This lushly inventive and moving fable, set in Francoist Spain during World War II, tries to pull off the combining of fantasy and harsh, relentless wartime reality, and the result is entirely that of its director, Guillermo del Toro, whose international career has been pockmarked with stories of monsters and crawlers in the darkness. The film is filled with his signature costumes and a sincerity of feeling for the childhood experience of curiosity and wonder—even if this curiosity tends to become noxious. The critical issue of Pan’s Labyrinth, an emotive, vigorous, and slightly shallow recreation of its period, is not whether this peculiar combining of fantasy and reality works well enough to hold up the story (it does this very well), but whether this ploy contains the dynamism and subtlety of character making it more than moving, a reflection of human life that fantasy illumines rather than exploits. I think it fails on this account, in spite of all that is authentic and moving, as well as visually captivating, in so renowned and beloved a film.
A girl whose mother has remarried a military man of the Francoist regime, Ofelia experiences the first chords of an enchantment surrounded by chaos and war as they arrive at the garrison to which her stepfather, the brutal and vicious captain, has spirited them to preserve the prenatal health of his child. She chases a persistent insect into a labyrinth in the forest, becoming riveted by its austere and foreboding ancientness. This insect later leads her into the labyrinth where a faun, played with an eccentric reservation by Doug Jones, takes her for a princess of the underworld, and assigns her three tasks intended to verify that she is the hallowed princess. Unfolding in tandem with the bob and weave of the captain’s efforts to uproot the rebels concealed by the surrounding forest, this childhood fantasy pushes Ofelia through the tasks assigned to her, so that the two side-by-side plots come to a head in the final scenes.
The character of the captain, Vidal, played by Sergi López with a compacted face like that of a bulldog, is the vicious leader in those harsh realities alongside which the fantasy takes place. Although his character is believable as a vengeful and merciless man of the regime, it is characteristic of the film that his evil is unsubtle and contemptible, eliciting emotions that play off the all-too-easy dichotomy of innocence and fascism. His ignominious destiny is one that rouses no more interest in his character than in the machinations of his dutiful, stolid underlings.
Of the many servants toiling at the garrison, the film highlights the doctor and the housekeeper, Mercedes, as the notable secondary characters. The doctor, played by the late Álex Angulo, has a moving (and predictable) moment betraying his allegiance before he dies, and Maribel Verdú as Mercedes is the most interesting character in the film, a line-crossing housekeeper whose brother is a rebel. But their development and significance as characters are sidelined by the more potent and attractive fantasies of Ofelia, and it is in these fantasies that the film achieves its groove with majestic invention. In spite of its imperfect paralleling of the wartime reality, the fantasy achieves some kind of innocent coherence that is more emotive and moving than it has any right to be; that it could pull off this fable of innocence, however imperfectly, is a testament to the skill and uniqueness that make it worthwhile viewing.
Enchantment and visual extravagance suffuse the fantasy, and these are definite assets compensating for what is lacking in the story. Playing both the Faun and the Pale Man, Doug Jones gives an impressive performance, and in spite of his being dubbed by another actor in the final cut, his dedication to inhabiting his roles and the elaborate costumes was no small contribution to the success of Pan’s Labyrinth. The imaginative imagery of those characters, the latter of whose eyes attach to its hands, can be as disturbing as it is delightful—and one must be grateful to the director and his collaborators all the more for it.
The many virtues of Pan’s Labyrinth compensate for its imperfections and shallowness, conveying the resonance of the moving fable, its tragedy of the harshness and cruelty of life smothering a childlike, vestal innocence that seems too fine and beautiful for the world, with the haunting power of night shadows and saber-toothed fairies.
