Pinocchio ’22 (2022)

The first film adaptation of the 19th-century Italian stories by Carlo Collodi is the 1940 Disney Pinocchio, but no decade since has gone by without at least one movie or TV version. Last year, in fact, there were two. With a third from 2021, a Russian picture called Pinocchio: A True Story, that means the 2020s are already holding up their end of this bargain. Pinocchio is a live-action / CGI Disney that was directed and cowritten by Robert Zemeckis, starring Tom Hanks. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is what it sounds like. I haven’t, full disclosure, seen any of the other versions but I got a look at those two anyway along with the 1940. Start with the Zemeckis. On IMDb, some 38,000 voters have ranked this remake an aggregate 5.0. That’s not good—compare GdT’sP’s 92,000 going 7.6. It’s not hard to see why. One of these movies is clearly better than the other. Tom Hanks makes a creditable enough Geppetto but he can’t carry the whole thing. It is faithful to the 1940 version to a fault, practically scene for scene. It feels notably uninspired and insipid. It has little to add to or improve on the Disney original and the changes it makes can be almost comical. Pleasure Island, the destination for wayward boys, if you recall, was populated by boys playing pool, wantonly vandalizing property, and, above all, smoking stogies—all of them, including Pinocchio, whose face turned funny colors as a result.

But in 2022, images of smoking are frowned on and now part of routine content warnings, even if smokers are shown paying the price. Disney decided to take the easy way out with movie-rating panels and just cut the smoking out completely. All things considered, it’s probably the better idea for society at large, and it shows some of the ways things have changed since 1940. Here’s another one. An interesting plot point, which is that Geppetto had a wife and son who are now dead, was not in the 1940 version. It completely makes sense as motivation for Geppetto, of course, but when I first saw it cropping up in the 2022 version I took it as unnecessary embellishment. As a plot point, however, it is really front and center in del Toro’s workup of the story, which arguably turns on it, and makes me think it must come from the original stories by Collodi (which I haven’t read). In turn, it makes me wonder why it was taken out of the 1940 version. Including the point is ultimately one of the few improvements, all relatively minor, that the 2022 Zemeckis makes on the 1940. For his part, del Toro seems to be trying to restore some of the qualities of Collodi’s original stories. His Pinocchio is refreshingly sassy and headstrong, much like reports of the Collodi stories. Del Toro, not surprisingly, certainly has the best Blue Fairy of all of them—even the Zemickis version is an improvement on the saccharine 1940 lady.

Unencumbered by Disney’s family-oriented priorities, del Toro lets the story range into much darker, more emotionally resonant and believable precincts. I’m not sure setting it in Fascist Italy was exactly the right way to go for this story, but at least it afforded a priceless cameo from Il Duce himself. And Del Toro is generally more focused on delving into Geppetto’s motivations to make a puppet and want it to be a real boy—it’s Geppetto who wants it, a simple and ingenious shift of emphasis that makes the story richer and more complex. Del Toro manages to take the story all the way into Cain and Abel stuff. Del Toro’s animation rivals the Disney original and is arguably even better, but there I think my judgment might be affected by how much better del Toro’s narrative is. The animation is very different but equally good in both. I’m not sure looking at these three Pinocchios in such close proximity is the way to do it. I’m sick of Monstro the whale and the nose-growing bits by now (del Toro goes to town on the nose thing much more than either of the others). I would recommend separating them out further than consecutive days. But the 1940 Disney and the 2022 del Toro are equally essential and I wouldn’t know which one to recommend first—probably the del Toro, if you’re an adult. The 2022 Zemeckis—sadly, because I have residual interest in his work—is eminently skippable.

The Shape of Water (2017)

USA / Mexico, 123 minutes

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Writers: Guillermo del Toro, Vanessa Taylor

Photography: Dan Laustsen

Music: Alexandre Desplat

Editor: Sidney Wolinsky

Cast: Sally Hawkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Shannon, Doug Jones, Richard Jenkins, Michael Stuhlbarg, Lauren Lee Smith, Nick Searcy, David Hewlett

I took a second look at The Shape of Water the other day and found my original review basically covered all the main points I have to make (it’s linked down there at #5 in the list below). It’s still a monster movie that makes me cry. The period detail—early-‘60s US Cold War—is still on the nose (in the Urban Dictionary sense of “unsubtle or overly and clumsily direct” as opposed to the older sense, which is its opposite, “precisely correct” ... how do these things in language happen? Compare the verb “table”). And Sally Hawkins particularly but the whole cast is still tremendously good. After Pacific Rim it’s probably my favorite movie I’ve seen by director and cowriter Guillermo del Toro. So see the movie. Read my original review.

