Viking Night: Labyrinth
By Bruce Hall
June 8, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
This is because when it comes to taste, kids usually have none. This can sometimes lead to generational awkwardness, since your brain just doesn’t (or shouldn't) operate the same way it did back then. So for your own good, I’d suggest you leave forever undisturbed the parts of your mind that fondly remember things like Pixie Stick Slurpees and David Hasselhoff’s man-fro. If you try to go back, you’re going to be disappointed. It’s not quite what you remember. It’s not even close. And in the case of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, I can’t for the life of me imagine what I ever enjoyed about it in the first place. This is a film with a substantial cult following, which is the reason I’m writing about it. But if you’re a fan who flatly refuses to accept the truth about how awful this movie is, you should stop reading now. Trust me, you won’t like where I am about to take this. Besides, people who like Muppets and people who don’t like Muppets should NEVER discuss Muppets.
But first, I owe you a bit of background: The '80s brought on a glut of fantasy themed films, such as Dragonslayer, Willow, and Krull. Most of them were terrible, some of them had potential, but only one of them had David Bowie busting out the rock aria in a room full of marionettes. Willow had Val Kilmer, and “Krull” is quite possibly the coolest movie title in history. But believe me, when David Bowie said “Let’s Dance,” he was talking about Muppets. Fittingly, Labyrinth was the brainchild of legendary puppeteer Jim Henson and legendary Monty Python alum Terry Jones. So, you’d think this would be a sweet, endearing story with a sympathetic hero, a menacing villain and a reassuring message at the end. Right? Wrong. This movie is about a vile, baby-shaking teenager and an androgynous child molester who lives in a spooky castle, surrounded by shadow dancing hand puppets. It’s a nightmarish catastrophe from beginning to end, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to have trouble sleeping for a while because Labyrinth disturbs me on just...so many levels.
Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) is a pretty 15-year-old girl who spends her idle moments in her parents' back yard, dressed as a fairy princess and talking to herself. Her parents seem very tolerant of this behavior, only asking that she do her chores and watch over her baby brother Toby while they’re away. Sarah responds by throwing fits, smack talking and manhandling the infant as soon as Mom and Dad step out the door. Inspired by her favorite fantasy book, Sarah then prays to the Invisible Goblin King Jareth to whisk the screaming child away to the nether regions of Goblin Hell. This is exactly what happens, as rock legend David Bowie swoops in through an open window, fondling a snow globe and struggling to breathe in a sinfully tight pair of spandex pants. Sarah pleads with the smirking Ziggy Stardust to return her brother, no doubt feeling guilty for screaming directly into the child’s face as she arranged his abduction. But according to Jareth, if Sarah wants to see little Toby again she has 13 hours to navigate a deadly Labyrinth (a fancy word for “maze”), and take the boy from Castle Bowie herself.
Sarah vows to do just that and sets off on her adventure, aided by a curious cast of scheming, wisecracking and altogether obnoxiously hairy Muppets. Some are friendly, some are frustrating, but all of them are a welcome distraction from Sarah’s self indulgent simpering. This is more or less a fractured retelling of Alice in Wonderland, if Alice were a shrieking bitch and Wonderland were ruled by an effeminate weirdo who kidnapped babies, wrote songs about it, and then gleefully performed those songs in front of his tiny, wailing victims. The irony here is that many of the reasons I dislike Alice in Wonderland apply directly to Labyrinth. “Alice” is a semi nonsensical narrative full of allusion and allegory whose exact points of reference went to the grave with their creator. To me, the original version of that story is like a song whose lyrics mean nothing to anyone but the person who wrote them. That’s excusable, provided you at least come away entertained.
But in the case of Labyrinth I was not entertained, and there is no excuse. The plot is essentially a low rent Dungeons and Dragons expedition where you take virtually naked characters through a tedious shopping list of repetitive tasks, hoping to acquire enough skill and equipment to win the real fight, which comes at the end. This is fine if you’re sitting around your parents' basement in high school, rolling dice and drinking Mountain Dew with your dorky friends. The concept works less well when asked to bear the weight of a full length movie. If you’re going to ask even an audience of children to invest in your story there needs to be ebb and flow, forward motion that makes the viewer feel involved in the action and worried about the stakes. At no point during Labyrinth do I feel much of anything other than a desperate desire for it to make some kind of sense.
What exactly was so bad about Sarah’s life? As far as I could tell, her parents were indulgent and understanding. She had a room full of toys and all the time in the world to prance around the yard dressed like a character from Ivanhoe. Yet she is insolent, selfish, shrill and unrepentant about it all (it also doesn’t help that at this point in her career, Jennifer Connelly was an absolutely horrible actress). You can’t help but despise Sarah right off the bat and even as she is shown the error of her ways, you never get the idea that her actions are truly meant to benefit anybody but herself.
Jareth just comes across as a disturbing freak. The existence of his fantasy kingdom requires an acceptable suspension of disbelief, but we’re never told why he needs this baby, what happens after 13 hours or for that matter, why is it even 13 hours? Why not 14? Why not drop a shout out to Spinal Tap and make it 11? Without knowing any of this, the Goblin King’s bizarre, ritualistic behavior just makes him seem like some sort of pan-dimensional sex offender. It’s creepy, and I hate it. But hey, it’s a free country. If you find that entertaining, so be it.
Henson’s Muppets don’t help as much as you’d think. Muppets were hilarious when I was a kid. Now they’re kind of just ghoulish. Slightly realistic but clearly not, they’re like little fabric zombies. But I will admit that the craft of puppetry requires a highly skilled artist to successfully communicate emotion through an inanimate object. In this regard, Labyrinth is as successful as anything Henson ever attempted. His Muppets are at times eerily lifelike, and even when they’re not they lend themselves well to the film’s otherworldly atmosphere. Unfortunately there’s no story for the dolls to tell us, no credible hero for them to rally around. The unique look of this film could have been an asset, but instead its limitations are highlighted by a narrative far too primitive for puppets, let alone children. Labyrinth is pretty much just a bunch of vaguely unrelated things happening to boring characters who are guaranteed to win, despite the efforts of a villain who was never really dangerous to begin with.
Speaking of Bowie’s villain, I should stress that Labyrinth is also something of a musical. The Thin White Duke does his thing three or four times and at least one of the songs (a creepy ballad) is actually pretty good. For the most part the music feels like filler, the way it does every time Sarah runs into yet another talking doorknob or half-heartedly harmless booby trap. There are few better ways to kill a story than to make your protagonist unlikeable. But one of them is to make your bad guy an impotent, agenda-free cross dresser who sings bad songs and is responsible for chubby little faces on milk cartons all over town. Bowie does what he can, and what he does is very, very Bowie.
But alas, this movie has no heart, soul or spirit. If it takes an artist to make a puppet live and breathe, Labyrinth is a doll with no master. I realize it has a lot of fans, partly because of Jim Henson and what he meant to so many people both young and old. And that’s okay - just because I don’t like it doesn’t mean nobody else should. But it’s an acquired taste, and if you ask me, you’d do better to get your fix from a Pixie Stick Slurpee than from Labyrinth.