Movie Review – Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Overall Quality 4.5 / 5.0
No Gay Content

“Pan’s Labyrinth” is an excellent, skillfully crafted piece of filmmaking with only a few minor flaws. Not only emotionally moving and intellectually evocative, the film also simply entertains. Few films succeed on all three levels, but this one proves to be a diamond in the rough.

Admittedly, I had anticipated a grimmer version of “What Dreams May Come” (1998), a movie wherein the fantasy realm was the major thrust of the film and the real-world elements just a subplot. Here the reverse is true, and even the fantasy realms were toned down from what I expected. The imagery and style were beautiful and striking but not as breathtaking or sweeping as I had imagined or hoped.

Summary

Set in Francisco Franco’s Spain shortly after the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, protagonist Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) is accompanying her pregnant mother (Ariadna Gil) to their new home, a rural military outpost run by her new step-father, the brutal Capitán Vidal (Sergi López). The Capitán has twin obsessions: having a son (he is more concerned with his unborn child’s well-being than the mother’s) and destroying the rebels hiding in the woods. He does not at first realize the resistance to his violent tyranny residing within his own household. Ofelia, meanwhile, finds herself escaping into the fantasy realm of Pan’s Labyrinth. Pan (Doug Jones) tells Ofelia she is the long-lost princess of a supernatural realm, but before she can return, she must prove her worthiness by completing three tasks.

Quality

In many respects, “Pan’s Labyrinth” is a masterpiece of filmmaking. The direction, cinematography, and acting shine. “Pan’s Labyrinth” is one of the most carefully constructed films I’ve seen in a long time, and the attention to detail manages to bring unity to some very disparate storylines.

Baquero, López, and Maribel Verdú playing housekeeper Mercedes are simply mesmerizing. The character of the López borders on cartoonish, and an injury he suffers toward the end of the film doesn’t help, recalling the Joker from “Batman” (1989). But López brings an intensity and ferocity to the role that imbues the character with all the dimensions of a man trapped by his own ideology and warped by his self-righteousness.

Baquero, at times a bit bland, nevertheless brings the requisite sense of innocence, wonder, and guilelessness to her character. But it is Verdú who truly shines in the movie. She becomes the film’s moral and emotional center with her moving, layered performance as a rebel torn between many duties and loyalties.

As mentioned, the rich, detailed visuals in the fantasy realm give the movie a textured, supernatural feel. In addition, for the use of a foreign language in the film contributes to the otherworldly atmosphere.

Minor Criticisms

Having said all that, I expected more from the visuals. This is just personal peccadilloes, of course, but I think the fantasy scenes would have benefited from being more visually discernible from the rest of the movie. The whole film is uniformly dark and gray. With the exception of the final scene, so were the fantasy scenes.

In fact, the fantasy thread felt underutilized. By far the bulk of the movie focuses on the “real” world of the Capitán hunting for rebels and awaiting the birth of his son. The fantasy scenes, although powerful and striking enough to feel substantial out of proportion to their actual screen time, still comprised little more than a subplot. One of the scenes introduced an extremely creepy and metaphorically rich character called the Pale Man (Doug Jones again). But his role was limited, whereas this figure could have made a powerful counterpoint to the Capitán.

The “real” world story also sometimes dragged with director Guillermo del Toro’s careful, methodical approach to the story.

In addition, I found a few logical inconsistencies in the movie. I wouldn’t expect a fairy tale-style story to follow the logic of the “real” world, but I do expect it to follow its own internal logic. It sometimes failed at this. For example, one scene used an hourglass to introduce some dramatic tension, but the ultimate resolution of the scene rendered the hourglass meaningless. Unfortunately, this turns the prop into a contrived plot device rather than a meaningful element of the scene.

The film’s weaknesses are few and minor, but sufficient to keep me from scoring it a full 5.0.

Analysis

** WARNING – MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW. The rest of this writing contains more analysis than review, so please stop here until you’ve seen the film, and then return. Trust me – don’t spoil your first viewing of this movie. This section SPOILS THE ENDING of the movie. **

Most fairy tales, at their core, are quite dark and gruesome. They are also, by nature, exaggerated. Like walking through a funhouse of mirrors, we are reflected back at ourselves in distorted or fantastical forms. Further, translating a fairy tale for an adult will almost always render it at least a little disturbing. Consider Harry Potter, whose adoptive family is clearly abusive. I always have a hard time reading those sections of the Harry Potter books. But it is the grimness that give otherwise silly stories much of their depth, and the exaggerated elements that allow us to hold them at arm’s length and say that they’re not real.

