Pan's Labyrinth

“Twas brillig and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: / All mimsy were the borogoves, / And the mome raths outgrabe.” - Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)

This first stanza of Carroll’s infamous poem “The Jabberwocky” caused his young protagonist Alice to exclaim, “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas - only I don’t know exactly what they are!” An initial glance at this poem would undoubtedly cause a similar reaction in baffled readers. Yet on closer inspection, one realizes that this fantastical garble is made from bits and pieces of actual words - for example, “mimsy” is derived from miserable, and “borogove” is an extinct parrot. The fragments of reality Carroll hid within his gloriously nonsensical prose made the ideas and imagery they addressed resonate all the more. And this is precisely the kind of bewilderingly clever magic writer/director Guillermo del Toro creates with his wondrous new film, Pan’s Labyrinth.

A simple synopsis of the film makes it sound like a straightforward derivation of Alice in Wonderland. A young girl named Ofelia, played by the phenomenally natural 11-year-old Ivana Baquero, travels with her pregnant mother to northern Spain, where she will meet her new stepfather. He turns out to be the sadistic Capitan Vidal, brilliantly portrayed by Sergi Lopez, who breathes fearsome life into the most singularly hateable character in recent film memory. Faced with a new life of “mimsy” at Vidal’s fascist military outpost, Ofelia is desperate for an escape, and on one particular night, “escape” finds her. Ofelia is beckoned into the surrounding forest by a mysterious faun - Doug Jones - who claims that she embodies the lost spirit of a princess. This sets her off on a perilous adventure where she encounters the nightmarish beasts and unspeakable evil of both worlds - the real and imaginary - while discovering that she may have the power to heal their considerable wounds.

Such a verbal description can only hint at the notes, not the music, of del Toro’s genius. What makes his film extraordinary is how its story marries together the childlike awe of timeless fantasy with the uncompromising brutality of historical wartime fiction. Set in 1944, when Spain was reeling from postwar fascist repression, the film uses entirely fictional plot elements to communicate the true-life terror and inhumane nature of the period. Vidal relishes in the torture of rebels who resist his reign, which appears to be unstoppable even as a growing number of guerrillas secretly infiltrate his headquarters, led by the Capitan’s chief housekeeper Mercedes - Meribel Verdu. Alice’s bitter reply to the Queen of Hearts, “All ways are your ways your majesty,” can almost be heard echoing in the distance. By seamlessly juxtaposing fantasy with reality, the film makes fascism seem as grotesque of an absurdist curiosity as the eye-popping creatures Ofelia confronts. Like Carroll’s classic work, del Toro’s film allows its fragments of tragic reality to resonate on an unforgettable level, by concealing them within an exhilarating fantasia.

The thrilling majesty of del Toro’s fantasy sequences are unlike anything seen in recent film history. When Ofelia encounters the Pale Man - also Jones - a child-killing abnormality whose eyeballs reside in the palms of its hands, there’s such palpable fear and tension that it giddily exorcizes the inner-spooked child out of the most jaded adult audience member. Though the film’s violence is brutally graphic, and earns the film’s hard R-rating, it is also completely justifiable within the context of the story’s cautionary intentions. Javier Navarrete’s score is as breathtakingly haunting as the astounding visuals, and the human characters are every bit the equal of the fantastical creatures.

Pan’s Labyrinth is a masterpiece. In a year where two other gifted Mexican filmmakers, and long-time friends of del Toro, offered films as ambitious as they were visceral - namely Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Babel and Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men - this film towers above them both. It is as imaginative a fantasy as Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, as devastating a historical drama as Schindler’s List, and as thrilling a work of art as any film released this year. Roger Ebert has often said that it “isn’t sadness that touches me the most in a movie, but goodness.” There is a universe of sadness in Pan’s Labyrinth, yet it is the pure innocence and benevolent determination of Ofelia which motivate her to make a pivotal decision, late in the film, that is more profoundly moving than any bloodshed or horror. This is the best film of 2006.

Rating: ***** (out of *****)