DEL TORO ROUNDTABLE: PAN'S LABYRINTH

After making two films in Hollywood, Guillermo Del Toro went to Spain to make his most well regarded film, Pan's Labyrinth, a remarkable fantasy film again dealing with the Spanish Civil War. I'm Loren Greenblatt and joining me for this discussion is Max O'Connell of The Film Temple. 

Max O’Connell: Loren, shall I play the tune?

Loren Greenblatt: Please don't, Javier Navarette's score is like the E.T. score, I cry every time I hear the first few bars of it. 

MO: I think this is Del Toro's best film, by considerable margin.

LG: This is not a guy who’s pumped out a lot of weak films, but I’d have to agree. This feels like a culmination of many things. It’s very much a companion-piece to The Devil’s Backbone. He calls it the “sister” film to the earlier “brother” film. The both deal extensively with the Spanish Civil War, and with children trying to make sense of a violent world around them. The film plays with reality and fantasy, and how they mix in messy ways. In centers on Ofelia, played wonderfully by Ivana Baquero. Her father has died, and her mother is marrying a fascist army officer Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez) who, I’m going to go out on a limb here, is evil.

MO: He’s very frightening. Lopez is known as a comedic actor, but I wouldn’t know it watching this. He’s the ultimate button-down monster.

LG: She marries him out of pragmatism- it’s 1944, so she needs to do something to support her daughter. But her daughter is upset by this, and the captain doesn’t care about her at all. She has to call him “father”, which hurts her. And she’s very much an outsider. Like Del Toro, she’s very bookish, very in her own head, and her mother doesn’t approve of her fascination with fairytales. The fascist army captain will not stand for her imagination, which leads to her retreating into a fantasy world, but that world is almost as dark as the one around her.

MO: There are two schools of thought as to whether or not the fantasy world is real. It could be her trying to process the horrible world around her, or it could be real.

LG: Del Toro believes it is real, though obviously that doesn’t settle the matter because art is something that happens with the viewer, not the creator. Either way, it works, and it works beautifully. I really like that when she sees bugs, she sees them as fairies in disguise. It’s a great childlike wonder at the real world, but it also ties into Del Toro’s own fascination with both bugs and fairies.

MO: She meets a faun, who is not Pan, we’ll stress that right now. In America the film is called Pan’s Labyrinth, but everywhere else it’s called The Labyrinth of the Faun. Del Toro thinks Pan is too much of a sexual character for a film like this, where this faun is very much a part of nature. He’s of the trees, he looks like a tree…Del Toro’s mentality for creature design is absolutely amazing.

LG: The faun tells her that she’s a princess of a forgotten underground kingdom, but she needs to prove her purity with a series of tasks. It’s fairytale stuff, but it’s very old-school fairytale stuff before it became sanitized.

MO: And it’s very important that the purity thing is stressed, because the fairytale parallel to the fascist world is that both the real monsters and the fantastical monsters believe in eugenics. Vidal says they have to kill all the vermin, the communists, and the weaklings, and the faun claims that her essence has to be pure.

LG: Though ultimately it’s a test of her will and goodness in the fantasy realm rather than anything racial…unless we find out in Pan’s Labyrinth 2 that she’s just in another fascist regime.

MO: (depressed) I don’t want to think about that…

LG: The tasks are dark, violent, and frightening, just as dark as the captain’s attempts to stamp out the anti-fascist rebels living in the woods near his home. The captain is Del Toro’s ultimate distillation and criticism of macho culture. He’s a cold, cruel, violent man who wants everything on his schedule. He practically tells his new wife the hour that she is to give birth, and that it had better be a boy.

MO: He’s a very prideful man, and it must be emphasized. One of the characters in the film, his maid Mercedes (Maribel Verdu, excellent as the only person who understands Ofelia), helps the resistance against the fascists, but Vidal doesn't suspect her because she’s a woman. He doesn’t consider her a threat, which is part of his undoing. And when the doctor, also a resistance member, asks him how he knows his child will be a boy, his response is a very curt “Don’t fuck with me”.

LG: If there is a flaw in the film, it’s that he’s cartoonishly evil. Del Toro is usually pretty good at giving us some sympathetic villains but not here. The only thing missing is a scene where he drowns some puppies while singing “Everything's Coming Up Roses”.

MO: I think that was deleted for time’s sake.

LG: I don’t think this is a terrible thing, since it is an allegory against fascism and machismo, which go very well together, but the fascist macho villain in The Devil’s Backbone is more understandable even if he’s venal.

MO: I’m going to go against that a little bit. Lopez talked in an interview about the character’s father, who Vidal says died in Ethiopia during battle and smashed his watch on a rock so his son would know the exact time of his death, and that he died as a man. That has affected who he is. Lopez has stressed that this doesn’t justify any of his behavior, but that terrible ghost of his father has formed who he is. That’s why the eventual rebuke of him is so moving. We’ll get to that.

