The Prestige (2006)

If you were to write a screenplay about a pair of rival magicians who both have acts which require them to be in two places at once, what would be the cheapest, least imaginative plot device you could implement to produce this magic trick? The answer reminds me of a sort of amusing exchange from Thank You for Smoking (2005): when a movie producer mentions that he plans on including cigarettes in a new sci-fi space movie, Aaron Eckhart’s Tobacco lobbyist asks, “But wouldn't they blow up in an all oxygen environment?” to which the movie producer replies, “Probably. But it's an easy fix. One line of dialogue: ‘Thank God we invented the... you know, whatever device.’”

Is it fitting or ironic that a movie about magicians duplicates the feeling of seeing a confounding magic trick, only to learn the secret, and find out that it’s incredibly disappointing? Christian Bale’s Alfred Borden performs an impossible stunt, where he stands on a wide stage with a pair of door frames on opposite ends, bounces a rubber ball across the stage, enters the door on the left, and exits from the door on the right, just in time to catch the bouncing ball. Hugh Jackman’s Robert Angier is in the audience, and when asked what he thought of this trick (dubbed “The Transporting Man” by Borden), utters, “It was the greatest magic trick I have ever seen.” Borden and Angier have a history that manages to be slightly less convoluted than the back-and-forth revenge tactics they exercise on one another involving “The Transporting Man” magic trick. The simpler revenge tactics involving a loaded pistol and the smashing of a birdcage, however, are one of the sparse points of interest to be found in the film before the nonsense with the Tesla machine collapses it into tedium. The Tesla machine is the lazily contrived plot device that is laid as the cornerstone upon which the entire plot’s architecture wobbly sits.

This dull and convenient contrivance could be overlooked if the architecture benefiting from it was at all compelling. The first time I saw the film, I was distracted by the deliberately tangled complications of the plot, but once the secret is revealed, all that is left for a second viewing is the routine. Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan know how to invent a gimmick strange enough to invite me on a search for answers, but Nolan has not figured out a way to make the journey rewarding in and of itself. Nolan’s direction is functional at best and insipid at worst. The only particularly rewarding aspect of watching The Prestige a second time is admiring the lighting, which is rich and elegant.

What is the most preposterously asinine story element is the gratuitous exchanging of identities between Fallon and Alfred. He says, “Fallon was both of us. We would switch,” needlessly jeopardizing and finally destroying the affections of both his wife and mistress.

As Alfred's mistress (but Robert's first) Scarlett Johansson is immensely watchable, of course...

...and, like Keira Knightley, does not seem out of place in period settings.

Her acting is fine. Michael Caine is quite good, but his character is underused. Christian Bale is enigmatic, but then again, next to Hugh Jackman’s theatrically arched eyebrows and inadvertently farcical overexpressiveness...


...Christian Bale is downright inscrutable.

Hugh Jackman is a gifted comic actor, but when called upon to play a dramatic role, the results are disastrous. I often found myself bursting into laughter when watching his excessively earnest overwrought grieving and raging in Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain (2006). He loses a wife tragically in this film too and gets a chance to do the excessively earnest overwrought grieving and raging all over again...

...duplicating the unintended mirth experienced during The Fountain (2006).

That is not to suggest that this sorry and perfunctory deception is in the same league as Aronofsky’s film; it is only to suggest that Hugh Jackman should stick to frivolous things like Broadway musicals and leave the serious histrionics for darker actors.

As for Christopher Nolan, he still hasn’t proved that he’s anything more than a hired gun with a few cards up his sleeve…which, I suppose, would make him ideal for manufacturing a film about a couple of frauds.


Grade: C-

Spartacus (1960)

“The script could have been improved in the course of shooting, but it wasn’t. Kirk [Douglas] was the producer. He and Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter, and Edward Lewis, the executive producer, had everything their way.”
-Stanley Kubrick
Vincent LoBrutto’s Stanley Kubrick: A Biography

I watched Spartacus for one reason and one reason alone: out of obligation to finish viewing every single one of Stanley Kubrick’s 12 available features (his first, Fear and Desire (1953) has never been released on video). I’m happy to say it was more compelling than I had imagined and despite the worrisome quote above, basically a success, though one that feels a little dated. Kirk Douglas is best in the first Act of the film, when he silently anguishes in a subterranean holding cell for slaves being trained to fight as gladiators for Lentalus Batiatus (the great Peter Ustinov), a man who is less nasty in lording over his doomed than Oliver Reed’s gnarled Proximo in Gladiator, but still cheerfully pitiless. There is a powerful and moving moment when Kirk Douglas’s eponymous hero is beaten in a impromptu gladiatorial battle by Draba (Woody Strode), a tall fearsome black slave.


