Cinema Vitæ

Once again, I’ve missed something. Here’s a film which has spellbound fantasy film fans and aroused hope in the hearts of many Hobbit lovers that director Guillermo Del Toro will do right by that classic Tolkien tale. I just don’t see it. Yes, Pan’s Labyrinth has amazing art direction and a wonderful Goya-esque quality, and these are perhaps worthy enough elements to excite a Hobbit fanatic, but I felt Del Toro left little to the imagination in his “real world” scenes.

Now, I credit myself as a sophisticated individual who doesn’t get all bent out of shape over violence, foul language, or sexual content in his films, but truthfully I have little patience for anything graphic that does not serve a purpose. To Del Toro’s credit, the extreme violence in this picture does have a point (to show Captain Vidal’s ruthlessness), but Del Toro chooses an atomic bomb where a hand grenade would have done the trick.

Why do directors so often insist on showing their audiences every dot and tittle thereby eliminating one of their strongest cinematic allies — the viewer’s imagination? Spielberg got it right in Jaws and Shyamalan balanced it perfectly in The Village, but Del Toro misses his chance here. Well, you say, Spielberg and Shyamalan made those choices to induce fear while Del Toro had something else in mind. Perhaps, but at the end of the day wasn’t the point to establish that Captain Vidal was a mean character who wrought fear in the hearts of his men and particularly in young Ofelia? The film’s violence actually became a point of distraction for me as Del Toro attempted to one-up himself on how gruesome he could make the next action taken by his tyrannical antagonist. Less would have most certainly been more here.

Violence aside, the story mostly works and the whole creative team from make-up to costume design to cinematography do an amazing job of creating a brown canvas that serves as the perfect backdrop for the periodic sparkles of color that show up now and then throughout the course of the film (especially in the fantasy scenes).

I hardly feel comfortable recommending Pan’s Labyrinth due to its excessive violence; yet, for those viewers who love fantasy or have a particular passion for Francisco Goya, you could do far worse than this film.