Decision ‘08

Pan’s Labyrinth: The Decision ‘08 Review

Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has done the near impossible; he is selling out screens across the country for a fairy tale. A fairy tale in Spanish, with English subtitles. That’s right, sold-out shows for a foreign-language movie. And the good news is, his new movie Pan’s Labyrinth lives up to the hype. It takes a little getting used to; the special effects are quite low-tech; though there is some CGI, the three main ‘monsters’ of the film are, essentially, guys in suits. For an audience that has grown up with the excesses of Hollywood, where blockbusters routinely have a budget of $150 million or more, it seems a little quaint.

That’s part of the picture’s charm, though, and besides, del Toro remembers something that far too many Hollywood executives have forgotten: an original story will charm an audience far more than a $5 million digital effect will. And this is an original story: set in Fascist Spain in the waning years of World War II, Pan’s Labyrinth is the story of a young girl whose outside circumstances could not be much worse: she has no real friends, besides her mother and the head housekeeper of a compound where she has been sent to live with her mother’s new husband (”He’s not my father!”, she emphatically reminds the housekeeper to much amusement), a sadistic captain in Franco’s army who is trying to root out the last of the rebels from (literally) his neck of the woods.

Warning: mild spoilers ahead.

Like many a young girl before and since, Ofelia (played by the implausibly graceful and lovely young actress Ivana Baquero) retreats to the world of fantasy. Fairies, fauns, giant toads, and monsters inhabit the labyrinth just outside the compound - or at least they do in the mind of young Ofelia. Whether they exist in the real world is left somewhat up to the viewer, but del Toro leaves hints that perhaps they don’t. And it’s that ambiguity leaning on denial that gives the movie its emotional wallop, for either the fantasy world of Ofelia is real, and we can all live happily every after, or else the world we know, full of murder, torture, and cruelty, the world that we ask our children to live in, is as good as it gets.

Now that’s a horrible thought, and the way you feel about it has a lot to do with whether you are a religious person or not. Del Toro recognizes the religious overtones to his story, and he neither over- nor underplays them; as I said before, he leaves some degree of uncertainty and lets the viewer decide. Without giving away the ending, it plays it both ways: fantasy gives way to reality gives way to fantasy gives way to reality gives way to fantasy - in that order.

And perhaps the fact that fantasy gets the last word is del Toro’s way of sending the viewer out with some degree of hope - because Ofelia deserves more in that other life than she ever got in this one. Highly recommended - but leave your preconceptions at the door. This isn’t a Hollywood movie - and thank God for that…

2 Responses to “Pan’s Labyrinth: The Decision ‘08 Review”

1 Decision ‘08 » Blog Archive » Oscar Notes Says:
January 23rd, 2007 at 9:05 am
[…] The big headline everywhere is that Dreamgirls got 8 nominations, but is not for Best Picture - but the real headline should be that a Spanish-language film with a Mexican director and a relatively modest production budget of $19 million got six - I’m talking about Pan’s Labyrinth (reviewed here by yours truly). The truly excellent Children of Men is up for three (my short review of that one here), and United 93 (my take) is up for Best Director and Film Editing. […]
2 Decision ‘08 » Blog Archive » Oscar Musings Says:
February 25th, 2007 at 7:55 pm
[…] Okay, no liveblog this year - I’m just not motivated enough…but I do want to open a thread for various odds and ends…starting with my delight that Pan’s Labyrinth won the night’s first award for art direction. I loved the movie (it was one of my three favorites this year, along with United 93 and Children of Men)… […]