Tag: Doug Jones

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Superb fantasy film, full of heart, visual imagination and beautiful story-telling, truly one from the heart

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Cast: Ivana Baquero (Ofelia), Sergi López (Captain Vidal), Maribel Verdú (Mercedes), Doug Jones (The Faun/The Pale Man), Ariadna Gil (Carmen), Álex Angulo (Doctor Ferreiro), Manolo Solo (Garcés), César Vea (Serrano), Roger Casamajor (Pedro), Pablo Adán (Narrator/Voice of the Faun)

What do you do when your world is terrible? Sometimes the only way to survive is to embrace your own world, even if that world has its own darkness and terrors. Guillermo del Toro’s masterful Gothic fairy tale mixes the terrors of Francoist Spain with one of untrustworthy magic and monstrous spirits and compellingly balances bleak horrors with the chance of hope. Visually stunning, thematically rich and heartbreakingly emotional, Pan’s Labyrinth is a Grimm’s fairy tale bought shockingly up-to-date, a uniquely heartfelt film from a distinctive director.

It’s 1944 in the woods of Spain and the Reds are still fighting their lonely crusade against Franco’s fascists. Captain Vidal (Sergi López) is here to stamp out these rebels and has summoned his heavily pregnant wife Carmen (Ariadna Gil) and twelve-year old step-daughter Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) to his distant command post so that he can be present at the imminent birth of his son. Ofelia hates the punctilious and coldly obsessive Vidal (rightly so – he’s capable of coldy indifferent but shocking acts of violence) and escapes more-and-more into her fairytale books. One night, she wanders into an old maze and encounters a Faun (Doug Jones), who tells her she is the long-lost princess of the fairy kingdom and must perform three tasks to return home. Ofelia now exists in two worlds: an increasingly Gothic fairy one of and a real one of violence, ruled by her monstrous father-in-law.

Pan’s Labyrinth is a beautifully balanced film of multiple interpretations. It’s never clearly stated whether Ofelia’s fairytale world is ‘real’ of a product of her imagination. It’s clearly a way a scared girl could process real world traumas – the death of her father, the appalling Vidal, the horrors of war around her – with many elements of the fairy world reflecting things happening around her. But on the other hand, the mandrake root the Faun gives her to help heal her sick mother by placing it under her bed has an immediate impact and Ofelia’s magic chalk and the labyrinth itself offer secret doorways that allow her to escape Vidal in the film’s final act (or perhaps a by then disoriented and drugged Vidal is just mistaken). Essentially, you are left to embrace the idea you prefer – much as it is implied Ofelia herself chooses the version of her life she wishes to embrace.

Choosing for yourself and not blindly following orders is one of the key lessons of Pan’s Labyrinth. The ‘real’ world of Franco’s Spain is full of regimented orders to be blindly obeyed without question. In this it has the collaboration of the Church – at Vidal’s dinner-party, a subservient priest self-satisfyingly fills his plate with food while shrugging off concerns of the starving poor – and Fascism echoes Church mantras (one of Vidal’s lieutenants repeats the same propaganda ‘prayer’ to Franco over-and-over again while he hands out the bread ration to the cowed villagers). Franco’s Spain is one of order and regimen, where individuality and choice is stamped out.

And there are echoes of this in Ofelia’s fantasy world. Played with a gentleness, vulnerability and strikingly earnest decency by Ivana Baquero, Ofelia refuses to accept the world must be the way it is (unlike her mother who has sadly accepted it must). But her fairy world, the Faun – expertly portrayed by Doug Jones’ lithe physicality – is a far from gentle guide. Creaking from the wood he is formed from, he’s sinister, mixes vague statements with subtly presented orders and constantly holds information back while presenting Ofelia with tight rules for her tasks. Just as Fascism takes choice away real world, the Faun presents Ofelia with a book that reveals the future (but only one page at a time) and her tasks increasingly demand complete obedience, under the threat of punishment.

This is not a comforting world. Ofelia – who at one-point wears costumes reminiscent of those other famous children in dark, surreal and dangerous fantasy-worlds Alice and Dorothy – confronts a vile toad and, most chillingly, an albino child-eater with eyes in his stigmata hands who lives in a room decorated with nightmare reflections of the real horrors of the 40s (most strikingly a Holocaust-reminiscent pile of children’s shoes). For all its fantastical, it’s also very much a nightmare version of a real-world that could have been dreamed up by a child processing horrors.