LG: Time and memory are huge themes here.

MO: He’s very much the clockwork, mechanical man of horror movie lore.

LG: Oh, absolutely, he’s a less literal monster cousin to Kroenen in Hellboy. Memory is a strong theme here. Ofelia is a princess who doesn’t remember she’s a princess. The captain is obsessed with being remembered as a strong man and fathering a male heir to carry on his legacy. That’s why it’s so important that (spoilers) when Mercedes kills him at the end, he tries to tell her to inform his son the hour at which he died, and that he died as a man, but she cuts him off, saying “No. He won't even know your name”.

MO: Which is what’s so moving about it. His son will not be affected by the same horrible culture that shaped him.

LG: Yes, the son will escape, the chain will be broken! It was definitely an applause moment when I saw it in the theater. Also on the memory front, there’s a point where Ofelia fails a test, and the faun threatens her with being forgotten forever when she eventually dies. And at the end of the film, when she’s rewarded, she’s rewarded with being remembered and immortal. This ties in with her fear of abandonment- she’s close to her mother, but her mother is trying in her own way to stamp out her bookishness. She’s been affected by this fascist government, and she’s pushing against her own humanity, which is going to make her less susceptible to the charms of her daughter’s imagination and cause a rift between them. Fascism makes people pragmatic about survival. The other thing about fascism is that the captain is a clockwork man who’s very obedient- he’s a man who can obey just for the sake of obeying orders. And at the end of the film, Ofelia is presented with the exact same choice.

MO: Which comes from the faun. There’s a lot of ambivalence regarding that character. He’s very charming, but there’s something sinister about him.

LG: The faun demands that she do a terrible thing- namely, draw blood from her newborn brother- and do it without question. Draw the blood from an innocent for your own benefit, basically. And chooses to not answer blindly, that she can’t obey for the sake of it. That’s the moral punchline of the film. It’s a rebuke of fascism made fantastical.(end spoilers)

MO: We should state that as with many Del Toro films, this plays with Catholic imagery and ideas. Del Toro is very anti-authoritarianism, so there’s some things about organized religion, particularly Catholicism, that he pushes back against. It’s stressed that much of fascist Spain manipulates religion as a way to go back to tradition and order. When the fascists are passing out bread and food as rations, they call it “Our Daily Bread of Spain”, which is a quotation from the Our Father prayer. I think that’s a very Bunuel thing to do to use Catholic imagery as a rebuke against authority. There’s also a scene with a dinner at Vidal’s place, and notably there’s a priest there on Vidal’s side.

LG: And at the end of the film, when we see the fantasy kingdom, there’s a big cathedral window behind the throne. This is a film that pushes against authority in a way that makes me think it would have been considered a very subversive and controversial film had it been made in the 1950s. Now, politically, we’re in a very different place, but spirit of film still works amazingly.

MO: Interesting you should say that, though, regarding the politics, since most of my conservative friends really, really hate this movie. I don’t know what’s up with that. But regarding religion, Del Toro has referred to this as one of his many lapsed Catholic films, but his friend, fellow director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel) considers this a very Catholic film, which makes sense. If you’ve seen the (often labored) Christ allegories in Inarritu’s work, you’d note that he’s very into martyrdom, and that’s here. Even if Del Toro is pushing against the order part of the religion, he’s still somewhat in tune with the spirituality of it. And I’ll go back to that Capra saying that Christianity is about second chances- we get second chances all throughout this film.

LG: Yeah, and when asked to explain the ending of the film, Del Toro offered up a Kierkegaard quote: “A tyrant’s reign ends with death, but a martyr’s reign starts with death”. That’s basically what happens here.

(lets just assume spoilers from here on out)

MO: If you believe in the fantasy ending, she gets to live forever in the fantasy realm with her family forever. If you believe in the afterlife, she lives there. And there are traces of her left behind on earth. There’s a moving final shot of a flower blooming at the end. But she’s not the only martyr- the doctor refers to himself as a coward, since he’s trying to stay alive even as he fights for a lost cause. But by the end he redeems himself. He helps a man Vidal is torturing by putting him out of his misery, and Vidal kills him for it, but he’s remembered as a man who fought for good. Same with the rest of the rebels, all of whom are fighting for a lost cause. It’s a moving parable about those who fight against authoritarian governments.

LG: Now Del Toro has always been enamored with fairytales, and his best films work somewhat as fairytales. We do get a lot of repeating task elements, but also in the reality segments, we get examples. She has to defeat monsters, retrieve keys from mystical places, but she’s also stuck in real life with the evil stepparent archetype.

