Directed by: Guillermo del Toro
Screenplay by: Guillermo del Toro
With: Ariadna Gil, Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú, Doug Jones and Alex Angulo
Guillermo del Toro, like some others, is a fine director and Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno) is, probably, the most visually amazing Spanish-Mexican production of all time. It is certainly the most splendid one I have ever seen. Apparently, being a successful Hollywood director (Hellboy, Blade II) allows a person to become such a convincing fundraiser as to be able to pay for the most sophisticated special effects modern technology can produce, and then to use some money to pay for an almost completely Spanish cast.
There is an enormous hype about Pan’s Labyrinth. It appears as if both the public and the critics have been taken in by what is not more than a caricatured representation of evil during the Spanish civil war, interrupted with lengthy sequences of nightmarish and expensive fantasy that add nothing to the main plot. Indeed, one has to suspect that if the fantasy sequences were cut off completely, the civil war plot would not be altered in any way and little Ofelia could have died a truly heroic death by trying to save her brother, not from a non-existent faun, but from the fascist villain who is her stepfather.
The two plots only touch in the incident of the ‘dirty dress.’ If anyone wanted to argue that the film was about obedience –or lack of it– and its consequences (which could explain the whole of the non-fantasy plot) they would find that Ofelia shows her lack of compliance from the very first scene: after she muddies her shoes, her mother begs her to call Vidal “father” which the girl never does. Ofelia’s lack of obedience during the fantasy sequence is more related to fairy tale motifs than to the movie itself, as there seems no reason on a realistic level to think that she would try to steal anything from the Pale Man. Instead the Civil War plot emphasizes that obedience is nothing without individual thought. To make this very clear we have the last words of Doctor Ferreiro: “But captain, obey for obey’s sake… That’s something only people like you do.”
The violence does not bother me that much, although I feel it is unnecessary at times. Capitan Vidal soon becomes a stereotype of the evil military commander in the war (generally, best represented by the unrealistic depictions of German Nazis in classic movies). Do we really need to see him smash the face of a young man with a bottle or shoot the dying in the head to blow their brains of?
Despite other simplifying representations, Maribel Verdú comes to the rescue. With only a few lines delivered in a flawless manner, she builds a character to save the whole film from itself. Absolutely believable as the helper of the rebels, she stands up to Vidal and becomes a catalyser of his demise. If Capitan Vidal had not become a cartoon, what a battle of giants this would have been.
Fortunately, not all are blind to the problems with this piece, despite the fact that only one of the reviews in Rotten Tomatoes is presented as if it shed a negative light on the film. A closer look to the reviews, shows that critics, after all, might know what they are talking about and that there is hope for us all (see for example the reviews by Andrew Sarris, Dustin Putman, Brian Orndorf)
