Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
Dark Fantasy movie by the patron saint of dark fantasy, Guillermo del Toro. Somehow I always tend to think of this as his first well known movie but it isn't, he had already done Blade II and the first Hellboy by that point, so there's goes my opening.
Anyway, Pan's Labyrinth follows half orphan girl Ophelia in post civil war Spain. Ophelia and her mother are called to the outpost of her stepfather Capitan Vidal, a military officer ordered to crack down on a resistance cell. Surrounded by the violence of war and her stepfathers ill temperament, she stumbles upon a portal to a mythical underworld, an envoy of which, the more or less titular Faun, gives her three tasks to do to claim her position as princess of the underworld.
With the benefit of hindsight, I couldn't help but compare this to a later movie of del Toro's, namely his adaptation of Pinocchio. A story he chose to push forward in time to World War 2 Italy under Benito Mussolini. Both being stories about the way growing up under dictatorship or, to some extent, just growing up in a authoritarian household in general, robs children of their childhood. Which, don't get me wrong, is a valid point to make. However, I will say Pinocchio, overall, worked for me, where Pan's Labyrinth didn't.
See, del Toro's Pinocchio feels very much in conversation with its source material. The original childrens book itself promoted a very authoritarian view on childhood. A child ought to heed their parents and teachers, learn discipline and obedience and be not corrupted by promises of easy wealth, pleasure or leasure, lest only misfortune awaits them. Del Toro's adaptation opted to challenge this moral, sending Pinocchio not to an island of pleasure where sinister figures corrupt children with fun and games to turn them into donkeys but instead to a military bootcamp to turn him into a soldier. The argument the director was making with his interpretation of the story was that violently forcing discipline and obedience onto children was, itself, a form of corruption. It doesn't make happy people or wise people or even productive people, unless all you're producing is violence, it makes people who die young for purposes they never learn to question.
Pan"s Labyrinth, to me, just never arrives at any kind of poignant point that would satisfyingly tie it together like that. It never moves much beyond "It sure is bleak for children to grow up like that" which, certainly, it is, I don't take issue with that. If I had to offer up my reading, I'd say that PL's core theme is that of defying authority, what ever victory Ophelia does manage to eke out, she does by contradicting the orders of the two authority figures left in her life (although there is another sequence earlier on where I'm hard pressed to see any way her disregarding the instructions she was given was justified or even, really, understandable) and it is implied that following her personal moral judgement rather than doing what she's told is the only reason she found salvation after sacrificing herself. That said though, let me be straight here, no matter how edgy and dark and goth you are, that kind of moral, "sacrifice yourself for the greater good" is just not one you should make when your protagonist is a child. Not to sound like I'm clutching my pearls here, but there's hardly a cause in the world great enough for a child to be asked to sacrifice their future over it, come on Guillermo.
All things considered, I had to think about Mirror Mask a couple of times, which might be a bad comparison because despite both of them being heavily stylized, vaguely goth fantasy movies about a young girl being taught harsh life lessons by fantastical creatures from another world reflecting her childlike imagination, Mirror Mask wasn't trying to go for outright tragedy the way this did. But also, that's kinda my point y'know. There's still too much whimsy, albeit dark whimsy, in PL's presentation to end on quite this fatalistic a note, there's a reason practically all other movies with this kind of premise at least end with the possibility that the children they follow have a future on this world to look forward to. It's funny because Mirror Mask's author, Neil Gaiman, turned out to be quite a vile customer while I have no reason to assume Guillermo del Toro is anything other than a perfectly decent fellow but if I was asked which of the two movies was written by a cynical, manipulative bastard I'd have guessed wrong.
But bear with me here, I'm not trying to drag Guillermo del Toro, I don't think that the problems I have with Pan's Labyrinth as a story have anything to do with any personal failings on his part, I just think it's a script that doesn't really come together, at least not for me. It feels like it could have used another draft or two for it to really come together. To actually tie its themes and ideas together into something that feels less awkward. Like most people, I do appreciate most of del Toro's visual style, some rather obnoxious colour filter nonwithstanding and I do think his interest in the unwarranted suffering of children comes from a place of genuine compassion, I just didn't really feel this compassion came through properly in Pan's Labyrinth.
