A pair of big names from the graphic novel world prove it’s not easy to cross over to the movies. “MirrorMask,” written by Neil Gaiman and directed by Dave McKean, is a visually lush fantasy that induces sleep from its earliest moments.
| Dreamy, or dreary: A girl dreams her way into a gauzy wonderland of creatures and riddles, in this “Oz”-like fantasy. Its precious fantasy and lack of forward motion become sleep-inducing pretty quickly.
Rated: PG rating is for violence. Now showing: Varsity. |
Our heroine is an adolescent girl, Helena (well-played by Stephanie Leonidas), who performs with her parents in their traveling circus. Where other children dream of running away and joining the circus, Helena declares, “I want to run away and join the real world.”
In an unhappy moment, she quarrels with her mother (Gina McKee), who promptly collapses with an unnamed affliction. Hospitalized, she teeters on the brink of death.
Meanwhile, Helena, who blames herself, goes into an alternate universe. Like post-tornado Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” she slips into a gossamer world where images of her parents and other people float.
But it’s all exaggerated and fantastical: big creatures made of rock, large scuttling spiders, a sphinx with a man’s head. In a largely symbolic journey, Helena must solve the warring parts of her own spirit, or so I suspect.
I am afraid I’m the wrong person to review this movie, because it combines a couple of worlds I have a short fuse for in film: the circus, and a sort of gauzy wonderland of fantasy where anything can happen and no rules seem to apply.
The circus has a juggling mime, but luckily he isn’t around long. The gauzy wonderland, however, goes on endlessly, with almost no forward motion. Despite the clever designs, its visual monotony adds to the sedative effect.
“MirrorMask” might have worked very nicely as a series of drawings or still photographs, collected in a coffee-table book. But spending 101 minutes staring at it is a chore.
The film was produced by Jim Henson’s company, which also made the somewhat similar “Labyrinth” almost 20 years ago. Stick with that film if you’re in the fantasy-world mood.
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