MO: There’s also use of threes- three days for her to complete the tasks, three tasks to complete…

LG: And during the second task, she’s presented with three locks and guided by three fairies. We should talk a little bit about the tasks. The first task doesn’t seem so difficult, but it is horrifying and claustrophobic and gross. She has to climb into a tree and feed three stones to a monstrous frog to retrieve a key. She does it easily, but it’s creepy, and she ruins a nice dress and shoes that were important gifts to her. And as she goes further on in the tasks, the fantasy world and the real world around her get darker.

MO: It’s important to note how the first task ties into the real world- the fascists are preparing for a dinner, and it’s been stressed throughout the film how little food there is for everyone in the country. Vidal has killed a couple of peasants for no reason because they crossed him- they were hunting rabbits for a sick daughter, and he kills them with a bottle of wine (food, plus more Catholic imagery). It’s very gruesome, but it’s also pointed in the way he’s able to take what little food they have and use it himself. These are tiny rabbits, and he basically demands that they still use them. And when it gets to the lavish dinner, where there’s a bunch of Bunuel-esque horrible rich people, the toad serves as a parallel for their gluttony. He’s a monstrous figure that’s killed a once beautiful tree.

LG: The frog has to be made to regurgitate what he’s eaten to free the tree- a pretty fantastic parallel for fascism’s effect on Spain.

MO: There are some people, even those who loved the film, who took it down a notch for saying how the fantasy sequences don’t always tie in neatly with the reality sequences, but that’s complete bull. It might be hard to spot the first time around, but it’s a very well-structured film.

LG: In between, her mother gets very sick and develops complications during the pregnancy, and she hears Vidal say that if it’s between the mother and kid, he wants his son to live. Ofelia overhears this and is terrified, and she has to wonder what’ll happen to her if her mother dies, because Vidal gives zero shits about her. She’ll end up in an orphanage or worse. She goes to the second task, and the important thing to remember here is that after she ruined her dress in the first task, she was forced to go to bed without supper, so she’s hungry. She has to go into a room where an ogre called the Pale Man lives.

MO: It’s a terrifying creature. This film is part fantasy, part horror, and here’s where the horror kicks in. This is one of the most frightening scenes I’ve seen in a film. It had me panicking in the theater.

LG: Ofelia is told to take the key, open a lock, and get something (a knife), and to not touch the bounty of food on the table. Ofelia is eleven, and she’s hungry. So being a typical, hungry eleven year old, she makes the mistake of eating the Pale Man’s food. How is he gonna know anyway? The Pale Man has no eyes in his face.

MO: His eyes are on the table, and for the holes in his face, he could maybe fit them if he really pushed them in, but that’s not what they’re for. They’re nostrils.

LG: And as soon as she touches the food, his hands jolt, and he puts his eyes into his hands and holds them up to see. It is an amazing creature.

MO: Doug Jones plays the creature, he’s a fantastic physical actor (and a fellow Ball State alum, woo!, where he started his costume-acting career as the mascot Charlie Cardinal), and he has a real gift for playing under heavy makeup and with unusual movement, which serves the creatures well. There’s also a nice subtle link between the Pale Man and the faun, as Jones plays both. This monster is maybe controlled by the faun- they’re perhaps of the same piece.

LG: There is a lot of questions about the faun. When Ofelia tells Mercedes about the faun, she says that “My mother always said to beware of fauns”, and there is a sense that the faun is a questionable figure. We don’t know how much he’s pulling the strings.

MO: It’s one of the seductive things about this fractured fairytale. Just like her mother is tempted with care by the fascists, Ofelia’s been tempted by care by the fantasy world, so long as she doesn’t question anything. She’s tempted with all of these things. And the table of food in the Pale Man’s lair looks like the most delicious feast ever. It’s a nice symbol for all of the riches that could come with fascism, horrible consequences be damned.

LG: It does very much mirror a real world dinner we see earlier. And I love that when she looks up, she sees these murals of the Pale Man cooking, eating, and tearing apart children like herself. And I love the way she gets into the room- through a magic piece of chalk straight out Looney Tunes short “Duck Amuck!,” honestly. It’s a wonderful, whimsical fantasy element in the midst of this dark world.

MO: Gilliam would approve, I think. And I read that the Pale Man was influenced by the paintings of Goya, which I can absolutely see.

LG: Del Toro is one of those guys who will tie his monster movie love into the fine arts. He cites Goya as an influence on his upcoming Godzilla-ish movie Pacific Rim, seriously. He is the poet laureate of monster movies. One of the things I noticed is that Del Toro plays around with her id his look. He's still working with cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, but he tones down his split-tone lighting and uses more color filters. It’s no less distinctive, but it is a stylistic shift. And since he worked with Mike Mignola on Hellboy, it affected his style. Moments look like Mignola artwork, like the bright-yellow against black fascist symbols on the cars, which is period-accurate but photographed like Mignola work.

