Guillermo del Toro has an incredible talent for making almost great movies. Which is to say movies that are almost great, movies that feel like they're going to be great, but somehow fall short (the Hellboy movie suffers from the same affliction). Indeed, for most of Pan's Labyrinth I felt like I was watching a new classic; a movie to put on the shelf and watch again and again.
Unfortunately as beautifully designed as the sets and costumes were, as amazing as the performances are, and as incredibly realized and brought to life as the movie is by the effects team, it doesn't add up to anything more than a mish-mash of ideas. There's the systematic brutality of war vs. the uncontrolled violence of fairy tales; fascist obedience vs. the rebellion of the imagination; childhood idealism vs. adult cynicism; life and death; the arbitrariness of reality vs. the rules-making of stories; etc. etc. etc.
del Toro know his stuff and he talks a good game (in the DVD extras), and the images he has created for the film, including the giant frog, the pale man, and the faun itself are visually arresting, as are the horrific scenes of violence, and the monstrous face of the Captain after a particularly gruesome scene. He knows enough to talk about rules of three, and to site Bruno Bettelheim as an influence. It was also clever to design the faun as a green man or druidic oak king figure and therefore tie him to the more primordial and dark aspects of the Pan archetype.
In the story of Fascist Spain, I was interested by the design of the Captain's house with it's low, sweeping roof-line, surrounded by endless forest, and whose doors are guarded by enormous iron locks. In this fairy tale setting, the Captain becomes an analog for every evil king. He has captured the Queen and hopes to usurp her throne by replacing the true heir (Ofelia) with his own son (the baby brother who must be saved). In the end, he is transformed into a monster by the horrific wound on his face and he is destroyed, without a son to follow him or even the solace of a story to remember him.
Except that the fascist storyline never really parallels the fantasy world. There is is no allegory. The Captain and the world he represents are too insular, too self-regarding: representatives of the banality of evil and the everyday institutional violence of fearful governments besieged by rebellion and terror. When the captain kills the farmer and his son, he blames his lieutenants for their lack of bureaucratic thoroughness.
Meanwhile the frog king and the pale man seem to have no analogs in the main story either. They belong completely to the fantasy world of childhood fears and anxieties. More importantly, the Faun does not turn out to be evil as I suspected he might, but he is merely a servant doing his duty to the rules of the fairy world. He tests Ofelia not to push her along the path of maturity or to help her face the reality of her situation (which del Toro knows ought to be the "use" of this particular "enchantment"), but to draw her deeper into her delusional world of fantasy and escapism, and ultimately the death wish of transcendence.
And that's the real problem with the movie. Ofelia's quest and struggle does not make her stronger, it only allows her and the audience to accept the senselessness of her murder. She's in a better place, and the faun was there not only to lead her to her death, but to teach her the pointlessness of living. After all she's not a mortal, she's a princess of the underworld; a goth suicide girl.
This also highlights the limited perspective we get when our main character is a child. She is someone who can't see beyond her own self, her own situation, her own fears and desires. She is incapable of heroism because she is incapable, unlike Mercedes the servant, of actively engaging in the world and understanding its true dangers.
And it is Mercedes, in the end, who is the protagonist of the story (which gives the movie an interesting symmetry with the structure of To Kill a Mockingbird where Scout is the main character, her father is the protagonist, and Boo like the Faun is the spooky impact character). She is the one who has the bravery and the inner resolve to pursue her goals, face up to reality, fight for what she wants (literally with a pairing knife!), and provides the rebels with their final victory.
I think we are intended to see Mercedes and Ofelia as two sides of the same person, and here we have a missed opportunity. If Mercedes had been Ofelia's impact character, the you and I are alike person, the movie would have tied together the two storylines into a unified whole. What's missing is a scene or two to show that Mercedes knows about the magic kingdom, that she understands what Ofelia is going through and can help her complete her quest and grow up. If the two were linked, we would have seen more clearly the meaning of innocence and sacrifice in the ending: that Ofelia in her world was able to achieve her personal goal by refusing to sacrifice innocent blood (her baby brother's), while Mercedes in her goal to assist the rebels in the woods does sacrifice innocent blood. Yes, the captain and his men are destroyed, but in order to do so Ofelia was unprotected and ultimately sacrificed. This gives resonance not only to the fairy story but to the real world situation the very grown up ability to regret the unthinkable costs of war and revolution.
But in the end, Mercedes and Ofelia occupy separate worlds, and Ofelia's welcome into the underworld seems like a cheap cop-out next to the reality of war. What we get is a movie that is more violent than Reservoir Dogs, that features scenes of brutality and torture, and that in the end gives us a senseless scene of child murder justified by pseudo-history and cgi theatrics. It's a story for children that no child can watch, and a story for adults with no deeper meaning or greater understanding of the human cost of war. The story, as told, has no justification, and the movie is ultimately a very beautiful and thought-provoking failure.
