CS Weekly Archive > DVD > 06/01/07

The Story That Got Lost in the Labyrinth

By jason davis

While the fascists round up the last remnants of the republican resistance in 1944 Spain, a young girl delves into a fantastic world to learn the value of responsibility in Guillermo del Toro's alluring, but suspect, fairy tale for adults.

Pan's Labyrinth

Guillermo del Toro (also directed)

In 1944, a young girl named Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) moves with her pregnant mother Carmen (Ariadna Gill) to the country estate of her new stepfather Captain Vidal (Sergi López), an officer serving Francisco Franco's fascist regime. While Vidal hunts republican guerillas in the surrounding countryside, Ofelia is tasked by a magical faun (Doug Jones) to perform three tests to prove that she's the reincarnation of the legendary Princess Moanna, heir to the throne of the underworld. Initially simple and discreet stories, del Toro slowly entwines the two tales to juxtapose notions of right and wrong from child-like and adult perspectives to create a film-going experience that provokes contemplation, but fails to satisfy on a storytelling level.

Purely from a writing perspective, Pan's Labyrinth fails to deliver on the expectations of a story-seeking audience -- the essentially stock characters are without significant development, the script fails to deploy the fairy tale motif in any innovative or meaningful fashion, and the overwhelming mood of the piece takes precedence over any narrative momentum. In almost every respect, the writing isn't really up to snuff as a story and any appreciation of the picture resides on a purely aesthetic level distinct from the narrative.

A philosophical follow-up to del Toro's 2001 film El espinazo del Diablo (aka The Devil's Backbone), El laberinto del fauno (the filmmaker has stated that the faun is not the Greek god Pan, and thus the American title is a misnomer) places the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War in relief to a classic storytelling style. While Backbone used a ghost story to comment on the raging war, Labyrinth deploys the fairy tale to examine its aftermath. In both cases, a simplistic form of storytelling is paired with a complicated historical landscape presumably to create an emotional effect and explore a specific theme. The theme here is one of free will, with both Ofelia and a republican sympathizer within Vidal's household choosing to adhere to what they believe is right despite the consequences, as well as subsidiary characters facing the same decisions with mixed results. As a work of philosophy, the movie provokes contemplation of the issues it brings up, but fails to develop them in a dramatic fashion.

Where the film fails on a narrative level is that both rebellious characters are in a state of rebellion from the beginning and remain static at the story's end. There is no evolution. Though this would be an acceptable state of affairs in a painting or still photograph, it defies the standards of cinematic storytelling. The rules of the magical world are left to the viewer to establish, but an attempt at applying any sort of logic yields mixed results. There is evidence both to support and denounce the reality of Ofelia's fantasy world within the film, but del Toro never supplies enough direction to take one side or the other…or even enough to determine if the filmmaker is intentional in his mixed signals.

- Video prologue by del Toro
- Audio commentary by del Toro
- Marketing campaign
- "The Power of Myth" featurette
- "Pan and the Fairies" featurette
- "The Color and the Shape" featurette
- The Charlie Rose Show featuring del Toro with fellow filmmakers Alfonso Cuar&oactue;n and Alejandro González Iñárritu
- DVD comics featuring prequel stories for the fantasy characters
- Director's notebook
- Multi-angle storyboard comparison
- VFX plate comparison
- Galleries

Del Toro provides a thoughtful and detailed commentary that explores the development of the story as it evolved through his journals and production. An engaging episode of The Charlie Rose Show finds del Toro joined by the other bright lights of Mexican cinema to discuss their influences, shared ideas, and sense of community. The rest of the supplemental sections detail the work that goes into realizing the story from every disparate craft involved in filmmaking.

Though the narrative style is anything but labyrinthine, Pan's Labyrinth pairs the simplistic style of the fairy tale with a dark moment in recent history to convey a moralistic story that is compelling as a film experience while wholly unsatisfying as a story.

Pan's Labyrinth

New Line Home Video
Rated R; 119 min.
$34.98

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Jason Davis is the DVD Manager for CS Weekly , a contributing editor for Creative Screenwriting Magazine, and has written for Cinescape.com, MSN.com, and created the TV series Studio 13, which ran on Lorne Michaels' Burly TV network. He lives in the small space left over by his ever-expanding library of books, movies, and music.

Pan's Labyrinth courtesy New Line Home Video

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