Unusually, in “Pan’s Labyrinth” the darkness is founded more in the real world than the fantasy. By far, the worst monster of the film is the Capitán, whose cruelty shocks and horrifies beyond any of the supernatural elements of the story. Illustrations in the Pale Man’s domain depict him skewering small children, and although he bites the heads of cute little fairies (well, okay, the fairies all looked mildly sinister to me), he seems rather bloodless for a supernatural villain. It does suggest that the Pale Man is Ofelia’s fantasy translation of the Captain.

There’s a saying that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to make us believe he doesn’t exist. I don’t agree: I think the greatest trick is to make us believe we’re not him.

We are the worst monsters we’ve ever met. For all the fairy tales, ghost stories, and myths we tell ourselves, the evil of the world isn’t “out there.” We may project it out there, trying to disown it or understand it more clearly, but ultimately we’re the ones who give birth to it, who make it real in the world through our choices and actions. And by placing it “out there,” we divest ourselves of responsibility for it, which only allows us to perpetuate it, both collectively and individually.

Dogmatic ideology provides fertile ground for evil to take root. Fascist regimes will render some group into the Cause of All Suffering. All we have to do is eliminate them (Jews, rebels, whosoever disagrees with the particular ideology), and the rest of us will exist in paradise. The Catholic Church does not escape Del Toro’s recrimination. In fact, Franco’s autocratic rule over Spain is sometimes called National Catholicism in that the Catholic Church’s moral system was rigidly and violently enforced during Franco’s regime, leading to an era of censorship and repression. In fact, the Catholic Church explicitly supported Franco’s rule. In the movie, the village priest dines with the Captain, a subtle symbol of the Church’s affirmation of the Capitán’s fascism and tyranny. Del Toro even says, “The Pale Man represents the Church for me… [He] represents fascism and the Church eating the children when they have a perversely abundant banquet in front of them. There is almost a hunger to eat innocence” (1).

Del Toro offers another strike against blind ideology and religion. In one scene, Pan admonishes Ofelia, “You have to stay in this world forever because you didn’t obey.” But at the end, Ofelia succeeds specifically because she disobeyed. She did not allow someone else to think for her, nor did she seek to elevate herself at the cost of violence to another. Another scene in the “real” world undergirds this theme. The Capitán, discovering the duplicity of the Doctor (Álex Angulo), says, “You could have obeyed me!” The Doctor replies, “But Captain, obey for obeying’s sake? That’s something only people like you do.” Choice defines what we are as human, and as Del Toro says, “Blind obedience castrates, negates, hides, and destroys what makes us human” (2). He also states, “I thought it would be great to counterpoint an institutional lack of choice, which is fascism, with the chance to choose, which the girl takes in this movie” (3).

At the same time, another scene muddies this particular theme a bit: Ofelia’s disobedience in the scene with the Pale Man, by eating the grapes, did lead to a real, negative consequence. But perhaps it is fascist of me to demand perfection from her. Flaws and mistakes makes us real, yielding vulnerability and raw, unvarnished humanity. (Truth be told, though, I thought Ofelia stopping to eat the grapes was contrived and heavy-handed, simultaneously predictable and hard to believe.)

The vulnerability and weakness of the flesh becomes another thematic thread. In fact, pain and suffering are recurring motifs throughout the movie: Ofelia’s mother’s terminal pregnancy, scenes of slaughter and battle, torture, the Capitán’s own terrible wound, the amputation of a gangrenous leg, etc. Recall how Pan threatens Ofelia with old age and death if she fails in her tasks. The infirmity of the body is the curse of the real world, and the ability to suffer the aspect of the human condition Ofelia would most like to shed.

Some traditions in Catholicism suggest that physical suffering brings us closer to God: hence practices like horse-hair shirts and self-flagellation. In this film, suffering is more of an impetus to escape the world.

Which brings us to an unusual thematic twist in the movie: going into the light. Usually this means ascending into Heaven, but the fairy tale at the very beginning of the film reverses this. The Other Side here is subterranean, dark and enclosed. “Pan’s Labyrinth” portrays the real world as the world of light. And yet, then the real world is shown as violent and gruesome. So where is the light we seek? The film never portrays a higher realm. By implication, the film postulates that we are the source of our own light. Since the film clearly supposes that we are the source of evil in the world, it makes sense that the converse would be true as well.