Draba is given the thumbs down by Senator Crassus (Laurence Olivier) and his female companion, but instead of plunging his trident into Spartacus’s throat, Draba hurls it at Crassus and leaps up to the balcony where the royals spectate, only to be incapacitated by a spear, and then brutally slashed by Crassus, sacrificing his life for human decency. It is a devastating moment of noble heroism that is all the more effective for transpiring without bluntly informing us of how noble it was.

Unlike, say, a crucial scene near the end, when the captured Spartacus talks to his loyal soldier and friend, Antoninus (Tony Curtis) outside the gates of Crassus’s fortress.

Antoninus: “Could we have won, Spartacus? Could we ever have won?”

Spartacus: “Just by fighting them, we won something.”

This exchange and the many others where characters talk incessantly, faces shining while violins play, about F-R-E-E-D-O-M is not too far removed from the platitudes of Braveheart, and if the screenplay of the film had been written by Kubrick (he wrote, or co-wrote all of his other films, including Lolita, for which he went uncredited), such clichéd aphorisms would have been excised. As would the mawkish romance between Spartacus and Varinia (Jean Simmons), who frolic in a meadow in one scene while warm gooey music strums insufferably.

Spartacus: I’m free. And what do I know? I don’t even know how to read.

Varinia: You know things that can’t be taught.

Spartacus: I know nothing. Nothing! And I want to know. I want to. I want to know.

Varinia: Know what?

Spartacus: …I want to know all about you. Every line…every curve. I want to know every part of you. Every beat of your heart.

No doubt Stanley Kubrick was in pain when it came time to shoot this scene. I was in pain watching it. Again, Spartacus was the one film on which Kubrick had no involvement in preplanning, notably in crafting the screenplay. That is not to say that Dalton Trumbo’s dialogue is without merit; on the contrary, there is a wealth of it. There is the relief of Charles Laughton’s cynical, decadent old Gracchus, who when informed by Peter Ustinov’s Batiatus that he’s “…found something I never had with all my wealth…dignity,” says, “In Rome, dignity shortens life, even more surely than disease.”

Much credit should go to Saul Bass. Bass is the most famous graphic designer in film history for his revolutionary opening title sequences, often combining animation and live action to create energetic film credits which sucked the viewer into a film in a way that had never been done before. His most famous sequences are the ones in The Man with the Golden Arm, Anatomy of a Murder, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Psycho, and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. While the one he designed for Spartacus is not one of his most dynamic, his contributions to the film went beyond title design. He scouted locations, worked on set design, and single-handedly blueprinted the battle scenes of the film. “He storyboarded the scene in which the slaves break down the fence of the gladiator school and originated the concept of the slaves’ using the fence as a weapon” (LoBrutto, 171). He also was responsible for thinking up the ingenious concept of the flaming logs that Spartacus’s army roll down the hill at the charging Romans. Spartacus has the look and the impact of many different collaborators’ achievements and failures being stirred together in the same pot, which gives it the ultimate, vaguely dissatisfying feeling of not cohering into one visionary whole.

Spartacus has many of Kubrick’s stylistic touches, but the actual story has zero: no subversive humor, no lack of sentimentality, no wicked perversity. The film does end mostly tragic and carries an inexorable gloom, but it has a generic sort of pessimism, glum, without Kubrick’s impish gallows humor. Another massive deficiency is the lighting and photography – reading about Kubrick on the set of Spartacus, it is clear that he showed a once in a lifetime complacency about the film he was working on. In Vincent LoBrutto’s Stanley Kubrick: A Biography, he writes, “Although Kubrick was under the enormous pressure of an epic production and having to cope with ubiquitous power struggles, his disengagement from a film that wasn’t really his and his inbred sense of dark humor helped move him through the project.” While he was uncompromising about many things, the long takes, calling for scenes to be covered in every possible angle, the shooting ratio (the ratio between the total duration of footage shot for a film and the footage which results from its final cut), he did not show his characteristic attention to the lighting as he had in The Killing and Paths of Glory. This could have been a result of the open hostility from Spartacus director of photography, Russell Metty, who was heard to say, “Let’s get that little Jew-boy from the Bronx off the crane” (LoBrutto, 185). There was much in-fighting between the two on the set, all of which Kubrick endured without raising his voice or becoming angry, another sign of his disengagement from Spartacus. Anyone who has watched Vivian Kubrick’s 35-minute documentary detailing the making of The Shining, has witnessed Stanley Kubrick being disquietingly irascible with Shelley Duvall.