MO: And at the end, there’s a bit of split-tone lighting as the fascist camp burns, it’s orange against blue. And it’s beautiful carnage as the captain’s empire crumbles right around him.

LG: And I think that’s influenced by Mignola as well. It is nice to see this bit of a fusion between personalities. It shows that artists can evolve. And I’m glad that the film is less flashy with the split-tone lighting. This is his most character-based film, and it’s his most intimate. There’s enough flash in the fantasy sequences, so I’m glad he didn’t use the split-tone lighting for the most part. It wouldn’t have worked.

MO: Del Toro has always been good at set-pieces, but here’s where he really reaches his peak. Hitchcock would be proud. Even the more normal scenes have heightened tension. There are a few sequences of Vidal shaving that show the camera panning around the room, which reminds us of the clockwork man thing, and the edits bring us closer and closer to him in a very subtle, terrifying way.

LG: Yeah, Del Toro constantly has Vidal adjusting his watch in the film, and the office is actually designed like the inside of his watch. With the shaving scenes, it’s a bit of foreshadowing as he looks in the mirror and tries to cut his reflection’s face. It’ll come in later, but for now it’s just a wonderful, bizarre flourish. It’s like his bloodlust is so strong that he has to imagine hurting even himself.

MO: There are other moments like that. The reveal of the faun, for example, shows Ofelia going into the labyrinth, and we see this thing that looks like a tree…until it moves. It’s a bit of a nice jolt. Del Toro also knows how to use casting to his advantage in a suspense scene.

LG: Yeah, early in the film, we see one of the rebels has a stutter, and he ends up getting caught by Vidal later on. The guy has a weak chin, which makes him seem weaker (sorry, people with weak chins!).

MO: It gets some vulnerable stuff with him, and the way Del Toro drags out that scene is great. Vidal tells him he’ll let him go…if he can count to three without a stutter (more threes). And the moment seems like an eternity as he almost makes it to three, but of course it doesn’t work.

LG: Del Toro also really brings in his Cronenberg influence rather well.

MO: There are some gooey moments that are fun, like the frog…

LG: But mostly we’re getting stuff that’s going to make us want to look away, like Vidal smashing a guy’s face in with a bottle of wine, or the cut in Vidal’s face that looks like the classic Man Who Laughs character (later an inspiration for The Joker). And because he’s a macho man, he has to sew it up himself!

MO: And drink liquor to dull the pain, which if you’ve got a big cut on your face is a really bad idea, but it gives us another visceral moment of violence to react to. But Del Toro also knows how to refrain from violence. He knows not to actually show the bullet hitting Ofelia when Captain Vidal shoots her.

LG: Oh yeah, that would’ve been tasteless. We instead see her reaction, and as she brings her blood-covered hand up, we get enough.

MO: And the way Del Toro sets up the Pale Man scene is just masterful. We have a time limit for her being in his lair before the door closes and she’s stuck with him. It’s running out, and as she runs away from the monster, the chalk breaks, and Del Toro really waits till the last second before seeing her to safety. There’s an anecdote that Del Toro showed the film to Stephen King, who looked physically upset by the scene.

LG: When you’ve upset Stephen King with your horror movie, you’ve done your job right. I imagine that made Del Toro happy for weeks. He said it was like winning the Oscar…which he actually should have won.

MO: It’s Del Toro’s most acclaimed film, to understate it. It went to Cannes, where it got a 22-minute standing ovation…it should’ve won some things, but it didn’t. It is the highest-rated film on Metacritic that’s not a re-release, with a 98%, which doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but basically, people loved this thing. I know it was Ebert’s favorite film that year.

LG: It’s a little unusual. It was a bit of a hit in the United States. For a non-English-language R-rated fantasy film to make nearly $40 million in America is pretty impressive. It was part of the conversation everyone was having around Oscar-time.

MO: It was nominated for six Oscars (Original Screenplay, Foreign Film, Original Score, Cinematography, Makeup, and Art Direction), more than anything that year other than Dreamgirls and Babel, and it won the latter three awards. I’m still kind of amazed it lost score, not to mention Foreign Film and Original Screenplay. And…look, maybe it’s a lot to expect foreign films to get nominated for Best Picture and Director, since it doesn’t happen often. And I know the Oscars don’t actually matter that much. But come on. This deserved both. It was nice having The Departed win that year, but I’d gladly have taken Little Miss Sunshine or The Queen or Babel away for this and Children of Men.

Loren's Grade: Seriously, three talented Mexican directors make movies that year, and they nominate the weakest of them. This is a spectacular film. I’m very easily giving this an A.

Max's Grade: No question. A.

That's it for our review of Pan's Labyrinth, the film is available for streaming via Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu and Xbox live. If you liked this review, please like us over at Facebook.

