Pan's Labryinth 2: The Legend of Handsy Eyes' Gold

Pan's Labyrinth
(Guillermo Del Toro, 2006)

Marge: Did anybody see that new Woodsy Allen movie?
Flanders: Y'know, I like his movies, except for that nervous fella that's always in 'em.

Handsy Eyes

To say that I would have liked to have seen Pan's Labyrinth in the hands of another director is not fair. Written and directed by Guillermo Del Toro, it is his story to tell. Who am I to take that away from him?

Some asshole with internet access. That's who.

I am told that Pan's Labyrinth is the most beautiful, wrenching film of the year. And I see how it could be. In war torn Spain, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) accompanies her widowed mother to the outpost of Captain Vidal (Sergi López), Ofelia's new stepfather and a herald of the newly empowered fascist regime. As Vidal quashes a noble rebellion, Ofelia becomes embroiled in the magical world of the forest around the outpost, in which a woodland faun tasks her with proving herself the heiress of a fantastical birthright.

Intellectually, I love this film. What's not to love? It's got beautiful production design, fine performances, it respects the intelligence of its audience (and by intelligence, I mean ability to watch people get stabbed), and it's all in the service of decrying blind obedience. Sold!

I'm torn, though. I wonder if the film is too territorial about its R rating (or the Spanish equivalent). This is fantasy strictly for adults, made so by the gruesome nature of the war around Ofelia. Vidal smashes skulls in, defiles corpses, and uses his pistol as casually as a flyswatter. Kudos for pulling no punches in a film that's about the brutality of fascism, but there is little here in the way of economy. When we are shown Vidal's violence once, it is all we need to inform the rest of the piece. But Vidal never stops, and he is dangerously close to becoming cartoonishly evil throughout, even tinkering in his lab like a mad scientist. The film seeks to take fantasy out of the realm of children, and it is often succesful. But the brutality of the film sometimes feels like its overcompensating, replacing a psychological depth that would truly speak to the adult viewer with the gratuitous violence that only adults are allowed to watch. "This is for adults! Of course it is, can't you see all the blood?"

I think I would forgive all of this if the film were a little less clean. From a design standpoint, the Faun is a complete triumph. But in terms of cinematography, the film is just... there. Here is a film that is being hailed as the most visually inventive fantasy film since The Wizard Of Oz, and to me it looked like it was shot by CSI's 2nd unit crew. (This is also a criticism I would level against Del Toro's Hellboy, which took a gloriously murky comic book and turned it into a slick, Hollywood shell of a film). In a year in which Children Of Men shows us just what a dynamic camera can do to an audience, Pan's Labyrinth doesn't even opt for an minimalist cinematography; it's too clean and self-aware to be invisible, too boring to be evocative.

I'll say this; it takes a special filmmaker to make his or her own film exactly the way he or she wants to make it, based on no pre-existing properties, strictly from his or her own mind, and make a film that is not a failure but a disappointment. If that makes any sense. I think it does.

Note: The film is being sold on the back of Handsy Eyes, that ghoulish imp who shows up in all of the press material. And Handsy Eyes is terrifying. That is not in question.