Fables and foibles.(FILM)(Pan's Labyrinth)(Movie review)

A FAIRY tale for adults. According to the wizards at Google, this phrase has been used 474 times to describe Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro's fantasy of fascist-era Spain, in the month since it made its American debut. I suppose I know what they mean: The film has fauns and fairies and magical kingdoms hidden away underground, but it's also rated R for graphic violence, and deservedly so. Yet at the same time it's hard to imagine a less appropriate description for del Toro's movie, which for all its gore is a children's story through and through, dependent on atmosphere and archetype for its power, and deliberately designed to skirt adulthood's complexities and shades of gray. Like the (equally bloody) fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, Pan's Labyrinth is potent enough to be appreciated by grown-ups, but only if they approach it through the eyes of a child.

The year is 1944, and the place is the north of Spain, where a girl named Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) and her pregnant, ailing mother are on their way to join Ofelia's stepfather, a captain in Franco's army named Vidal who's charged with cleaning up a pocket of Communist resistance in the countryside around an old mill. Vidal is played by Sergi Lopez, who has conjured up memorable villains while speaking French (as the titular psychopath of With A Friend Like Harry) and English (as a corrupt hotel manager in Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things); here, he adds a Spanish-language sadist to his curriculum vitae. The captain is the sort of man who prefers beating to talking, shooting to beating, and a spot of torture to any of the above. He's interested in Ofelia's mother only because she's carrying his son; Ofelia herself exists only as an object for his cruelty to batten on.

Seeking an escape, Ofelia retreats into the forests that surround the mill, where she discovers--or imagines, or dreams--a portal to a magical world, guarded by a creaking, enormous, and faintly sinister faun. He informs her that she's actually the reincarnation of Princess Moanna, daughter of the ruler of an underground realm, and that she can return to her royal father's side--but only if she first performs three tasks, each more dangerous than the last, involving dripping caverns and enormous frogs, keys and daggers, and a memorably surreal creature with eye sockets on his hands. These tasks must be carried out under the noses of her adult guardians, who have their own problems to deal with: Vidal is trying to cope with the rebels, both the partisans in the hills and the collaborators in his own house; those same collaborators, a kindly doctor and the beautiful housekeeper, are trying to assist their Communist friends without ...