Critical Labyrinth

Why the excess of critical love for Pan’s Labyrinth? The film’s current Metacritic score is a stupendous 98 (higher than almost any film of 2006)), with the majority of critics positively dazzled by the splendor and political allusions of this dark fantasia. And no doubt, Del Toro’s film is a ghoulish visual feast; his eye for the golden-hued worlds of myth and legend is basically unmatched in current filmmaking. The refinement of his visual sense is really rather incredible. In some ways, Del Toro resembles a Mexican Jean-Pierre Jeunet, except he replaces Jeunet’s bleakly comic quirkiness with a more melancholy spirit. Here, though, that spirit tends to drag the movie down, keeping it slow and not entirely engaging, letting its parallel storylines languish in partial disconnection.

More pointedly, at least with regard to the general critical reaction, is that Del Toro’s penchant for simplistic narratives and characters works much better in pulpier genre fare like Mimic and the vastly underrated Hellboy, and comes off especially bad in light of the film’s flirtations with history and politics. As Ross Douthat smartly notes in his review in the latest print edition of National Review (sorry, subscriber only—but subscribe!):

You’d have to be pretty thick not to realize that del Toro intends the fairyland narrative — heavy with arbitrary commands, underground abattoirs, and intimations of blood sacrifice — as a commentary on the politics at work in the real-world storyline, and this realization has sent many critics into raptures over the film’s supposed political sophistication. Hence, for instance, Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern’s announcement that Pan’s Labyrinth “deepens our emotional understanding of fascism, and of rigid ideology’s dire consequences.”

This is, of course, precisely what the movie doesn’t do. López makes what he can of the character of Vidal, turning a cardboard villain into a memorable monster, but the film’s politics are about as deep as a puddle of blood. The fascists are beasts who torture, maim, and kill without compunction, before sitting down to fine dinners with local grandees and corrupt clerics; the Communists in the woods, on the other hand, are a heroic lot, sturdy and kindhearted and ethically pure, like figures out of, well, Communist propaganda. The only thing such caricatures deepen is our understanding of predictable left-wing bias in Western cinema.

I’m glad I saw the movie, and it certainly serves as a potent reminder of Del Toro’s visual panache, but I think he’s better suited to directing films that don’t require such subtlety. I’d love to see him, for example, take on the Greek myths, with their larger-than-life heroes and villains and gods. These stories would be far better fits for his all-or-nothing approach to character and story, and would better match the unrestrained grandiosity of his visuals.