Roundtable Directory:
Geometria
Cronos
Mimic (director's cut)
The Devil's Backbone
Blade II
Hellboy (director's cut)
Pan's Labyrinth
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Unmade Del Toro
Pacific Rim

DEL TORO ROUNDTABLE: THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE

Welcome back to Director's Roundtable. I'm Loren Greenblatt and joining me in this discussion of Guillermo Del Toro's third film, The Devil's Backbone is Max O'Connell of The Film Temple.

Max O’Connell: Alright, we just finished The Devil’s Backbone, Guillermo Del Toro’s follow-up to Mimic that is, if I may be so bold, a little bit better.

Loren Greenblatt: Just barely a colossal improvement that makes it hard to believe he ever directed Mimic at all.

MO: The Devil’s Backbone is a ghost story and fractured fairytale of sorts that came out in 2001. It was a moderate commercial success, a major critical success that got him a lot of respect, and it’s getting more attention now in the years since Pan’s Labyrinth because, in many regards, it’s a companion piece.

LG: They share a lot of things in common: they both deal with the Spanish Civil War, they both center on children dealing with the invasion of both adult, human evil and supernatural elements. Del Toro has said that this is the brother film to Pan’s Labyrinth’s sister film. The plot concerns a young boy named Carlos, played wonderfully by Fernando Tielve, who is sent to an orphanage for sons of the men who fought against Franco’s regime. The orphanage is a spooky place. For starters, there's rumors of a ghost running around. Then there's the small matter of the unexploded bomb in the middle of the courtyard. It’s been diffused, but it’s a powerful symbol of the realities of war and violence that are encroaching upon childhood. As he’s shown around, it feels much like we’re entering a prison film: he’s given a bar of soap to keep, he’s assigned a numbered bed, he’s warned not to try to run away, and he starts to form a bit of a friendship with the other kids that reminded me a bit of the Morgan Freeman-Tim Robbins friendship in The Shawshank Redemption. 
 

Not ominous in the slightest.

MO: In that he has to earn their respect first. The prison parallel is interesting in that this case they’re not held by a cruel group of people, but by good-natured (if flawed) people that have to make very hard decisions in order to keep the kids alive. Federico Luppi (previously the star of Cronos) is Dr. Cesares, who has to be the kind but very pragmatic and stern mentor to the children. The head of the orphanage, Carmen (Marisa Paredes) has to limit what they can eat at any given time in order to guarantee that they’ll have enough.

LG: She’s also dealt with the realities of war- she lost a leg and has to wear a prosthetic, which really looks like something that Del Toro would design (though we have no clue what prosthetics looked like at this point in time). This is a film where Del Toro really comes into his own as a visual stylist. Cronos was done as well as it could be done on its budget, but this feels like he has just the right amount of money to make something special.

MO: We noticed while we watched it that the current DVD edition doesn't have the greatest transfer - we’re waiting for the Criterion blu-ray that's coming out the end of next month - but even so it the film has a wonderful soft look to everything that makes it…not nostalgic, necessarily, but more romantic. Cinematographer Guillermo Navarro did a wonderful job here.

LG: The two really developed the two-color lighting techniques that they've become known for. He’s found his own color palette outside of his Argento influences. We’re going to see this as a standard lighting technique for Del Toro in almost all of his films from here on out.

MO: You mentioned that this film has your favorite image in any of Del Toro’s films.

LG: The last shot. It’s a ridiculously simple image, of people walking away framed in a doorway, and then there’s a silhouette. It's hard to explain why it works without spoiling it but it's a wonderful, mysterious image that points to the mysterious nature of death.

MO: Del Toro’s also always been in debt to Cronenberg with the body-horror thing, and that’s here, but in a more Del Toro-esque way than before. It’s much more subtle. The title refers to children suffering from spina bifida (a presumably fatal birth defect where the spine is exposed) and the doctor keeps a handful of dead fetuses suffering from this in jars as a way to gain funds. He sells the rum that they pickle them in as “limbo water,” a cure for impotence, among other things. It’s a superstition based out of body horror that can be frightening, but what’s nice is that it’s essentially benign. It’s a very nice symbol for what’s at the heart of the orphanage: a g-g-g-ghost!

LG: The ghost of a child who used to be an orphan there. As someone who’s usually not scared of ghost movies in general (ghosts don’t really do anything), I have to say that this ghost is terrifying, haunting, and beautiful, all at the same time. There’s a sort of benign quality to him right away- he’s frightening to look at, but he’s glimpsed very casually. We really don’t know quite what to make of him at first. There’s a wonderful mystery, especially since we know there are kids who have gone missing from the orphanage. One of the great things about the film is that it has a very fairytale-like feel to it. Part of that comes from rhyming imagery. The beginning and ending of the film have nearly identical images with different narration, the limbo water for the babies mirrors the fate of one of the children who dies in an amber-lit pool.

