Fantasy and desire

'Pan's Labyrinth' and 'Scandal' are dark and gripping; 'Dreamgirls' genuinely thrills

By JOSEPH CUNNEEN and KEVIN DOHERTY

Guillermo Del Toro’s award-winning Pan’s Labyrinth is the most haunting yet compelling foreign film to be released in a long time. Combining the worlds of childhood fantasy and harsh reality, he tells the story of 11-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero). She and her pregnant mother (Ariadna Gil) are caught in the violent world of Franco’s Spain in 1944. While her cruel new stepfather, an army captain (Sergi López), is still fighting rebels in the outlying forests, Ofelia enters an alternative universe that requires tests and trials that prove she is the lost princess of a hidden underworld empire.

Her real life on the outpost with her mother is one of almost unbearable horror, while the captain’s only interest is the impending birth of his son. In camp, Ofelia’s mother’s health deteriorates, threatening the safe delivery of the child. Torture and death seem the order of the day; Ofelia’s struggle to keep everything from falling apart is definitely not a tale for children.

The young girl moves effortlessly through a world in which insects turn into nymphs, and woodland haunts become cavernous worlds and moving labyrinths. The fantastic creatures Ofelia meets offer strange parallels to those in the harsh reality she inhabits. Both an amiable yet frightening faun who serves as her underworld guide as well as a hideous child-eating humanoid with eyes in the palms of his hand are played by Doug Jones with a spooky naturalness. In one test, Ofelia must extract a key from a huge toad mired in a bug-infested tree trunk.

As in most fables, rites of passage are central, and director Del Toro hints at Ofelia’s emerging womanhood as she is entrusted with the care of the unborn and the young. A remarkably mature actress, Ivana Baquero does not play Ofelia as a withdrawn and fearful child but as a wide-eyed, determined young woman moving painfully from innocence to wisdom. Amazingly, Guillermo Del Toro, known for sci-fi horror films like “Hellboy” and “Cronos,” has made a movie that reveals the introspective world of children under stress. Working the same territory as neorealists like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, he succeeds in making fantasy a projective outlet, revealing a child who learns to make moral choices that are human and just.

At certain points, one begins to wonder which world the director wants us to see as the real one. But though dark, the film offers a sense of hope in its seemingly simple look at the battle between good and evil. “Pan’s Labyrinth” is a gripping and complicated work; its images will haunt the viewer long after the lights go up.

Notes on a Scandal is a chilling study of obsession and desire based on Zoe Hellera’s acclaimed novel, “What Was She Thinking?” It’s a perfect vehicle for two great actresses, Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench. The former plays Sheba Hart, a vulnerable woman who joins the cynical staff of an English comprehensive school as an art teacher. Ms. Dench’s Barbara Covett, an older spinster teacher, befriends Sheba but is compulsively taking notes in her daily journal as voice-overs reveal the web of control she is weaving around her colleague.

Ms. Dench’s restrained performance, compelling but somehow sympathetic, is loaded with sexual overtones: A repressed sense of evil unveils as the film progresses. When Barbara discovers Sheba in a sexual liaison with a 15-year-old male student, she confronts her friend but promises to keep her secret. “By doing nothing, I gain everything,” she calculates in her journal.

Director Richard Eyre is immeasurably helped by his supporting cast: Bill Nighy, Sheba’s contented older husband; Juno Temple, her moody teenage daughter; and especially Max Lewis, as her Down syndrome son. Andrew Simpson, her young lover, comes across as both seductive predator and child victim. When things become ugly, he can only say, “It’s supposed to be fun, but now it’s a serious thing.”

The director achieves a semidocumentary look with hand-held camera and natural lighting, with intense close-ups that provide some of the tension and dark humor the story requires. Philip Glass’ music could use more volume control, but his distinctively repetitive chords fit the film’s pattern of spiraling loss.

Those who have been waiting for a great movie musical have finally got their wish with Dreamgirls, Bill Condon’s adaptation of the Broadway hit. A singing, not a dancing, musical about a group, the Dreams, similar to Detroit’s Supremes, during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, it may try to cover too much but tells almost its whole story in song. At first, Effie (Jennifer Hudson), Deena (Beyoncé Knowles) and Lorrell (Anika Noni Rose) are just backup singers for the widely popular Jimmy Early (Eddie Murphy). After Curtis Taylor (Jamie Foxx) takes over as their manager, however, he softens their sound, gives them wigs and glamorous costumes, and uses payola to get DJs to play their songs on the air.

The climax comes when he drops Effie as lead singer; she’s not slim enough and her emotionally intense mezzo soprano seems scary to white audiences in the big cafés. When she does her protest number, “And I’m telling you I’m not going,” the movie audience exploded, but Effie is no longer part of the Dreams. The movie glamorizes stardom while displaying its pitfalls, as in Taylor’s manipulation of Deena and Mr. Murphy’s performance as an artist terrified at being abandoned by his public.

Mr. Condon incorporates some shots of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Detroit riots but wisely concentrates on the excitements of show business. With its soft but nonsentimental ending, “Dreamgirls” genuinely thrills its audience, especially in Effie’s defiant wail and Deena’s breakaway number, “Listen.”

Kevin Doherty teaches film at Manhattanville College, in Purchase, N.Y. Joseph Cunneen has been NCR’s movie reviewer for 16 years.

Quick takes Our young woman assistant rated Charlotte’s Web, adapted from E.B. White’s children’s classic, the best family feature of the season. Using state-of-the-art animation and live action, it tells the story of Wilbur, the little pig who hearing he is to be eaten for dinner before the first snow befriends Charlotte, the motherly barnyard spider. While exposing the pain of the natural cycles of life and death, the movie is ultimately an uplifting experience. The all-star cast of animal voices includes Julia Roberts, Oprah Winfrey and Robert Redford, but our 10-year-old reviewer’s favorite was Steve Buscemi as Templeton, the ornery rat who shows he has a heart after all.

National Catholic Reporter, February 2, 2007