**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly, and Toby Froud.
Directed by Jim Henson & written by Henson, Terry Jones, Dennis Lee, and Elaine May
1986 PG
“Labyrinth” is a family movie that is, in places, a little too cerebral for the kids, but not cerebral enough for the grown-ups. It follows a bratty but resourceful teenage girl (Jennifer Connelly in pre-"Beautiful Mind" days) as she attempts to rescue her baby brother from the storybook Labyrinth of the Goblin King (David Bowie). Children will enjoy watching her run from one puzzle to the next, in and out of the jaws of death. Teenage boys will just enjoy watching her. Really attentive adults will notice that something is going on underneath all this, involving the nature and function of escapism although, sadly, “Labyrinth” is aimed at an audience a little too small for it to go exploring.
Maybe I’m making too big of a deal out of movie whose cast is ninety percent Muppets (I dig Muppets, by the way). As a “find-and-finish” adventure, “Labyrinth” is entertaining and very good-looking. The maze made by the Goblin King is part garden, part swamp, part village, part cave. The art direction, as supervised by the late genius Jim Henson, is superb: everything is gorgeous and perilous, but not too perilous, more like a theme park haunted house. Along the way Connelly meets all manner of creature, including a talking caterpillar, an old wise man with an ostrich growing out of his head, and a greedy little troll whom she can bribe with plastic. Naturally she makes friends and sidekicks out of some of them. There are also dozens of setpieces for them to explore, my favorite being the pit with arms coming out of the walls, who hold Connelly up and make faces out of their hands to talk to her. The work of Jim Henson’s creature shop, these toys made me smile to no end. Children that haven’t been completely bombarded and deadened by anime will probably share my joy. Some bits might be scary, but not the real kind of scary, the good kind, like reading a fairy tale.
What intrigues and bothers me the most about “Labyrinth” is the reality-bending mind games the Goblin King plays on Connelly. The question never asked in stories like this is, what does the Goblin King want with a baby anyway? The answer fleetingly provided in “Labyrinth” is that the King wants the baby to get to Connelly, in part to seduce her as men since time immemorial have always seduced women, but also because he becomes the embodiment of all the fantasy novels she reads. The Goblin King does not simply swoop out of nowhere and snatch the baby brother; he is summoned by Connelly from a big-picture storybook she has been reading. By the end of the film, he is the embodiment of Fiction, and whatever purpose beautiful fantasies and lies serve in our lives. In the course of the film Connelly is asked again and again to choose between fantasy and reality. The two are even flip-flopped at one point, so that the hallucination looks like her real bedroom.
To my frustration “Labyrinth” only touches on these ideas without really exploring them. There is real pathos in the relationship between the fantasy-enthralled girl and her fantasy come to life as an androgynous pop star. In her final scenes with Bowie, as well as an earlier dream sequence where we find the two of them waltzing inside a bubble, I was struck with how much potential this same material had for…well, something else, something deeper, besides a simple find-and-finish adventure. There’s unexplored potential for a statement about childhood’s end, about abandoning girlish fantasies and facing cold reality. I liked what I saw, and have always had and will have a soft spot for this movie. “Labyrinth” is a pretty jolly adventure, I just wanted a little more of the brainy stuff.
Finished May 29, 2002
Copyright 2002 Friday & Saturday Night