MO: The doctor even makes reference in his narration to a ghost being like an insect stuck in amber. It’s a very arresting image. Another thing he’s always been in debt to are the classic horror filmmakers like James Whale and Hitchcock. Some of the scariest moments here are entirely because of the way Del Toro has framed the shot - the main character’s head is in a very particular position, and as soon as he moves, the ghost is revealed. It’s very classical, often playing with tropes that have been around since the 1930s, but when combined with Del Toro’s more assured visual sense it feels striking and new.

LG: It's strange, because even though that's a pretty standard shot, it never feels like he’s going for cheap scares. Earlier this year I saw the Del Toro-produced film Mama, which is almost all loud noises and shots designed to startle instead of scare. There’s such a better sense of dread and atmosphere in this thing.

MO: Part of that comes from something that’s going to recur in Pan’s Labyrinth: the true villain isn’t a supernatural monster, but rather a very human monster by the name of Jacinto, played very well by Eduardo Noriega.

LG: Apparently a lot of people were very skeptical of Noriega’s casting. He was more famous in Spain for his telenovelas than anything else, but he’s terrifying here.

MO: Oh, he’s a complete bastard. They do find ways to make him somewhat empathetic- we feel his humanity because he’s a truly pathetic human being. He was an orphan, like most of the characters in the film, and the principal describes him as the saddest orphan there was because he never had anyone to relate to in his 15 years there. He’s a “prince without a kingdom- a man without warmth.” He has nothing to live for. He has a girlfriend, Conchita (Irene Visedo), who he doesn’t seem to like very much. He sleeps with Carmen, the head of the orphanage, because the one who truly loves her, Dr. Cesares, is impotent, but she clearly hates herself for it and pities him. We find some pity in ourselves, but for the most part he’s a man we love to hate.

LG: The other thing Del Toro’s going for here is a deconstruction for the macho stereotype that he’s never really bought into. Jacinto is the macho guy- tough, virile, emotionally guarded and here, all those qualities are made to be totally despicable.

MO: It also must be said that although Del Toro doesn’t overstate it too much, the connection to the Spanish Civil War…well, I remember when I first saw the film that I rather liked it, but felt that the Civil War material was just window-dressing that’s happening around the real plot, and it’s stuff that Jacinto takes advantage of. Near the end of the film this time around, though, I thought, “No, I’m completely wrong”. This is an almost perfect allegory for fascism (as macho and hateful as ideologies get), as Jacinto is a man who’s willing to take advantage of everything around him in order to gain power, or in this case, wealth, as there’s gold hidden away in the orphanage from the rebels. It’s not as strong a parallel as in Pan’s Labyrinth, perhaps, but it’s still quite powerful.

LG: The film is also very much about the effect of war on children. This is the first of Del Toro's films where the children feel like real characters. They’re all remarkable actors. They are all very much like boys are in real life, Del Toro is never one to sugarcoat anything, and I’m sure he related to a lot of Carlos’ bullying.

MO: Something else worth noting is how the boys all band together by the end, but that the boys can be nasty little shits before that.

LG: There’s this wonderful sequence where the boys force Carlos to go out to refill a jug of water in the dead of night, and if he’s caught, he’s going to be in a heap of trouble. He has a run-in with the ghost, but he does it, victorious! But as Carlos heads into the courtyard the other boys pull out slingshots and break the jug, and now Carlos is in trouble for being out at night and for breaking a jug. 

MO: We know that none of them are going to buy that he saw the ghost, even though they’ve talked it up for ages. (assume spoilers from here on out) And the ghost, Santi, keeps trying to communicate with them: he keeps saying that “many of you will die”, which can be interpreted as a threat, but it’s really a warning that Jacinto has something terrible planned. There’s a sense of brotherhood even after death that’s quite moving, particularly with the leader of the boys, Jaime (Inigo Garces). And he’s an interesting character- he’s someone who does not open up very easily, because he’s been hurt. We find out later that it’s because he witnessed the murder of his best friend, Santi, by Jacinto. It takes more time for him to embrace Carlos, or really any of them, because he doesn’t want to lose another friend. There’s a scene near the end, though, when he takes leadership, and it’s emblematic of the struggle against Jacinto (and, by proxy, the fascists). The other boys fear Jacinto and his cronies because “they have guns, and they’re bigger than us”, but Jaime leads them by saying that “there’s more of us”.