Pan’s Labyrinth celebrates individuality and choosing for yourself. Ofelia’s story is one of increasingly taking her own choices: from refusing to accept her mother’s new husband, to escaping into her fantasy world (twisted as it is), to finally outright refusing the increasingly dark instructions of the Faun. It’s in doing this that she can eventually prove herself a true hero, someone who does not accept the established order but can make her own decisions.

This makes her a contrast to Vidal. Truly he is one of cinema’s most loathsome monsters. In a superbly controlled performance by Sergi López, Vidal isn’t repulsive because he is a larger-than-life, sadistic monster but because he is a small, inadequate bully who has controls his small world in order to make himself feel important. Vidal is obsessed with order and detail – introduced tutting at the 15-minute-late arrival of his wife, his office is filled with the gears of the mill and he fetishistically cleans his pristine uniform, shaves himself and repairs his father’s watch. This watch – the only memoir he has of his hero father, who died when he was a baby – is the root of his obsessions, Vidal desperate to become his father and pass on his own toxic legacy of ancestor worship to his son. It’s striking that, as Vidal’s world collapses around him, his clothing and body becomes more and more scarred, bloody and disordered – his external appearance resembling the monster within.

In Vidal’s world everything fits neatly into place, governed by his Fascist ideology. Carmen – a fragile Ariadna Gil, struggling to accommodate to a world of harsh choices – is of interest to him only because of the baby she carries. He operates the mill as a tightly organised regime, in which the rebels are unwanted ghosts in the machine. He uses violence ruthlessly but as a tool, not with sadistic relish. He brutally beats a suspected rebel to death with a bottle with robotic indifference and tortures suspects with a practised patter. To him, everything is justified if it is obeying an order. So much so, that he literally cannot understand the refusal of Dr Ferreiro (in one of the film’s most moving moments) to blindly follow orders, no matter the consequences.

Dr Ferreiro (a beautifully judged performance by Álex Angulo) is one of two figures whose independent thought Vidal is unable to recognise, even when they are under his nose. His maid Mercedes (Maribel Verdú, one of the passionate hearts of the film) is fiercely independent, the sister of the rebel leader and working subtly against Vidal. She forms a bond with the gentle Ofelia while showing that refusing to be part of a blind system is a crucial part of humanity. She also provides possibly one of the most satisfying moments in cinema during a confrontation with Vidal.

Del Toro’s film beautifully balances these fascinating ideas of choice and independence within its brilliantly evocative design. It’s a beautifully shot film, in a gorgeous array of Velazquez-inspired tones, its moody darks and blues gorgeously captured by Guillermo Navarro while its design work is extraordinary in its texture and detail. But it’s a classic because del Toro’s superb creativity and quietly emotional direction. Pan’s Labyrinth makes us really care for this child just as it makes us despise the cruelty of her step-father. Combined with gorgeous design, del Toro’s film truly comes from the heart, a loving, very personal tribute to the power of stories and individual choices. The film is so powerful, you even forget that it opens as it ends, and that we know in our heart-of-hearts how this journey will finish. Nevertheless, Pan’s Labyrinth ends on a note of joy and acceptance so pure, it could only be from the fantasy world not the real one.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)

Ron Perlman faces larger problems than ever in Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Cast: Ron Perlman (Hellboy), Selma Blair (Liz Sherman), Doug Jones (Abe Sapien/Angel of Death/Chamberlain), Seth MacFarlane (Johann Krauss), Luke Goss (Prince Nuada), Anna Walton (Princess Nuala), Jeffrey Tambor (Tom Manning), John Hurt (Professor Trevor Bruttenholm), Roy Dotrice (King Balor)

There is something quite sweet about the Guillermo del Toro taking all the chips won for directing Pan’s Labyrinth and cashed them in for this comic book sequel. There you have the distillation of the man’s career right there: one for the artist and then one for the teenage boy he used to be. But Hellboy II is a marvellous creation, a gorgeous to look at, magical, rather funny comic book film crammed with amazing images, ingenious creatures and sparkling moments of action and adventure.

Thousands of years ago, the magical creatures of the world, led by the elves, fought a war against mankind. To win a desperate victory, goblins created the dreaded Golden Army, an indestructible mechanical army. Horrified at the slaughter, Elven King Balor (Roy Dotrice) offered a truce. His son Prince Nuala (Luke Goss) disagreed. In the present day, Nuala goes about to collect the three pieces of the crown needed to control the Golden Army – and only Hellboy (Ron Perlman) and his friends from the BPRD can stop him.