Ofelia demonstrates this more obviously than anyone. In fact, Ofelia writes her own story metaphorically, and almost literally, by using the blank book Pan gives her. And this presents one of the more interesting questions raised by the movie: is the fantasy realm of Pan’s Labyrinth real, or is it just in Ofelia’s head?

I don’t see it as an either/or. We live in a world of duality, and we often treat it like a zero-sum game where if it’s not black, it must be white. But I am fascinated by the idea that there can be multiple worlds superimposed on each other. This is one of the most interesting elements of, say, a world like “Silent Hill” (2006). The city of Silent Hill has several “versions” or “dimensions” which exist simultaneously: the ordinary, “real” Silent Hill, the ghostly and supernatural “gray” Silent Hill, and the nightmarish and evil “dark” Silent Hill.

Is it possible that Ofelia and her step-father live in two overlapping but fundamentally different worlds? He doesn’t see the Faun at the end of the film because, while Ofelia exists in both worlds, he exists in only one? Or is his preconceived understanding of the world so narrow but so deeply ideological that he simply can’t see the Faun? Confirmation bias is a psychological principle stating that people selectively search for, and interpret, information in the environment in order to confirm their pre-existing ideas. Concordantly, disconfirmation bias states that people are especially critical of information that contradicts their preconceptions and at the same are uncritically accepting of information that supports their preconceived ideas. Literally not seeing an entire magical creature would certainly be an exaggeration of these experimentally tested concepts, but as I’ve already stated, fairy tales are the province of exaggeration.

Perhaps it is Ofelia’s “innocence” as a child that allows her to see Pan. The adult mind, so fixed in its ideas, can neither perceive nor process that kind of information. Recall that Ofelia’s mother told her that magic is not real, especially for grown-ups. Similarly, Mercedes tells Ofelia that she used to believe in fairies, when she was a girl, but no longer. As Wayne Dyer would argue, we’ll see it when we believe it. Lacking belief, we blind ourselves to the magic that surrounds us. Or, unbelieving, we are unable to manufacture magic in our lives. Says Del Toro, “’Pan’s Labyrinth’ is a movie about a girl who gives birth to herself into the world she believes in” (4).

Consider the famous quote commonly attributed to Racter (an artificial intelligence computer program, short for Raconteur): “The human doesn’t see things as they are, but as he is.”

The movie’s finale doesn’t really provide the catharsis the viewer may be looking for. It didn’t in my case, at any rate. We want it to be clearly established whether the fairy tale is real or not. (Also, I really wanted the Pale Man to bite off the Capitán’s head.)

Instead, the two sides of the story resolve themselves separately. Ofelia descends into her fantasy realm forever, or at least finally. And the Capitán earns his reward: not only death but anonymity from his own son. And yet, after causing so much suffering and death, his own demise seems anticlimactic.

Ofelia’s final scene has distinctly religious overtones, with a pieta-style mother-and-baby sitting in a throne next to a gentleman who resembles a traditional Judeo-Christian God-figure. In a way, this presentation jars the viewer, diverting from the film’s otherwise agnostic vibe. But perhaps it simply brings “Pan’s Labyrinth” full circle by emphasizing that the Other World is mysterious and ultimately unknowable to those of us who have not yet shed the mortal coil.

In the words of Guillermo Del Toro: “The movie is like a Rorschach test where, if you view it and you don’t believe, you’ll view the movie as, ‘Oh, it was all in her head.’ If you view it as a believer, you’ll see clearly where I stand, which is it is real.” (5)

(1) Michael Guillén, “Pan’s Labyrinth: Interview with Guillermo Del Toro,” Twitchfilm.net, 16 December 2006, http://www.twitchfilm.net/archives/008507.html (21 January 2007).
(2) Ibid.
(3) Mark Kermode, “Review: Pan’s Labyrinth,” The Observer, 5 November 2006, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1939500,00.html (23 January 2007).
(4) Ibid.
(5) Michael Guillén, “Pan’s Labyrinth: Interview with Guillermo Del Toro,” Twitchfilm.net, 16 December 2006, http://www.twitchfilm.net/archives/008507.html (21 January 2007).