Don't Think, Just Watch

Okay, I hated Pan's Labyrinth.

I should have gleaned more from the words "fairy tale" that hovered around its publicity. What a fool! Instead I settled in to watch the story about a little girl going with her mother to stay at the country house of her mother's new husband, a rigid, militaristic, pro-Franco nightmare, without quite knowing where I was. But soon it became clear: The husband is not just humorless and cold, he's hateful and ruthless. The mother is gentle and helpless. The sad-eyed Mercedes, a household worker drooping around in a white shawl, is a supporter of the Resistance and heroic and doomed.

As it became clear that the characters were simplistically delineated Good or Bad, the way they would be in a children's fairy tale (but not one of the good ones) I felt let down, but the actress playing the little girl was very good and there was some good, tough dialogue. But then the little girl gets called on a quest by a supernatural praying mantis, it looks like, and she follows it down a winding stair, and then the worst thing possible happens. A shape transforms into a CGI'd gooey talking monster. At this point, I check out of any film. Talking monsters with gooey limbs have been stock creatures in boring movies for decades now. They couldn't be more played. Plus they're boring anyway. The little girl has to run back from the Underworld in time to beat a trickling hourglass -- something horrible and CGI'd is chasing her -- will she make it? Will she possibly make it in time? Since it's only 40 minutes into the movie, the answer is clear and the suspense entirely bogus.

I find all this super tiresome. If I had a child by my side, maybe I could suffer through it, though it would be more fun if Mike Myers was in it. I was happy whenever the movie's story left the scary underworld and went back to the adult plot, which involved a cadre of Resistance fighters who are camped near the scary stepfather's house so they can get supplies. But there was something uninspired about the way these characters were portrayed, too. None became a full person, they were Types. And why characterize them deeply? It's clear what's going to happen to them. Might they also not meet an awful fate, since they are camped so near the human embodiment of evil? Why, they might!

Plus it isn't realistic that a girl of 11 or 12 can crawl through a tunnel with cockroaches the size of large dominoes clambering over her arms, neck and even face. Why doesn't she run screaming? What little girl could brush a giant cockroach off her face with just a little shake of annoyance? This ruins the suspension of disbelief still further. But really it's the gooey monsters. To me, they're strictly kids stuff. If they're in a movie, I want to leave, and I did leave Pan's Labyrinth after an hour and 10 minutes. Grumpily going home, I searched the Onion for the review that had led me to believe I might like it -- I read "The second hour is a magnificent demonstration of how the personal affects history." Crumb. Maybe I bailed at exactly the second it got really good. But after that first hour, how good could it get?