LG: Now, I do want to talk about the way Santi is presented. Del Toro isn’t shy about showing us Santi’s face, which is interesting, because at first he’s playing the Jaws rule of “don’t show too much too soon”, and he teases out this by showing Santi’s silhouette at first, followed by his footprints in water (sans visible feet, of course), but then we do see him fairly early on, and that’s important. His appearance is a big part of the mystery of who he is and what happened to him. The look of Santi is really influenced by J-Horror (which hadn’t quite become huge, but Del Toro is really plugged into what’s going on in horror), but he goes beyond the standard J-Horror creepy kid. Santi has a large wound in his forehead that blood pours out of in a cloud, and there’s these wonderful little silver flecks floating around him, which reminds us of the pool he died in. The story is that, in order to help light the pool, Del Toro had the pool lined with with silver but by the third day of shooting it started corroding and showing up onscreen when they shot underwater, but Del Toro liked the look of it and incorporated it into the design. But he’s not the only ghost in the movie- as certain characters die, the hopelessness of the kids’ situation ramps up as they’re trapped by Jacinto.

MO: And I love how Del Toro ramps up the tension of that scene. He establishes the spatial dynamics very well- they’re locked in a cupboard, there’s a hallway between them and another room where the villains are trying to open up a safe where the gold might be, and the noise in that room is drowning out their escape attempts, but they’re close enough that too much noise could still be noticed.

LG: There’s a deus ex machina that gets them out (the ghost of Dr. Cesares, who dies from wounds caused by an explosion Jacinto started), but it’s one that works. In any other film, I’d be annoyed, but there’s a mystery to this that’s wonderful.

MO: Something else that I like about the film is the innocence of adolescent interest in sexuality.

LG: There’s a moment in the film where the boys are trading things, and there’s a drawing of a naked woman- which is really just a stick figure. They say that it’s anatomically correct, except that the vagina has been drawn sideways, because the kid just doesn’t know. How would he know?

MO: It’s funny, but kind of sweet in a way. There’s also a lot of sweetness in Jaime’s relationship with Jacinto’s girlfriend Conchita. He dotes on her and gives her this very plain ring- I think it’s just a cigar band- and she takes it very happily. It’s a moment of kindness that plays in direct contrast to the way the brutish Jacinto treats her, and it’s a rallying point for Jaime later on after Jacinto brings the band back to Jaime. One of my favorite shots in the film is a wide shot after Conchita confronts Jacinto and rebukes him, and she crumples to the ground as he stabs her. It’s a very moving moment, and when Jaime sees that Jacinto has brought the band back, he’s ready to strike back and lead his friends against this sadistic monster.

LG: Del Toro is very adamant that fairy tales should be dark, brutal, and violent, and lord knows we get that. The last thirty minutes in particular- the orphanage explodes, children die, the kind adults die, and it makes us really want Jacinto to get what’s coming to him. And he does. The ending isn’t triumphant, which is important, because the tone would be wrong for what’s such a mournful film.

MO: Right. They’ve been through a lot, the adults have had to sacrifice themselves, and there’s only five or six of the kids left, and Jacinto gets an appropriately brutal death.

LG: Lord of the Flies style. There’s an earlier scene where they talk about a mammoth hunt with cavemen, where the men would use sharpened sticks. Then the kids use sticks sharpened by glass, and they just ram them into Jacinto. The first one goes right into his armpit, which has a boatload of nerves, and we really feel that one.

MO: I once had to get stitches under my arm after I fell on a wine-rack. Trust me, I felt it.

LG: And as much as we hate the guy, it’s painful to watch. And we think about the acts that these children have been driven to, even though they’re doing it to save their own lives.

MO: And it’s a tribute to all of their fallen friends like Santi, who was murdered by this bastard.

LG: But what’s important is that it’s their version of a war trauma - they’ll have to live with this for the rest of their lives, and as they go off into the desert to try to find shelter, it’s a very uneasy ending.

MO: And Luppi’s narration as they go off about ghosts being stuck in time, it’s a reminder that the horrors of the Spanish Civil War will never fully disappear. Del Toro was born twenty or thirty years after they ended and in Mexico, but it really matters to him to capture the gravity of the situation.

LG: It was a very personal project for him. He’s a very intellectual guy, he studied history very closely, and he was always fascinated by the Spanish Civil War. He views it as a period of history that we’ve forgotten about completely. Europe mostly ignored it because they were trying to stay neutral, and when Europe did get dragged into war, they were too busy to deal with Spain.

MO: One minor qualm I have about the climax of the film- when Jacinto is dispatched with and thrown into the pool, Santi attacks him, and he can’t escape because he’s weighed down by gold. It’s just a bit much for me.

LG: And it’s not even enough gold for me to believe that he couldn’t overcome that, even with his injuries. But, eh, I’ll go with it. It’s a very minor thing in an extremely strong film.

MO: Oh, yeah, it’s minor. It’s not like I could think of a way to improve it, it’s his choices that have weighed him down and taken him into a monster without humanity. The symbol only slightly bothers me.

Loren's Grade: I give it an A.

Max's Grade: A- from me, but it’s a high A-.

The Devil's Backbone is available for streaming on iTunes, Vudu, Amazon and Xbox live. It comes out on Criterion Collection DVD and Blu-ray at the end of July, at which point it will likely be available on Hulu+ along with the bulk of the collection.

