Nada. Pinocchio lives on the page and in the memory of countless children, but on the screen his incarnations has hardly ever been more than the clumsy impression of an idea, however rooted. Guillermo del Toro’s age-old passion project is in some ways no exception, I hate to say, but with more than a few saving graces.
While giving up the layered narrative of Collodi’s Pinocchio and with that any trace of its freemasonic significance, del Toro drastically readapts the material to his own idiosyncrasies and disparately influenced sense of mythology making it more personal, contemporary, cinematic. Like he said, his Pinocchio is not much about a child learning to be a real boy, as it is about a father learning to be a real one. After all, children don’t need to learn how to be children, but grownups might have to learn how to be parents—when not adults too.
Guillermo de Toro’s Pinocchio is also the celebration of disobedience for the sake of affirming one’s identity, and therefore of unruliness as an act of innate bravery as opposed to one of immaturity. ‘If he’s a puppet, where are his strings?’ candidly asks Candelwick in church. ‘That’s true. Who controls you, wooden boy?’ chimes in his father, the city black-shirted podestà. ‘Who controls you?’ counters Pinocchio, to Geppetto’s embarrassment and the congregation’s muttered dismay.
By giving it a more specific historical placement than to my knowledge Pinocchio ever had, del Toro not only adds an unexpected sense of crude realism to a story broadly perceived as a timeless fantastic metaphor—he creates an exciting resonance between the stubborn, candid, rebellious attitude of our skinny little one and values that are close to intellectual resistance. Very soon we realise that Pinocchio’s magical characters have to deal with war, death, discrimination, Fascists—and the fairytale’s dramatic side suddenly gains a different gravity.
As stop-frame couldn’t have been a better choice to tell about a talking burattino and a cricket fond of Schopenhauer, the animations are mostly excellent with just a few jarring notes. The scenes where Geppetto is drunk and desperate, or when he puts Carlo and Pinocchio to bed are superb, tasteful, moving. Others moments lack the same charm. Count Volpe’s animation in particular, however deliberately theatrical and sophisticatedly mannered, feels conceived around slightly amateurish acting clichés.
Very interestingly, the comparison between this Pinocchio and Disney’s is not just an easy bait film critics picked up. Guillermo del Toro himself often raised the comparison, praising the beloved animated classic and declaring himself a proper Disney freak. The two films somehow speak to each other for how they read Collodi’s faceted novel from different yet complementary angles. Disney doesn’t get enough credit for being dark, says del Toro. As his films don’t get enough for being bright and positive.
But the most precious gift I get from him, is even prior to the film itself. As a very Mexican inspiration to Pinocchio’s central idea, he quoted a stanza from a poem by Jaime Sabines that is going to stay with me forever.
Alguien me habló todos los días de mi vida
al oído, despacio, lentamente.
Me dijo: ¡vive, vive, vive!
Era la Muerte.
Nightmare Alley was released in an age where such glossy films full of stars, commercial ambitions, and no cosplays, have probably gone, however temporary, who knows, out of fashion. Shame, because catching up with it only now, I realise that it deserved a lot more attention—mine, to start with—and that despite drawing from classic noir material, it is a lot closer to our days than its stylish appearance might lead to think. Better phrased by Martin Scorsese, who even wrote a heartfelt article1 to persuade people to put the bloody remote down and go see it in a cinema, ‘Guillermo is certainly speaking from and to his own time, but he’s doing so in the idiom of a time gone by, and the urgency and despair of then overlaps with the urgency and despair of now in a way that’s quite disturbing. It’s like a warning bell.’
To an equally relatable contrast, Nightmare Alley’s haunted souls roam in a surreal land of wonders. The aesthetics of the film are so meticulously designed to let their perfection give way to an almost alienating feeling. Richly packed with gorgeous antiques, every set looks like a recreated environment in a history museum or a model inside a snowglobe. Of course they are great, and yet indulgently artificial in their vintage warmth, especially for the gritty notes of the subject.
The story unfolds at a slow pace through a lengthy first act, though before I know, the film has switched to a completely different tempo. The tension grows from lazy golden-lit cinema déjà-vus, including what seemed to me a slightly forced homage to one of the most memorable moments from Goodfellas—‘Go on, go on, around the corner,’ says the fishy Clem to Stan, indicating a mattress where he could crunch for the night—to near hart-attack intensity as our hero’s foolhardiness paves him the way to self-destruction. On the one hand, Nightmare Alley seems to try and give more answers than it should, or if anything than I wanted. I didn’t need to know about Stan’s past to connect with the character. Nor I needed the hilarity of the epilogue—more apt to a short film anyway—to close the circle. But on the other, I was fine not to know the details of what the spine-chilling Ezra Grindle really did to his lovers, or the meaning of the fantastic creature in the jar. My imagination works well enough, and it feels great when a director is aware and knows how to feed it.
Upon its original release I was told it was the best film Guillermo del Toro had ever made. Having only seen Hellboy at that point and still aching from the disappointment, I didn’t doubt for a second the truthfulness of the tip so I went and watch it—but once again, not quite meeting any of the exhilaration anticipated. Coming back to it sixteen years later, after having distractedly let those negative impressions sediment for so long, the first thing I notice is how little I actually remembered of the story and, conversely, how vividly its imagery has been preserved in my mind. This observation alone is rather revealing as to the main graces of Pan’s Labyrinth, and as to what makes Guillermo del Toro such a unique storyteller. However mixed my feelings might be about his work, he remains one the very few—especially in an age that despite the amazing means offered by technology has only made mainstream films lighter and emptier—who’s still capable of creating characters and worlds that stay. An enchanter, and above all a daydreamer.
Giving shape to his own nightmares, del Toro conceives the film as a narrative maze in which reality gets lost and blurs into fantasy—where history meets mythology, human meets monster, darkness meets light. Pan is a reversed fairytale of lies, where solace can’t be found in this land but within its mysteries. Ofelia carries the complexity of a heroine who’s almost oblivious to what the real threats and stakes are, not just behind the walls or underneath the floors, but out there in the woods and even beyond, in the rest of the country. Less convincingly, her stepfather, brutal Francoist captain Vidal, slips into a stylisation often resorted to in cinema. By making a myth out of the sadistic autocrat, the disturbed man, the single-minded political and social climber, Pan reduces the troubled psychology under a sick regime to trivial terms, therefore missing at least one terrifying notion. People like Vidal don’t necessarily sport the mannerisms of a lunatic, a torturer, a monster. They are just like anyone else, men with families, men with friends, men and all.
It also took me an effort to buy the kitchy golden glow of the epilogue, but the profundity of its essence didn’t fail to touch me. From that depth, an unsound hollow, the echo of a cry deafened me—that of all the children who suffered from the inherent inhumanities of our recursive history. In that respect, Guillermo del Toro’s take is as down to earth as horns and hooves and fairies can be in the most beautiful stories.