He just didn’t care as much, and it shows. There isn’t a hint of the brilliant Expressionistic lighting of The Killing and Paths of Glory, the very thing that made those films so astonishing. In Spartacus, the photography is adequate, but not particularly interesting to look at: the daylight scenes are too bright and the night scenes are too murky. Indeed, Spartacus has the least impressive cinematography of the 11 Kubrick films I’ve seen. Considered alone, it is a fine handsome epic, but among Kubrick’s oeuvre, it is an unfortunate weak spot.


Grade: B

Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942)

In my ongoing quest to devour the complete works of all the important directors in the Film canon, I considered that it might be helpful to start from the beginning and develop a structured road map. Being a student of the Auteur Theory, and gravitating towards formalists, I thought it might be best to fill in the Hitchcock gaps. So I'm going to attempt to make my way through all 14 films of Alfred Hitchock's The Masterpiece Collection 14-Disc Box Set. I still plan on rewatching the 7 in there that I've already seen.


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Saboteur is famous for its ending struggle atop the torch of the Statue of Liberty, and I once watched a behind-the-scenes video detailing the construction of the life-size model of the upper portion of the statue’s left hand during a Hitchcock exhibit at Universal Studios. Everything about this scene (the final scene in the film) is wildly innovative, but I did not know how exceptionally well the rest of Saboteur would hold up. It is an astonishing precursor to Hitchcock’s much more celebrated action thriller North by Northwest, a precursor in story (an innocent man is framed for a crime committed by a small handful of wealthy conspirators and is on the run) and astonishing because the black-and-white earlier film is as thrilling and sharp as North by Northwest was in 1959. Even in 2008, the film moves briskly and displays a wide variety of influential story developments. The fugitive, Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) is apprehended by the police and sits, handcuffed, in the backseat of a cop car. As the car is stalled behind some trucks on a bridge overlooking a river, Kane asks for a cigarette. When the cop reaches in his pocket, Kane clobbers him on the head, dashes out onto the bridge, and with no other opportunities available, steps up onto the railing, and in a spectacular long-distance shot, is filmed leaping from the bridge and plummeting down, down, down into the river.

This an entire five decades before Richard Kimble’s suicidal leap of faith off a dam viaduct.

Robert Cummings is of the bland & dashing variety of movie heroes. He does play harried really well, and his character often must find creative methods to elude the authorities. At one point, he even made me feel ashamed for wishing he would be more ruthless in his self-preservation: he is traveling with a young woman, Patricia (Priscilla Lane) who intends on turning him into the police, and has him in a bind – she has wrangled his handcuffed hands behind the wheel as she drives. He manages to get control of the vehicle and stops it in the middle of a lonely country road. She gets out and informs him that she’ll flag down the next car that comes by and tell them that he is a dangerous fugitive. While she stands out farther down the road, a car appears on the horizon. He craftily unlatches the hood of her car, and holds the chain of his handcuffs into the motor fan.







Hitchcock edits breathlessly between the car gaining proximity to Patricia and closer and closer shots of sparks flying off the chain as it is frictioned against the spinning motor fan.


At the last second, the chain snaps, and he gets back behind the wheel as the car coming in the opposite direction on the left side of the road halts next to Patricia who is standing on the right side of the road, directly in his path. Compulsively, I thought, “just drive over her and speed out of there,” which of course, if he did, would render the entire point of his dilemma moot. That might make for an interesting film premise, though: a guilty man on the run for the one crime that he didn’t commit, though he’d be the only one rooting for him. Instead Cummings stops the car in front of her and grabs her to come along with him. Patricia goes from being combative to feeling dubious about his claims of innocence to finally being convinced of it.




Priscilla Lane is a lovely and endearing actress and becomes increasingly more so as Barry and Patricia forge ahead into the knotty conspiracy.


As for Barry Kane, Cummings makes the commonly-considered-to-be-boring good guy role look unusually alluring. The entire film, in fact, makes playing the good guy look far more compelling than being one of the elitist, treacherous villains, of whom the head, Charles Tobin (Otto Kruger), coolly proselytizes to Kane about the superiority of playing the duplicitous fair-weather friend during the country’s uncertain transitional period of fighting overseas:

“You're one of the ardent believers - a good American. Oh, there are millions like you. People who plod along, without asking questions. I hate to use the word stupid, but it seems to be the only one that applies. The great masses, the moron millions. Well, there are a few of us unwilling to just troop along... a few of us who are clever enough to see that there's much more to be done than just live small complacent lives, a few of us in America who desire a more profitable type of government. When you think about it, Mr. Kane, the competence of totalitarian nations is much higher than ours. They get things done.”