Roundtable Directory:
Geometria
Cronos
Mimic (director's cut)
The Devil's Backbone
Blade II
Hellboy (director's cut)
Pan's Labyrinth
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Unmade Del Toro
Pacific Rim

AVENGERS RECAP: CAPTAIN AMERICA

We're in the home stretch now. The last major character left to introduce is also the oldest. Captain America is a character from a different age and thus requires a slightly different kind of film. As a result Captain America: The First Avenger is a nice change of pace from the other Marvel films.

A prequel of sorts, Captain America takes place during WWII, or rather the Marvel Universe's version of it. It's the story of Steve Rodgers (Chris Evans), a sickly, skinny young man who want's nothing more than to serve his country. He tries again and again to enlist, even going so far as to falsify his enlistment form to get a better chance (a serious crime), each time he is stamped 4F. Eventually he's caught, but instead of jail he's given a chance. A government scientist named Erskine (Stanley Tucci) selects him for a secret program to make him America's first super-soldier. Why skinny ol' Steve Rogers? Because Dr. Erskine feels that a man without power will have a greater respect for it. Of course, history is full of people who are suddenly given power and abuse it, but Dr. Erskine never said he was a history buff, now did he?

Steve is injected with super-serum instantly giving him 100 pounds of pure, American beef muscle. A steroid soaked Audie Murphy, and before long he's waging a one man war on super-nazi  Red Skull (Hugo Weaving). Red Skull is an evil man, so evil that Hitler exiles him from the nazi party for being too evil! He's a fun villain, perhaps not as interesting as Hanz Landa from Inglorious Basterds, but when your head looks like a giant red Skull, you don't have to be. As if being Too Evil For Hitler weren't enough, he also has access to a mysterious artifact, the Cosmic Cube, powerful enough to power all sorts of fearsome retro-futuristic weapons he can use to - wait for it- take over the world!!!

Call it a hunch, but this guy might be evil

Director Joe Johnson (Rocketeer, Jurassic Park III) knows his way around a set piece better than most of these directors but having a real villain helps. The best being the Captain's one-man raid on one of Red Skull's weapon's factories. That sequence actually feels like a real act of selfless heroism (something that Marvel's superhero movies are strangely short on).

The biggest problem with the film is the pacing. I would not be surprised to learn that a great deal of footage was left on the cutting room floor. For instance, no one ever sits down and tells Rogers about the super-serum or what it will do to him, making him look like a bit of a dolt. Large parts of Cap's campaign against Red Skull are told in extended montage, giving the second half of the film a frustratingly undefined feeling. For instance, we know that Skull plans on attacking Hitler as well as the rest of the world, but we don't know if he actually did that or if he's fighting the Allies as well as his former masters. Does that mean that the Allies are fighting the Nazi's, the Japanese AND Red Skull? Shut up brain! Captain America is punching people in slow motion!

Another issue the film doesn't satisfactorily answer is that of race. During his campaign Captain America assembles a surprisingly diverse fighting force. Which is all well and good, except that the U.S. Army was very much segregated during the 40's. Does racism just not exist in the Marvel Universe? As cool as that would be, there is a fine line between escapism and white-washing history. I'm not sure if the film crosses that line, but it's close enough to be having the conversation. There's nothing malicious in Marvel's attempt to be politically correct, but some may feel that it diminishes the struggles of the real heroes who fought to desegregate the armed services.

Regardless, the film a mostly fun piece of escapism. It does a good job of replicating all the element's that made the golden age of comics fun. Evil as sin villains, ray-guns, Flying wings and brave, one-dimensional heroes who fight selflessly for their country. No one laughs maniacally, but that's all that's missing. There are times when Captain America feels almost like an Indiana Jones or Hellboy film without ever being as good as those.

Surprisingly Captain America does not shine brightly with the magic of corporate synergy. Apart from a framing device that brings the film into the present day, there are relatively few shout-outs to the greater Marvel universe. We get Tony Stark's father Howard, and the government agency that makes Rogers into Captain America is the forerunner of S.H.I.E.L.D.. These details feel more like easter eggs for fans, than anything that interferes, even peripherally, with the plot. Unlike Thor and Iron Man 2, Captain America actually feels like its own film that gets to stand or fall on it's own merit. The only true shout-out to Avengers is the Cosmic Cube (briefly glimpsed in Thor) which will play a significant role in the big team-up movie.

Dedicated readers will recall that I reviewed Captain America once before upon it's theatrical release. Back then I gave it a B-, but after viewing it in context with the series let's bump it up to a regular ol' B and be done with it. It's better than most of the other entries, but still not as good as Iron Man.

Grade: B

Previous installments in this series:
Iron Man
The Hulk and The Incredible Hulk
Iron Man 2
Thor

Future installments:

The Avengers