Labyrinth

Review

"Don't tell me truth hurts, little girl, cause it hurts like hell."

Labyrinth's lead character Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) has a problem. She's a beautiful, intelligent teenage girl forced to live with her evil stepmother, powerless father and irritating baby brother, who has taken away her inheritance. This is not her problem - if it were, there would be a dashing prince with an improbable name rushing to her rescue. Her problem is that she lives in The Real World, where her CV proclaims her an airhead rather than a princess and her stepmother doesn't try to kill her with a poisoned apple - she just makes her babysit.

Sarah really doesn't seem to fit in with the world she has found herself in. She has no discernable friends apart from her pet dog (her only weapon against parental idiosyncracies) and her toys, which litter her room. Her pastimes include dressing up and reciting passages from fantasy books. Any school guidance teacher would think her seriously disturbed and send her out for psychiatric evaluation. Sarah, quite simply, has never grown up and taken on the world.

The Goblin King

Fortunately, the prince she has been waiting for does turn up. Admittedly he's an oversized goblin with tight trousers and dodgy hair who's just kidnapped her brother, but in all other aspects he's perfect: good-looking, witty, intelligent, sexy, all-powerful with a nice line in real estate and he can turn into an owl at a moment's notice. Exactly the kind of boy Sarah would love to bring home to dinner. And this is the crux of the story. The Goblin King, Jareth (David Bowie), offers Sarah a life with him in his wondrous kingdom. She would live out her wildest dreams and, more importantly, escape from the life she hates. However, if she does so, Jareth will turn her brother, Toby (Toby Froud), into a goblin. Tough choice, huh?

Teenage Escapism

Labyrinth is generally disliked by 'serious' movie critics (they're the ones with the bad fashion sense you see on TV sometimes). I've seen it described too many times as a modern Alice In Wonderland - a piece of colourful escapism for pre-teens but nothing more. Of course, there are certain similarities: the young heroine, the bizarre alter-world she finds herself in and the stranger 'people' she meets. In both stories, there are comic and scary moments. However, Labyrinth is not pure escapism. Rather, it is a movie about escapism - a movie not that aims to appeal so much to Disney-weaned children, but to the young teenagers and pre-teens who, unlike a lot of adults, might actually admit to understanding what this film is on about.

Talk Back

Okay, time of truth: how many of us have absolutely never wished that we were somebody else, or at least somewhere else - preferably a prince with a big dragon-slaying sword or a princess with, er, a big dragon-slaying sword. More or less everyone spends a healthy amount of time before the complicated years of puberty pretending to be superheroes, mystical warriors, magical animals and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And then you go to the big school and replace daydreams with maths homework and playmates with the coolest crowd that'll have you, despite the fact that all they do is stand around and talk about Dawson's Creek. In three words: you grow up. And, forget about stolen brothers, this rather mundane, but quite alarming transformation is the real plot of Labyrinth.

At home in a strange land

At the start of the movie, Sarah starts off across the labyrinth to the goblin city with the intent of finding Toby mainly due to the understandable fact that if she doesn't get him back, she'll be in a lot of trouble. And, well, he's her brother, what's she supposed to do? However, as she travels deeper into this strange land, it seems evident that she is really more at home here than at her actual home. Every step of the way, she may not know what to do, but she is not afraid of this place, with its gnomes, fairies and talking blue worms. For the first time in her life, she is in her element. She's read all the books, seen all the movies - she knows exactly how things work. However, if it were this easy to reclaim her brother, Labyrinth wouldn't have been much of a film... [More]

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