Superficial Spirits

Rating: 4/10 (14 January 2020)

I gave "The Shape of Water" (2017) high marks, but I'm not finding Guillermo del Toro to be a very interesting filmmaker as of yet despite the praise he receives from others. The same reservations I had for his Best Picture Oscar winner, I hold for this, "Pan's Labyrinth," but this earlier picture also lacks the reflexive inversion of a classic film (in that case, "Creature from the Black Lagoon" (1954) to partially make up for it. I held out hope, too, finally coming to this due to rumors of it sharing similarities with Lewis Carroll's Alice books, for which I've been seeking a bunch of related movies lately. Unfortunately, besides the rabbit-hole-like entries to a fantasy land, the dress and the business with small doors, "Pan's Labyrinth" doesn't really have anything to do with Alice's adventures; instead, it's a bland conflation of a generic fairy tale seemingly of del Toro's own design. Girl must solve quests given to her by a faun to become princess. I'm not counting it among the Alice films I've been collecting.
So, what does "Pan's Labyrinth" offer us, then? As in the rest of his oeuvre, the visuals and CGI impress, although they're darkly lit. But, the characterizations and storytelling is exceedingly simplistic. In the home-video commentary, del Toro valorizes the perspective of a child, which seems to be something he's unfortunately internalized. Consequently, there's no complexity, no nuance to his world. The baddies are bad and the goodies are good. The faun and ferries are supposedly a bit more ambiguous, but not by much. As in "The Shape of Water," there are nurturing mother figures, good spies, and Sergi López plays the same role here that Michael Shannon occupies in the later production, to play dastardly and even to be physically mutilated. In this one, even the fairytale magic and the historical drama hardly interact, although they're both juvenile visions lacking intricacy. The opposite of a labyrinth.
The framework on display here is too facile even for superhero fare, which is why his "Hellboy" movies suffered, too. Even there, he began to ground their narratives in other movies, by connection to Universal's classic monster movies, which may be one of the more obvious methods to enrich a picture, but it may be all that can be hoped for with a filmmaker of this limited of a vision. "The Shape of Water" may be the pinnacle of that, and I don't see where he can improve from there without altering this formula For Pan's Labyrinth, set directly after the Spanish Civil War, a conspicuous filmic precedent is "The Spirit of the Beehive" (1973), which is also about a child looking to fantasy to cope with the horrors of reality (in that case, through the classic "Frankenstein" (1931) film). "Beehive" is vastly more sophisticated than "Labyrinth," as well as visually richer. It engages intellectually by its oblique stance to its subject and earns its emotional appeals to the spectator by such depth. By contrast, this movie is simple, superficial and spiritless.