Hellboy II is immensely imaginative and wonderful to look at. Perhaps inspired by Pan’s Labyrinth, the film plays like a cross between the most brain-twisting magic depths of that film and a traditional comic book. So we get dozens of creatures, each pulled from the pages of some sort of acid tripped Tolkien novel: with extended hands, distorted heads and steam-punkish extremities, the creatures on show are masterpieces of design and character. The juxtaposition between this ethereal, magical world of elves and goblins and mankind’s expansion brings home the danger this world is in: the Elven King’s palace in the modern day is in a sort of converted sewer, while Nuala’s base is an abandoned underground line. With some performers (often del Toro’s muse Doug Jones) under layers of make-up and prosthetics, it’s extraordinary the amount of personality each of these creatures gets. When the film takes a turn down a Diagon Alley-style market, you regret Del Toro never got to make a Harry Potter film.

Hellboy looks both part of this world and also like a muscular bull in a china shop. Ron Perlman continues to be perfect in the part, and captures the wry, cynical, slightly teenagerish humour of the part. Del Toro does a wonderful job of showing the sense of family between Hellboy, his lover pyrokinetic Liz (a decent performance by Selma Blair, although she is too often relegated to the “woman” role), and his surrogate brother, amphibious empath Abe (Doug Jones getting to provide the voice as well this time, and getting a fine display of growing emotional expression). The quiet character moments between the action really ring true – a very funny sequence sees Hellboy and Abe bemoan their romantic entanglements by getting drunk while singing Can’t Smile Without You.

It’s scenes like that which add the heart alongside the throbbing action and colourful character weirdness of del Toro’s vision. It’s also part of the distinctiveness of the whole vision of the film. Everything is seen with as fresh an eye as possible, and makes for some really striking images and scenes. The steam-punk aesthetic of the Golden Army seems to fit together perfectly with the more organic world of the Elves. There’s a sense at all times that the design and pacing of the film have been carefully thought through so everything fits logically together. Starting the film with a wonderfully animated Golden Army backstory (voiced by a briefly returning John Hurt for maximum impact) is just another reflection of the artistry at work here.

There is a nice vein of humour running through the film – there are some funny sight gags as characters walk nonchalantly through bizarre goings-on in BDRP HQ – and the more gory moments of the action are shot with a certain black comedy. The film also gets a decent few points in about how humanity rejects things that are different, which are not surprising but still hit home.

Hellboy II does start to become a bit more generic as it heads towards its final denouement. Most of the events of the final few scenes are pretty predictable from the outset, and offer little in the way of surprises. For all the chemistry she has with Perlman, Blair is more or less relegated to the sidelines for large chunks of the film (usually the action). But for most of the run time, it’s inventive, imaginative fun with a director bringing a distinctive vision to the genre while also kicking back his heels and having fun. And fun is what it wants the viewer to have as well – don’t try too hard, sit back, relax and enjoy yourself.

Hellboy (2004)

Ron Perlman fights the darkness in curio del Toro comic book flick Hellboy

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Cast: Ron Perlman (Hellboy), Selma Blair (Liz Sherman), Rupert Evans (John Thaddeus), John Hurt (Dr Trevor Bruttenholm), Karel Roden (Rasputin), Jeffrey Tambor (Tom Manning), Doug Jones (Abe Sapien), Brian Steele (Sammael), Ladislav Beran (Karl Ruprecht Kroenen), Bridget Hodson (Ilsa Haupstein), Corey Johnson (Agent Clay)

As little as 10 years ago, outside a few core characters like Batman, the X-Men or Spiderman, comic book movies were an odd curio hard to place in the mass market. Today of course, you can virtually get any character who has appeared in a cartoon strip up on the screen with a budget of millions. But back in 2004, Guillermo del Toro had to squeeze this project out on a smaller budget in order to get the studio to agree to make the film.

Hellboy has a particularly demented story. In 1945, the Nazis, working in partnership with Rasputin (Karel Roden) – yes thatRasputin, don’t even ask – attempt to open a portal to hell to, well I’m not quite sure what they want to do, but it probably involves the destruction of the world. Anyway, some humble GIs stop them and the only thing that comes through the portal is a little demon with an enormous stone fist. Raised by paranormal expert Dr Trevor Bruttenholm (John Hurt), this creature grows up into cigar-chomping secret-agent-for-the-FBI Hellboy (Ron Perlman), working on paranormal investigations. But when Rasputin returns from the dead it looks like all hell (literally) is about to break out.

Okay it should be pretty clear to you from that that Hellboy is an odd film. It’s very much from del Toro’s B-movie heart, and he invests this nonsense material with a great deal of directorial style and heart – a real “geek-boy-artist” job. Del Toro has a great deal of imagination and is able to strike a happy balance between enjoying the material and not taking it all too seriously. So he lets the film barrel along, throwing plenty of nonsense at the screen without worrying about trying to make it make real-world sense. In fact Del Toro is clearly so fond of the material that he basically shoots the whole thing like a comic book come to life.