Kane: “Yeah. They get things done. They bomb cities, sink ships, torture and murder so you and your friends can eat off of gold plate; it’s a great philosophy.”

Tobin: “I neither intend to be bombed nor sunk, Mr. Kane. That’s why I’m leaving now. And if things don’t arrive for you, if, uh…we should win, then I’ll come back.”

I would be far less tolerant of such malevolent exposition (or as Ebert labels such speeches, “The Talking Killer”) in a current film, but different criterion must be employed for a film made in 1942. The thing that made Hitchcock, like Kubrick after him, stand out from his peers, was his ingenuity and sense of humor and pacing. Many films from the 1940s would be absolutely interminable at this point, but Saboteur only has one scene (involving Kane speaking to the mother of a dead friend) that is sluggish. There is even a bizarre detour where Kane and Patricia hop a ride with a traveling Circus troupe à la Carnivàle, and in conversation with a dyspeptic midget, a kindly thin man, Bones, known as “The Human Skeleton,” a pair of warring conjoined twin sisters, and a bearded lady named Esmeralda. Reluctant to reveal that he is the fugitive that’s been talked about on the radio, Barry explains that their car broke down on a side road. “I know. A moonlight night and a parked car. That’s nice,” says the bearded lady, who is then rebuked by Bones, “Esmeralda! Everywhere you search for sex. Get your eyes out of the mud and look up at the stars!” Lodz might say she has a “singularly prurient mind.”

The film has Hitchcock’s trademark virtuoso orchestration, propelling an action story ahead of its time in artistry and thrills that culminates in a striking climax atop a famous American monument just as it did in North By Northwest (Mount Rushmore in that film). There are sumptuous, detailed images such as a hangar door slowly opening to allow entry to a multitude of shadowed workers...





...and simpler images that resonate powerfully with a primal force such as the image of a man’s seized arm struggling to reach a button to detonate an explosive with his finger or the way the absence of a score underlines and exaggerates the terrible urgency of watching a man hanging on for dear life over a dizzying fall.





There are self-aware images cleverly obscuring the line between reality and the movies as when Kane chases the real saboteur into a crowded movie theater in the middle of a screening and the man runs behind the giant screen. We see his tiny silhouette dwarfed by the massive backdrop of the theater-projected image, and the tiny silhouette fires a gun as the characters in the movie exchange gun fire.

A man in the audience is shot and slumps over, but it takes a while for anyone to notice as the real gunshot has been covered (a similar incident occurs in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) when an assassination attempt at a symphony is planned so that the gunshot coincides with the crash of a cymbal).

Saboteur has some inevitable anachronistic clunkiness here and there, but the whole enterprise still works splendidly in 2008. In 1942, Hitchcock’s work was the very definition of cutting edge.


Grade: A

Happy Birthday Edie Falco

She is a chameleon and a vessel: drop her into any diseased milieu and she’ll absorb it like a sponge, her face manifesting pathologies unique to that broken atmosphere. Whether it be the smothering constant danger of the Oswald Correctional Facility or the banal sleaze and empty suburban malaise of New Jersey, Edie Falco is a crucible of anxieties and pathos. She was the standout actress on HBO's very first series, Oz, a steely female presence that is the antithesis of the women on HBO's second series, Sex & the City.

As Corrections Officer Diane Wittlesey, she lives in a sterile Plexiglas subculture of feral, unpredictably lethal inmates. As Wittlesey, her face is as taut and plain and hard as the stretched top of a water drum, while her eyes, feverishly alert, dart in the stone of her face, the paranoid eyes themselves prisoners of her hard vigilant expression. This actress alone, and this character alone already powerfully conveys the claustrophobic frenzy that is the aura of Oz: Seasons 1 and 2. It is also divulged over the course of the first few seasons that she is a divorcee struggling to outrun poverty and, it is not a surprise, as her weary face does not hide her character’s hardscrabble background. This complete and utter lack of glamor is what makes her perfect to play a female prison guard. As Diane Wittlesey, she seemed perfectly at home as the only white female Corrections Officer in Oswald State Penitentiary, her probing face was hard as granite and completely scrubbed of pretty embellishments. She wasn’t a clichéd ballbuster type, either; she was self-effacing in her toughness, a thoroughly layered character, incapable of being insubstantial. People who have only seen her as Carmela Soprano have no idea how much range this woman has.

