Mexican Gothic

When it comes to immigration, Hollywood is an open borders kind of place. But I suspect even those creative folks in the motion picture business who think America should declare Spanish its official language are bristling a little these days at the directorial invasion from the South. That giant sucking sound you hear is the blissful oxygen of American critical praise being drawn away from American directors and filling the lungs instead of three Mexican directors who are the darlings of the present moment. They’ve been dubbed “the Three Amigos,” and while that ethnic joke would ordinarily be the cause of protests by Hispanic-sensitivity groups, the directors themselves seem delighted by it, and so the Three Amigos they are and will always be.

Amigo Numero Uno is Alejandro González Iñárritu, the auteur responsible for Babel, the titanically depressing triptych I dubbed “the Feel Bad Movie of the Millennium” a couple of months ago in these pages. Amigos Dos and Tres are Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo Del Toro, who have both labored successfully in Hollywood vineyards even as they have continued directing smaller and more personal movies in Spanish. Cuarón made several much-admired smaller films before hitting the jackpot with an assignment to helm Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the third and best of that blockbuster series. Del Toro has scored at the box office with lower-brow fare like the vampire flick Blade 2 and the comic-book adaptation Hellboy.

Cuaron has just made a $75 million end-of-the-world movie called Children of Men while serving as a producer on Pan’s Labyrinth, an exceedingly grim fairy tale set in 1944 Spain written and directed by Del Toro. Children of Men and Pan’s Labyrinth both opened in New York and Los Angeles during the last week of 2006, delivering moviegoers a potent uno-dos punch of doom and death–Mexican mordancy amid Christmas cheer. The critics went bananas. A “glorious bummer,” said Manohla Dargis of the New York Times about Children of Men. A.O. Scott went even wilder for Pan’s Labyrinth, saying it “has the feel of something permanent.”

Scott’s words were echoed across the critical landscape. The National Society of Film Critics has named Pan’s Labyrinth the year’s best movie, foreshadowing its likely victory as Best Foreign Film on Oscar night in March. And it’s beginning to seem plausible that Children of Men will zoom in out of nowhere to take an Academy Award nomination for best picture–perhaps snatching that nod from Babel, which has been on the Oscar short list for months even though hardly anybody actually likes it. Doubtless, the question you’re asking is: Can the amigo-ship of Babel‘s González Iñárritu and Children‘s Cuaron survive the Year of the Three Amigos?

Fine. You’re not really asking that. You’re really asking whether Children of Men and Pan’s Labyrinth are any good. And the answer to that question is: Yes and no.

Pan’s Labyrinth is an almost perfect piece of work, in which every scene is exactly what it should be and where it should be. Del Toro knows what he’s doing and gets nothing wrong along the way. He has the kind of control over his storytelling that a novelist has, and his ability to get his ideas from the page to the screen with such meticulous thoroughness is a very rare cinematic accomplishment.

And yet Pan’s Labyrinth is really a hateful thing–a film that basically tells the story of the psychological torture and eventual murder of an innocent 12-year-old girl with grotesque relish. The girl’s name is Ofelia, and she finds herself living in a remote military outpost in Spain with her desperately sick pregnant mother and brutal stepfather. Friendless and isolated as her mother grows ever more ill, she spends her days reading fairy tales–and imagines that an ancient faun visits to tell her that she is actually the lost daughter of the King of the Underworld. She can return home and live forever as a princess, the faun tells her, if she undergoes three tests.

Ofelia’s fairy-tale imagination is as bleak as anything in Grimm. She must fetch a key from the innards of a colossal toad that vomits all over her. She must use the key to open a cabinet in a realm controlled by an albino giant that eats children. And she must kidnap her baby brother from her step father’s lair and bring him to the faun, whose designs on the infant aren’t necessarily benign.

