On the verge of becoming a total Guillermo del Toro fan
Finished up with Pan’s Labyrinth in HD last night. I absolutely consumed that disc. Watched it twice, once with commentary; watched all the special features. Such a wonderful and gorgeous and dark movie–authentically dark in the way that children’s fairy tales seem when adults look back at them with a somewhat critical eye.
Admittedly, I am very late to the party on Pan’s Labyrinth, and enough has been said about it online that I’d just be joining a chorus a year late. Guillermo del Toro in general is my topic of discussion.
Guillermo del Toro is a director I so want to love, but looking at his complete filmography, he really only has two absolutely brilliant films, those being Pan’s and The Devil’s Backbone. Hellboy, Blade II are merely good movies, good comic book movies. And as Guillermo’s directing of the upcoming Hellboy sequel tells us, he actually likes doing that sort of thing. It’s not a money in the bank, one for you, one for me studio picture.
His interest in Hellboy comes as no surprise when you see that del Toro’s personal favorites and interests at least roughly align with Hellboy creator Mike Mignola. Lovecraft’s dark fantasy fingerprints are all over the work of both men, so I am sure that del Toro and Mignola probably hit it off on a personal level. For this reason I am expecting that the Hellboy sequel will likely be better than the original.
So that’s good, right? Kind of. It’s just a little disappointing that del Toro, a man that wrote and directed both The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth by himself, on non-Hollywood budgets, is going back to a licensed property, no matter how emotionally invested he is in it. Even though del Toro is behind Hellboy II’s screenplay, he’s not the creator; he is playing with someone else’s toys. I want more of his unbound creativity. We will definitely get that, of course, but it looks like we will be waiting a year or more, depending on how long this WGA strike goes on (although if his next personal picture, 3993, is an independent foreign production like Pan’s Labyrinth and the Devil’s Backbone, he may not be under the thumb of the strike rules).
I guess I can’t begrudge him for doing projects he’s actually interested in. It is somewhat odd that I feel this way to begin with since I actually like the movies I am bitching about. And there’s also some hypocrisy at play because I see he has announced he is doing an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness for 2010. But that’s different! You’ve seen the Lovecraft adaptations; they are all either terrible or mixed bags. Guillermo could finally give us the good shit us Lovecraft fans have been craving for decades.
My concern is almost assuredly misplaced here. His dalliances with licensed properties were probably part of a concentrated effort to get his foot into the Hollywood door, and if he hadn’t done that, he’d probably be confined to permanent cult status, whereas now he is on the verge of being huge. He just happened to find licensed projects that worked for him, and that is a good thing. But he still needs to deliver a third masterpiece before I fully buy the hype.
It’s good to have a gutsy director that knows how to put together beautiful visuals, visceral imagery, and strong stories. I’m not sure anyone else in the game today does that. I remember some Jodorowsky quote about how beautiful and terrible things go together, and del Toro might, might just epitomize that axiom.
Sunday 20 Jan 2008 | TVC15 | Movies
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If you’d told me going in that Pan’s Labyrinth is roughly 60% WWII thriller and 40% fantasy adventure, I’d have heard warning bells, but it’s amazing how well-told both halves of the story are. Captain Vidal is a totalitarian villain for the ages, his random cruelty expressing a deep, disturbing need to live up to his father’s legacy. General Vidal died on the battlefield and smashed his watch at that precise moment so that his son would know not only when he died, but how to die, and the younger Vidal clutches that broken timepiece as the moments until his inevitable demise tick-tick-tick away ominously on the soundtrack. Lopez’s performance is sensational.
While the two halves of the story never really meet (not to give anything away, but the reason why they fail to meet in the closing moments is critically important to understanding what’s just happened), they still combine to create one fully-realized tale. Del Toro has crafted an extraordinary meditation on the purpose and importance of fairy tales. We often wonder why the imagery in those old stories is so harsh and disturbing, but they come from times when the world was a much harsher place. And when Spain is consumed by violence and evil, the same lessons that allow Ofelia to navigate the labyrinth toward her destiny are the ones that will lead the rebels to freedom. Our virtues may seem inconvenient in our darkest hours, but they also become indispensable.
The look and feel of Pan’s Labyrinth (or “El Laberinto del Fauno”, the actual on-screen title which translates as “The Labyrinth of the Faun”) are remarkable. The goat-like Pan and a malignant giant toad look like they’ve walked out of our childhood imaginations, while the Pale Man, an eyeless zombie-like creature who sees out of the palms of his hands, lurches out of our adult nightmares. I honestly wondered why Ofelia is tempted to eat the creepy-looking food on the Pale Man’s table, but fairy tales are filled with children committing such obviously foolish transgressions. And I really loved how the dark, filthy catacombs and tunnels that fill the fairy-tale world seem to occupy the same reality as the war-torn landscapes above.
Baquero is outstanding as Ofelia, a role that calls for levels of horror and despair child performers rarely have to summon. I also liked the maddening obliviousness Gil projects as her mother, particularly given where that failure to believe leads her. Verdu makes a courageous and upstanding rebel, and Jones is profoundly creepy both as Pan and the haunting Pale Man.
Del Toro has been a reliable director of crowd-pleasing horror flicks like Blade 2 and Mimic for the last decade, but here he’s working at a whole new level. His intelligent, artful screenplay also benefits from an above-average job of translation on the subtitles (the movie is Mexico’s nominee for the Foreign Language Film Oscar).
Be warned-despite its’ child star and fairy tale story, Pan’s Labyrinth is not for kids. It’s a dark, violent story about the ways fantasy and hope help bring out the best in us in troubling times. It’s also uncommonly moving and uplifting.
All in all I have made this one of my favorite movies to date.