Clever pretenses but shallow and insincere

Rating: 6/10 (30 November 2008)

Synopsis: In 1944, against the backdrop of the rise of General Franco's fascist regime, a young girl on the verge of adolescence, tries to dodge the fears of growing and horrors of the historical moment through her magical fantasies.
While El Laberinto del Fauno definitely shows that the director has some skills (as it kept me involved for all of its duration), it's quite disappointing in itself. Why is that? The bulk of the film is about the horrors of reality, however those are depicted through extremely graphic gory sequences which do nothing to convey the plain, blunt, basic nature of true life horrors, because they all revolve around the figure of fascist Captain Vidal, who is basically manically depressed, a psychopath, and whose overstated displays of violence are really of no purpose in themselves, other than making it obvious for the most distracted viewer how sick the man is (and just look how much emphasis was put on the discovery of the connection between the doctor and the communists, it's like they're assuming you're not paying attention.) At some point the recurring, unnecessary outing of Vidal's sadistic personality started to feel trite, effectively neutralizing the power of the representation through desensitization.
In the end, the depiction of the fascist regime appears flat, simplistic and two-dimensional, too much like a kid's vision of history, bad vs good, black and white - almost Stephen King-ish in its oversimplification.
On the topic of the role of holocaust in movies (and anything else resembling that): every piece of film which deals, even remotely, with it, inevitably clads itself in self-importance, expecting the viewer to accept whatever is shown on the silver screen with a nod and utter respect for the sorrows the victims of those historical moments had to endure. So let me state this again: no matter the respect we owe to those victims, by no means your movie has a right to have this respect trasferred upon itself, unless it's _thoroughly_ _deserved_.
El laberinto is clever in sidestepping the overused holocaust focusing instead on a part of history which is connected to it but mostly unknown outside Europe. If El Laberinto had been any good in offering a believable representation of this close-to-forgotten memory, it would have restored it, thus gaining a right to be lauded, but as it is, it just used the historical backdrop to gain undeserved recognition, the filmic equivalent of an attention whore.
The fantasy parts, which revolve instead around the labyrinth and his ambiguous guardian, the faun, offer much more space for subtleties, which is quite likely an intended inversion of attributes, though lacking the flair Tim Burton has for this kind of device, and as a result this ambiguity feels only necessary to make the cardboard reality part more acceptable, but useless in itself. Subtleties for the subtlety's sake. The fantasy parts also come out as more genuinely disturbing than Vidal's outbursts.
A wealth of little details has been disseminated in the script, but not enough attention has been spent on interweaving them with the plot in a meaningful way. They just look a lot like the icing on the cake: 'look mommy how deep I am' rather than a functional part of story telling.
All of these elements persuaded me that El Laberinto is narcissistic exercise where all the movie maker has been thinking - You'll *have* to notice how good I am! - and for this very same reason ends up being shallow and fake, lacking a core of truthfulness.
PS: and for the 20+ minutes of standing ovation, either it was staged or a fantasy with no more substance to it than the ones of the main character.