Del Toro’s point here is that Ofelia is transmuting her horrific existence into imaginative art. She intuitively understands that her innocence is being challenged by the corruption of the world and that her only means of defense is to defeat it in her fantasies. But most of the film is dedicated not to the exploration of Ofelia’s fairy tale but to the Fascist violence unleashed by her stepfather as he pursues a Republican rebel remnant of the Spanish civil war. He tortures and kills constantly and without consequence, even shooting the doctor who must attend to his wife’s labor because he discovers the doctor has passed antibiotics to the rebels.

In the course of Pan’s Labyrinth, Ofelia does not have a single moment of joy, or pleasure, or happiness. Even her fantasy world is a dour, dark, dank place where there is only a hint of a promise of redemption. Only when she is fatally shot by her stepfather can she escape, in the very last moment of consciousness, to the fantasy world she has created–where she becomes a princess of the Dead.

Some critics say Del Toro leaves it open whether Ofelia’s fantasy world is real or simply metaphorical. I don’t think it’s an open question at all. Every indication the film gives us, from its very first image of Ofelia dying from the gunshot, is that Ofelia is seeking an escape, through her imagination, from her real-world torments. Nothing we’re seeing is actually happening. And the nihilistic aspect of Del Toro’s portrait of childhood misery is that Ofelia cannot even imagine an escape that might involve sunlight. Pan’s Labyrinth is a work of secret sadism that revels in the abuse of a child even as it appears to be weeping bitter tears over her. In this respect, Del Toro is displaying his comradeship with González Iñárritu and his Babel, another film in which children are dragged through Hell so the filmmaker can make us squirm.

Children of Men has, if possible, an even more ghastly premise, borrowed from the English mystery novelist P.D. James’s 1992 book of the same name. The world has gone infertile, and as the movie begins, the youngest person on earth has just died at the age of 18. In 50 years, the planet will be left to the animals. James clearly intends Children of Men to be a metaphorical exploration of abortion and euthanasia–about mankind’s descent into an abyss through its increasing acceptance of planned death. In her imagining, the looming death of mankind leads to a new form of tyranny as a dictatorship springs up in Britain whose entire purpose is making life as orderly as possible while the nation dwindles to nothing.

Director Cuarón (who is also credited with writing the screenplay along with four others) has no interest in James’s morality play. Instead, he twists her social-conservative dystopia into a leftist nightmare vision. His particular bugbears are present-day homeland-security policies and foes of immigration. This makes no sense as metaphor and even less sense as a realistic vision of the future. Who, exactly, would spend their remaining years on a childless Earth enforcing a closed-borders policy? At its climax, Children of Men descends into crazed silliness when immigrants imprisoned in a concentration camp and the evil soldiers imprisoning them end up in a Falluja-like street war.

Children of Men is messy and incoherent where Pan’s Labyrinth is focused and flawless. But even so, it’s pretty amazing, and not just because the idea of a world without children has such a haunting power. Cuaron and his team do a magnificent job of capturing the strange ennui that would descend on an infertile planet–a place where people, like the film’s protagonist Theo (the wonderfully soulful Clive Owen), would just go through the motions of living. The movie’s plot kicks in when Theo is kidnapped by an activist group led by his ex-wife (Julianne Moore).

It turns out her group is harboring the only pregnant woman in the world, an illegal named Kee. They are keeping her existence secret because they fear the dictatorial anti-immigrant government would kill her and the baby. It’s a measure of Cuarón’s breathless storytelling mastery that you let this preposterous insane-leftist conspiracy theory detail go by very easily. Cuarón films Children of Men as a series of astoundingly long takes, with us following Theo as he is drawn into the plot to save Kee. This has the effect of bringing us along as a passenger in the cars which Theo drives, another guest in the houses where he hides, and as a secret conspirator when he needs to change plans.

This intimate approach gives Children of Men the immediacy of a home movie, though it is as artificial as any big-budget Hollywood picture. Cuarón’s ability to involve the audience so viscerally–which includes the triumphant staging of what may be, without exaggeration, the two greatest car-chase scenes ever filmed–helps Children of Men transcend its own silliness and become something unforgettable. Pan’s Labyrinth may be unforgettable too, but so is a mugging.

John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.