A character that couldn’t be more the polar opposite of the hyper-alert, ossified Corrections Officer is Carmela Soprano, a spoiled, unfulfilled New Jersey housewife whose face becomes more slack and vacant as her character becomes more used to her materialism and her moral complacency. She’d like to believe she is the unwitting First Lady of the New Jersey criminal empire, but the authority and the poise with which she holds herself in the presence of her husband’s associates’ wives shows, just so subtly, that she knows quite well that she is the Alpha Bitch.

Her first HBO character is often overlooked because of her astonishing work on The Sopranos, but I'm comforted in the knowledge that Carmela Soprano is as rich and complicated as Diane Wittlesey, very likely moreso because we spent twice as much time with Carmela. When thinking about The Sopranos, I often forget how many terrible attributes Carmela has: she is materialistic and has dubious motives when it comes to her relationship with her husband that verge on flat-out gold-digging, but these are trivial considerations when they are being exhibited by someone with as much humanity as Edie Falco. I always forgive her wrongdoings, no matter how selfish or thoughtless. Falco really broke new ground during her time on HBO, resulting in the first truly complex female dramatic television character. In fact, she is the first actress to ever sweep the top three television awards. In 2000, she received the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, The Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Drama Series, and the SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series, all in the same year for her performance as Carmela Soprano.

HBO has introduced me to many great actresses: Molly Parker and Paula Malcolmson in Deadwood, Polly Walker in Rome, Amy Ryan and Sonja Sohn in The Wire, but Edie Falco is the original HBO actress, and just like Carmela among the gangster housewives of New Jersey, she is #1.

Paths of Glory (1957)

“The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
- Elegy written in a church courtyard, Thomas Gray


Everything you’ve heard is true: Paths of Glory is as potent and gripping today as it was when it was released 51(!) years ago. After conquering the crime genre with The Killing (1956, only his 3rd film), Kubrick conquered the war genre, producing the single best English-language war film in cinematic history (excepting perhaps Apocalypse Now), a vicious satire of military bureaucracy and the farcical allegiance to the chain-of-command. Paths of Glory alternates between compassionate irony and bleak absurdity to illustrate the horrendous folly of war. 10,000 men’s lives are lost for a few yards, to capture a building on a spot of land, which they have been told, means something.

A man’s life is not terribly important to him, unless, of course, it is his own, but if it’s not his life, why not sacrifice it for 15 meters, as long as it promotes his reputation? That is the ugly mindset of General Mireau (George MacReady), the officer putting his promotion in jeopardy if his men do not accomplish the impossible. He has been ordered by the genial sociopath General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) to take a particularly pesky battlement, the terribly important “Ant Hill” in order to show tangible results of progress. Broulard is the highest ranking officer in the film, but the subtle pressure he puts on Mireau implies that he himself is being pressured by another, even more aloof higher-up.

The two Generals negotiate promotions in ivory ballrooms lined with towering windows, coldly determining ideal strategies to overcome impossible circumstances at the great bodily risk of pawns under their command. The Grandmasters chat as the outside floods the inner rooms, penetrating their sequestered plotting, bathing it in naked daylight. Later, the same daylight lurks in a ballroom where a devastating injustice is taking place, flooding, and remaining, stubbornly, like an elephant in the room.

It is in the use of light, the use of color (yes, black and white provides a color all its own), that Paths of Glory rewards the attention that has been apprehended by the cruel story of three men chosen, by lottery, to serve as scapegoats for a major tactical setback for the French Army during World War I. Like The Killing, Paths of Glory presents lustrous black-and-white imagery with deep rich blacks, cinematography crisper and sharper than most other black-and-white films from that period, and even more arresting for the meticulous manner in which Kubrick lights it, every image a marvelous raising of the bar of brilliant photography.

There are many powerful performances, especially George MacReady as the monstrously proud General Mireau, and the great, sometimes volcanic force of Kirk Douglas as the heroic Col. Dax.

The considerable acting is integrated so well into Kubrick's vision and served so proficiently by the photography that it is no surprise that, after Kubrick completed it, he was hailed as some sort of prodigy with a prescient sensibility peerless in its cunning assuredness.