So the film is crammed with bright primary colours mixed with murky blacks, and Del Toro frames many key moments like comic book panels. It’s a film packed with striking images and scenes built around stuff that feels like it should teeter over into ridiculous camp all the time but never quite does. Its steam-punky styling instead manages to feel somehow both strikingly original visually and also strangely packed with integrity – like Del Toro made a very personal big-budget movie for his childhood, the sort of bizarro cult film that’s actually-quite-good and it’s going to win a huge following once people can find it for themselves (which is indeed what happened).

Del Toro’s other great principled stand was to ensure that Ron Perlman played the lead. Hellboy is a bizarre character – over six feet, red, horns, a tail – but what Perlman and Del Toro do so well is to make him some sort of Brooklynish chippy blue-collar worker with a kitchen-sink earthy wit. Perlman is clearly having a whale of a time playing this temperamental demon like some sort of longshoreman Han Solo, a brattish teenager and rebel with a world-weary cynicism. He’s crammed with contradictions (the demon who fights for good!) that Del Toro is keen to explore – and makes consistently interesting.

Because he’s such a different character, he energises a fairly traditional story and his character’s pretty standard personal-struggle-plotline (will he do the right or the wrong thing?). Perlman juggles all this really well, and gives a performance that is both dry and funny but also has moments of real heart and emotion. He even manages to sell his rather possessive love for Selma Blair’s (also pretty good) fellow orphan with pyrotechnical abilities as something heartfelt and caring, despite the fact that at one point he basically stalks her. It’s a rather wonderful performance.

The rest of the cast are a bit more of a mixed bag. Rupert Evans is saddled with the audience surrogate role – asking the questions we can’t ask – while Karel Roden’s lipsmacking performance as Rasputin never quite engages as a villain. Stronger roles come from Jeffrey Tambor as an officious FBI director and especially from John Hurt as Hellboy’s father-figure, the kind of quintessential ageing mentor that you can imagine his wards adoring.

The rather silly plot doesn’t really matter. The importance here is the gothic chill of Del Toro’s style, mixed with his crazy “larger-than-life” dark comic book tone. And it works really well: the film is fun and witty, and if the storyline never really feels like it earns the “end of the world” threat (and builds towards an uninvolving duking out with a giant CGI monster), there are enough enjoyments along the way to make you want to make the journey.

The Shape of Water (2017)

Sally Hawkins and Octavia Spencer work together to save a misunderstood creature in The Shape of Water

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Cast: Sally Hawkins (Elisa Esposito), Michael Shannon (Colonel Richard Strickland), Richard Jenkins (Giles), Doug Jones (The Creature), Michael Stuhlbarg (Dr Robert Hoffstetler), Octavia Spencer (Zelda Delilah Fuller), Nick Searcy (General Frank Hoyt), David Hewlett (Fleming), Lauren Lee Smith (Elaine Strickland)

Guillermo del Toro: part arthouse director, part thumping action director, who else could have made both Pan’s Labyrinth and Pacific Rim? The Shape of Water falls firmly into the former category, and continues the director’s long-standing interest in fairy-tales and fables, creating adult bedtime stories filled with romance and wonder, but laced with violence and human horror (and it’s always the humans who are the monsters). The Shape of Water has been garlanded with huge praise – but yet I’m not quite sure about it. Just not quite sure.

In 1962 in Baltimore, Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) is a mute cleaner working in a government facility with her colleague, friend and effective translator Zelda (Octavia Spencer). Her only other friend is her neighbour, a gay out-of-work advert artist Giles (Richard Jenkins). The research facility takes delivery of a strange amphibious creature (Doug Jones), captured in the wild by sinister CIA man Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon). While Strickland and lead scientist Dr Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) conduct tests on the creature, Elisa befriends it – the two of them drawn together by their isolation and inability to communicate verbally. When the decision comes from above to dissect the creature, Elisa decides to help it escape.

The Shape of Wateris an adult fairy-tale that uses the structure, rules and heightened reality of the bedtime story. So we have Elisa as “the Princess without a voice”, the government facility as the evil castle, the creature as a mixture of damsel in distress and knight errant, and Michael Shannon’s vile government spook as a sort of perverted evil Queen. While the film is set in 1962, it’s aiming for a fantasy world feeling: Elisa and Giles even live above an old-school movie cinema, while the facility itself is a dank, subterranean concrete prison, part medieval dungeon, part industrial complex, dressed in a retro-1950s style. There’s no denying the film looks fantastically impressive.

