicated by his obsessive maintenance of his pocketwatch. Ofelia, an imaginative child who is of no use to Vidal since she cannot function as his heir, finds herself at odds with the cruel stepfather at once. Meanwhile, her mother is very pregnant with the Capitan's son, and her health doesn't seem to be holding up. Things are hard indeed for Ofelia.

So when she begins to enter her fairy land, by our contemporary expectations, we may expect it to be an escape from the harsh realities of life into a land of ponies and lollipops. And such an expectation would reveal how little we understand the purpose of storytelling.

Ofelia's fairly land, as it turns out, is neither pretty nor reassuring. She is brought to a faun, an ancient goat-man who seems to be made of wood (his joints creek like the boughs of a tree when he moves). He assigns her a series of tasks (three, the magic number of storytelling) which she must carry out to prove that she is the true heir to an underground kingdom.

Del Toro has been working in the fantasy genre for over a decade now, honing his style, producing some pretty great work, even weaving a masterful ghost story set in the early Spanish Civil War in The Devil's Backbone, to which Pan's Labyrinth is a companion piece, but never quite fulfilling the potential he seemed to have. With Pan's Labyrinth, that potential has been realized. This is a movie that clicks on every level, and puts Del Toro clearly on a level with fantasists Gilliam and Miyazaki.

What makes the fantasy world come alive in Pan's Labyrinth is an attention to detail. The scariest scene involves a truly grotesque fellow referred to as The Pale Man. The design of the creature is creepy as hell, but it's the way he moves, brought to life by actor Doug Jones (who also plays the faun) that gives him season tickets to your nightmares, along with the gruesome fresco paintings (reminiscent of those one would find in a Catholic church in Spain) Ofelia spies of The Pale Man committing hideous deeds.

As things get darker for Ofelia in the real world, they don't lighten up in fairyland, because the purpose of fairytales is not escape--it's to help kids process and understand the harsh realities of what's going on around them in the real world. As things progress, Ofelia's choices in the fairy world parallel what's happening around her in the "real" world, and the choices that not just she, but the adults around her are faced with: absolute deference to authority vs. deciding for oneself what the right thing to do is.

It's no great leap to connect the situation of the late Spanish Civil War with the world facing us right now. As we slowly drift toward totalitarianism in our own century, will we continue to blindly follow our leaders, or will we realize that our own choices can make a difference? It is not just children who need these stories to help process the world. Maybe it is our own lack or imagination, and ultimately our lack of any substantive mythology to challenge that of the patriarchal conquerors running this country that has brought us to the sad situation we now find ourselves in. Because these things--storytelling, myth--these things are important.