Kubrick was well known for his devilish sense of humor and inevitably his black irony was misinterpreted as misogyny, nihilism, and misanthropy. The devilish sense of humor may have been magnified in later works like A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket, but they are prominent in The Killing and Paths of Glory as well. From the man condemned for cowardice for not leaving the trenches despite being knocked unconscious, to the condemned man with the skull fracture roused alert just in time for his execution, Kubrick is already pushing his exceptional cynicism to the breaking point for maximum poignant horror and dismay.

After the film was released, it was banned in France, as the film was considered “an offense to the honor of their army.” The film was also banned in Spain for its anti-military message and in Germany because they feared it might “strain relations with France.”

It would not be allowed to be exhibited in France until 1975.



Grade: A+

"The mouth is a primitive hole that will soon be phased out."

El Espinazo del Diablo (The Devil's Backbone) (2001)

When watching Guillermo Del Toro’s third feature film, The Devil’s Backbone, the promise of the richly conceived Pan’s Labyrinth is apparent in many details: the handsome photography, the Gothic ornamentation, the simultaneously grim and humane sensibility of the storyteller, the imagination.

And what an imagination Del Toro has. With the recent passing of Stan Winston, I’ve been more conscious of the contributions of creature puppetry and the vast superiority of tactile monsters over computer-generated ones. Del Toro primarily provides the former - memorable movie monsters that are not superimposed over the actual settings, but dwell and lurk, very real, within the walls of his gothic-noir architecture. The more often better than decent Hellboy (2004) has a handful of striking monsters and mutants; Blade II (2002), features the coolest cinematic vampires in a while, the ones carrying the Predator mouths; and of course, there is the wobbling eyeless nightmare that is the Pale Man.

He also knows how to pick humans who carry a palpable air of brutality: Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega) is like a junior version of the sadistic Captain Vidal from Pan’s Labyrinth, and has dark, primitive features that reminded me of a much meaner version of Colin Farrell.

There is a sinister mystery at the heart of The Devil’s Backbone and it’s clear that Jacinto is at the center of it.

We are made aware that he was once an orphan at the very institution where he now works as a scowling work-hand. He says the place makes him sick, though why he stays is not revealed until a little later when we learn he is involved in a couple of conspiracies (this would be the point in the review where you might want to stop reading if you’ve not seen the film), one of which is producing supernatural consequences, namely a wronged ghost who will not rest until he has brought his killer to justice. This is a familiar story ingredient in any movie that involves ghosts, usually, and, though the plot of The Devil’s Backbone may not be inspired, the film is a complete success in its cinematography (many, many images could be paused to admire for the sophistication of their composition). Example: There is a long-distance shot of Jacinto and some buddies sitting in orange-yellow light at a table in the middle to lower right side of the frame neatly arranged beside a pile of crates and barrels covered in white cloth bathed in white-blue light from the top to the bottom of the left side of the frame. Pause it and witness a painting. There is a superior artistic eye at work here, though anyone who has watched Pan’s Labyrinth knows this already.

Despite my admiration for the elegance of the look and the richness of visual creativity, The Devil’s Backbone left me wanting a deeper story. It tells a generic sort of R-rated Spanish Scooby Doo story. It has some delightfully perverted details (the headmistress's artificial leg, the deformed fetuses marinating in jars of rum...

...rum with which Professor Casares (Federico Luppi) fills a shot glass and downs) that add particular flavor and idiosyncratic humor, but the visionary ghoulishness of Pan's Labyrinth is still developing.

In one of my favorite movie images of the year, Del Toro plants an un-detonated megaton bomb face down in the ground of the courtyard of the orphanage. Not subtle, but some of the greatest movie images are not subtle (Charles Foster Kane leaning grandly over a podium with a 30-foot tall banner of his face towering behind him). The bomb sticking obstinately in the air is not only a singular, potentially iconic image, but also a potent symbol for a location simmering with dark secrets lying dormant.

Those dark secrets, regrettably, are disappointing; the underwhelming nature of the film comes from the story suggesting an epic, expansive evil with its setting and often mighty images (the bomb, the jarred fetuses and the symbol of the “Devil’s backbone”) and then revealing the evil as being merely the accidental death of one of the boys at the orphanage at the hands of a greedy, amoral young work-hand. Jacinto becomes much worse than simply amoral as the film goes along, but regardless, any possibilities for communicating a larger allegory offered by those mighty images is lost once the film simply reduces the possibilities to the boys tussling with Jacinto and two thug friends of his.

Another way to regard the wasted symbol of the upright bomb is to pretend it represents Del Toro’s ability: it is certainly already there, waiting, but it has yet to erupt into anything spectacular.


Grade: B