The plot hinges on the growing bond between Elisa and the creature, which flourishes first into a mutual friendship, then semi-romance and finally into a full-blown relationship. If there is one part of the movie which I felt didn’t quite work, it was the build between friendship and love. While del Toro does some excellent work showing these two bonding over a common lack of language – she teaches him some basic sign language, they both share a love of music – I felt the jump between friendship and sexual attraction seemed a little big.

Del Toro films it all beautifully – and his empathy for both characters is very moving. But the film wants us to feel this deep connection for (and between) the two characters – and I’m just not sure I did. I’m not sure the film gives the time it needs for this development. Great as Michael Stuhlbarg’s (and excellent as his conflicted performance is) character is, could the film have removed his sub-plot and invested more time in the relationship? Yes it could – and I think this could have made a stronger movie. This is of course a personal reaction – I’m sure plenty of people will be bowled over by the romance of the film – but I didn’t quite buy it. For all the soulfulness of the film, I just didn’t find myself investing in this relationship as it built as much as I should.

This is despite Sally Hawkins’ expressive acting as Elisa. I find Hawkins a bit of an acquired taste: she is a little too twee, something about her eyes and vulnerable smile is a little too head-girlish. Of course that sprightly gentleness works perfectly here, but the character is more interesting when del Toro explores her depths, her desire and well-concealed resentfulness under a cheery exterior (practically the first thing we see her do is masturbate in the bath – a daily ritual timed to the second via egg timer, functionally getting these feelings out of the way before the day ahead). Hawkins mixes this gentle exterior and passionate interior extremely well throughout the film.

The principal supports are also excellent. It’s no coincidence that del Toro makes our heroes all outsiders: a mute, a black servant and an ageing gay man. As well as showing why these characters might be drawn together, it’s also a neat parallel commentary on attitudes of the time – Octavia Spencer in particular makes a huge amount out of a character that is effectively a voice for Elisa half the time, investing the part with a huge sisterly warmth.

Richard Jenkins is both very funny and rather sweet as a man scared of being alone and frightened about doing the right thing. Most of the film’s laughs come from him – but so does a large degree of its heart. Jenkins gets some fantastic material – from hints that he has been fired for social and sexual misdemeanors from his Mad Men-ish former job, to his growing realisation that his hand-drawn art is being left behind in a world embracing photography (“I think it’s my best work” has never sounded like a sadder mantra), and above all his hopelessly sad infatuation with the friendly barman at a local diner (the sort of hopeless crush you feel he must realise isn’t going to go anywhere good – but still manages to be endearing before it gets there).

Del Toro’s dreamy fable has plenty of potential monsters and obstacles in it – from government suits to Russian heavies – but the main antagonist is Shannon’s Strickland. Great as Shannon is in this role as a menacing heavy with a hinterland of insecurities and self-doubt, it’s a character that feels a little obvious. He’s the monster, you see! It’s a heavy-handedness the film sometimes uses – not least in its occasional references to the race politics of the era – that weights the deck, and tries to do a little too much of the work for the audience. Again, a film with one fewer sub-plot might have allowed this character greater depth. As it is, his vileness is established from the first second, which means the metaphor of his hand with its increasingly rotten, gangrenous fingers seems a little to on-the-nose.

But The Shape of Water is a labour of love, and a testament to love – and del Toro reminds us all what a luscious and romantic filmmaker he can be. The later romantic moments between Elisa and the Creature have a beauty to them – not least the moments when they immerse themselves together in water. Other moments are too obvious: an imagined song-and-dance routine is so signposted in advance that it carries little emotional impact. In fact, the film’s main fault may be it is too predictable: most of its plot developments I worked out within the first few minutes – but it sort of still works. After all, fairy-tales are predictable aren’t they?

Del Toro has made one from the heart here. It’s not a perfect film – it’s not a masterpiece, and I think it’s a less complex and affecting work than the brilliant Pan’s Labyrinth – but it’s made with a lot of love and a lot of lyrical romanticism. It looks absolutely astounding. It’s actually surprisingly funny and wonderfully acted: Richard Jenkins probably stands out, and my respect for Octavia Spencer continues to grow. Del Toro is gifted filmmaker, and he is working overtime here to make a romantic, sweeping, monster movie cum adult fairy-tale. All the ingredients are there: but somehow I didn’t fall in love. Did I miss it? Maybe I did. And I can’t think of much higher praise than I’m more than willing to go back and look again and see if I get more of a bond with it next time. But, for all its moments of genius, I found the delight was on the margins rather than the centre.