Here we are well into the first month of 2007, and Pan's Labyrinth and Letters from Iwo Jima, two of 2006's most critically acclaimed films, are only now making their way into theaters. Hollywood is a strange and often unfathomable mistress, but ours is not to reason why.
Of these two, Letters from Iwo Jima is the movie you'll probably be hearing about most; it's the new film from Clint Eastwood, a sort of companion piece to his recent Flags of our Fathers, and there's already some significant Oscar buzz swirling around it. There's a bit of buzz surrounding Pan's Labyrinth too, but this is a much harder film to get a handle on, so it's unlikely to receive the same sort of attention.
Eastwood's new film is a staunchly humanist drama in the form of a war movie, with an easily readable message that war is hell. Pan's Labyrinth is a war movie as well, but it's also a whole lot of other things, and its politics are not so easily deciphered. Letters from Iwo Jima could wind up grabbing an Oscar or two, and that would make perfect sense. It's a very good movie. But Pan's Labyrinth may very well be a great one.
Besides functioning as a brutally incisive account of life during wartime, Pan's Labyrinth is something of a fairy tale, a classic fable shaken and stirred with a modern twist (including a wicked, obsessive-compulsive stepfather, a trio of tasks to be completed before the moon is full, and a bionic-insect fairy for a guide).
The movie is also an elegant coming-of-age tale, as well as a horror story of the first order, densely textured and elaborately imagined, in which the most resonant horrors turn out to be less supernatural (although there is that as well), and more psychological and social — greed, murder, betrayal and a whole gamut of human ills associated with the plague of war.
Taking place during the final days of the Spanish Civil War, the movie filters that conflict through the imagination of a 10-year-old girl who absorbs the messy suffering into a richly ordered fantasy world of her own device. The girl (Ivana Baquero) is named Ofelia, appropriately enough, a fragile, dangerously sensitive soul who can't quite come to terms with the brutal fascist officer her mother has re-married. As rebel forces hover at the edges of the isolated compound where Ofelia resides with her fascist faux-family, the young girl finds herself visited by a gangly half-man half-faun creature with a strange glint in his eye and an even stranger plan for her future.
Taking us down the rabbit hole and straight through the looking glass, Pan's Labyrinth layers its real-world drama with glimpses of a parallel universe where anything is possible, where pagan myth and Jungian symbols collide, and magical realism mixes freely with grotesque imagery straight out of Goya. The film is a fairy tale in the best and darkest sense (a baby-killing, eyeless monster dining by an enormous pile of tiny shoes is just one of its terrible pleasures), so be aware that this is most decidedly not, repeat not, an entertainment for children.
Pan's Labyrinth was directed by the brilliant Mexican-born filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, best known for megaplex extravaganzas like Hellboy and Blade 2 (both of which are actually quite good for what they are), but seen in the best light in his smaller, more personal (but no less fantastic) films, such as the lyrical riff on vampirism, Cronos (1992), the astonishing The Devil's Backbone (2001) and now Pan.
In many ways a companion piece to The Devil's Backbone, which also dwelled on children drifting through supernatural waters during the Spanish Civil War, Pan's Labyrinth is a luxuriously mysterious effort, echoing everything from Bunuel to the Brothers Grimm to The Night of the Hunter. But, above all else, Pan's Labyrinth is its own creature.
Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima isn't nearly as unique as del Toro's film, but two full-blown masterpieces in one week might be more than our delicate hearts could bear. What Letters does offer is basically the reverse angle of Flags of our Fathers, a movie that barely allowed us a glimpse of the eyes behind the guns blowing holes in young American soldiers. Eastwood returns here to the pivotal WWII battle that consumed his earlier film, but this time the director attaches faces to his invisible enemy, as well as names, histories and personalities, daring to turn former foes into human beings who weep and bleed.
The titular letters are real as well, missives from the Japanese soldiers to their wives, mothers, sweethearts and children, but mostly written to convince themselves that something exists beyond the void of constant combat. The letters are yet another humanizing device, defining the characters, describing their emotional states and providing backstories through a series of flashbacks that punctuate the film. These flashbacks aren't always handled with the greatest of ease, but the structure doesn't actually impede the movie's forward momentum, and it's certainly a significant improvement over the convoluted stop-and-start rhythms of Flags.
As in Flags of our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima mixes extended (and extremely graphic) battle sequences with intimate moments detailing the moral dimensions and dilemmas of its characters. In Flags, Eastwood focused on American soldiers falsely promoted as heroes, hammering home how war is packaged, sold and sanitized into a curiously bloodless symbol of patriotism.
Letters concentrates on the flipside of the same phenomenon: Japanese soldiers realizing they're being lied to by leaders who order them to die for a cause that's already lost. Both movies are ultimately mad as hell about the same exact thing: the idiocy of buying into illusions that governments try to impose on their people. (The parallels with the current mess in Iraq are unavoidable.)
"Always do what is right because it is right," Eastwood tells us time after time in these films (in between those lengthy passages in which bodies are blasted apart and limbs go flying through the air) — a bit of homespun wisdom that runs from the Talmud through Spike Lee, and that resounds everywhere in Letters from Iwo Jima.
We hear it from the mouths of Japanese officers struggling for individuality and from saintly, apple-cheeked moms back home in Oklahoma. As in Flags, the director makes his point within the film's first 15 minutes and then basically repeats himself for the next 126, but for once, at least, it's a lesson worth remembering.
This article appears in Jan 17-23, 2007.