This second time through I had occasion to think about my problems with del Toro, whose work has been so disappointing so often I have tended to avoid it, and thus have many many gaps with him. I just realized now, for example, he did Nightmare Alley (which came out totally in the middle of Covid ... I still haven’t been back to a movie theater, but soon). Anyway, I know this is chatty and all over the place, I have plans to write about Disney’s 1940 Pinocchio soon and I should probably look at del Toro’s Pinocchio for that. Oh heck, I probably should have looked at it for this. A second look at The Shape of Water helped clarify some of the problem. It’s not so much anything to do with del Toro. It’s on me, or mostly.

Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

El laberinto del fauno, Spain / Mexico / USA, 118 minutes
Director / writer: Guillermo del Toro
Photography: Guillermo Navarro
Music: Javier Navarrete
Editor: Bernat Vilaplana
Cast: Ivana Baquero, Maribel Verdu, Sergi Lopez, Alex Angulo, Ariadna Gil, Doug Jones

Pan's Labyrinth is a very different movie from The Spirit of the Beehive (which by coincidence I was writing about a few weeks ago) but the similarities are striking. Both focus on the perceptions and experience of a young girl, both involve fevered imagination states and possibly magic (or certainly "magic"), and both are set in Spain in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, isolated in remote regions but with World War II still raging beyond the horizons. It's even possible to say that Pan's Labyrinth is equally preoccupied with the same two questions that haunt Beehive: Why did the monster kill the girl? Why did the people kill the monster?

But where Beehive is quiet and locates its motivating conflicts at the margins, Pan's Labyrinth is pulpy and rich with glittering special effects and showy clashes. They are both fairy tales, after a fashion, with raw brutalities. Another picture Pan's Labyrinth bears comparison with is Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, also comfortable with magic and inhumanity. In terms of the way it looks, however, the special effects puts Pan's Labyrinth more in the company of movies like Avatar, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars 23, Harry Potter, able to soar on its visual conceits even if you are never fooled that what you are looking at is anything but movie special effects. For that reason, perhaps, I usually end up a little underwhelmed by Pan's Labyrinth. Instead of fairies and a magical faun I tend to see a really impressive movie budget. Pan's Labyrinth rings with the dulcet tones of allocated capital. Some spoilers.

The Shape of Water (2017)

There's a wash of nostalgia in The Shape of Water that's applied so liberally by director and cowriter Guillermo del Toro that it's almost too much—but I think it's also a lot of what won me over. I went into it hoping for a monster movie that would make me cry, and that's more or less what I got. I knew I loved Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky, which is somehow almost 10 years old now. Not surprisingly, she is great here too. Del Toro conceived the role of Elisa Esposito with her in mind. Elisa is mute but not deaf, an orphan who was found by a river. She works as a janitor. Hawkins studied film players such as Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel, and Audrey Hepburn for the part, and she brings a tremendous amount of poise and power to the role and the movie. On certain obvious levels, The Shape of Water is pure movie entertainment hokum, maybe even a little more than I bargained for—closer to Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast than Universal's Creature From the Black Lagoon, and even closer to the musical Wizard of Oz, with its emotional whiplash, yearning desires for home, and song and dance numbers. The Shape of Water is set at the height of the Cold War—approximately 1960, as both Mr. Ed and Dobie Gillis make cameo appearances on various TV consoles in various living rooms. That period detail felt a little rancid to me, with the flashy Cadillacs, beehive hairdos, comfy diners, retro bigotry and such. But del Toro mostly buries it in shadows, with a lot of the movie taking place in a harsh underground facility or shabby apartments. It looks more like Being John Malkovich than Mad Men.

And the most affecting hits of nostalgia lean all the way back to the '30s and '40s. Elisa plays Benny Goodman records for the monster, for example. The monster is an amphibious human-sized creature captured by the American military somewhere in South America (presumably near Black Lagoon, wink wink)—the only name we hear for him is "the asset." The American military being what it is in Hollywood movies, they don't know what they have so they proceed to torture it to see what that gets them. Russians are also nosing around—part of the Cold War theme, with the subterfuge eventually turning into useful plot points. Michael Shannon once again plays an extremely bad guy and he's as good at it as ever. But he's very evil. And Elisa is very angelic. Then you remember: it's a fairy tale movie. It has excesses and actually they run in both directions. It's awfully saccharine awfully often—the monster is beautiful, so much so that at one point he causes a distracted driving accident. Much of that is the giant soulful eyes, but some is the tender rubbery lips of Mick Jagger. Otherwise it is scaly, gray, and sopping wet. The love story that develops between the monster and Elisa is gentle and beautiful, if you're in the mood for that kind of thing. If you're not, remember, Michael Shannon is coming for everything you love and that dude is just bad. We see a few of the terrible things he does. So there is often suspense and high tension around every corner. The Shape of Water sets a moderate pace and keeps it up all the way, with a nice batch of players. Besides Hawkins and Shannon, it also has roles for Richard Jenkins and Octavia Spencer. Doug Jones wears the fish suit. Among other things The Shape of Water is a useful reminder that fairy tales are not always for children. It even spends some time on racial issues—and not metaphorically related to the monster. It's pretty good.