MirrorMask
If the most extreme aspects of Jim Henson, Terry Gilliam, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," and "The Wizard of Oz" were put into a stew pot and browned, you might end up with the arresting stylistic goulash that is "Mirrormask." The film will have its fans, particularly among the young and those who glorify Neil Gaiman, writer of the cult comic "Sandman" and the shaggy head from whom "Mirrormask" largely springs. Anyone wishing for a belated sequel to the 1986 Henson fantasy "Labyrinth" might also want to take a look. All others, approach with caution. Aggressive visual invention is rarely its own reward, and this movie does nothing to better the odds.
Filmed on the soundstages and in the hard drives of London's Jim Henson Studios, "Mirrormask" tells of a 15-year-old girl named Helena (Stephanie Leonidas, appealingly spiky) who's had enough of working for her parent's threadbare family circus. A gifted artist, she draws constantly in a notebook, hoping to sketch her way out of frustration and into the fantasy universe in her head.
A fight with her exasperated mum (Gina McKee) ends with the latter shouting, "You'll be the death of me!" and Helena responding, "I wish I was!" and, sure enough, the older woman is diagnosed with cancer. Stuck in her grandmother's council flat while awaiting word from the doctors, the girl dreams her way into her inner world to wrestle with her demons. And through the looking glass we go.
The director of "Mirrormask" is Dave McKean, a comics artist and visual concept guru on the last "Harry Potter" movie, and the Shrieking Shack sequences of "Prisoner of Azkaban" hint at what McKean's after here. Creating a vertiginous landscape of vast interstellar spaces and floating edifices, he and Gaiman people it with flying cats, querulous librarians, uncertain princesses, a dying queen (McKee again), and a helpful fellow traveler with a mirrored face named Valentine (Jason Barry).
Simultaneously manic and mannered, the art direction references Salvador Dali dream paintings, Goth dankness, Joseph Campbell iconography (all those masks), and the sort of workshop floor bric-a-brac seen in the stop-motion films of the Brothers Quay. "Mirrormask" is often astonishing to look at -- sometimes astonishingly ugly, too -- but the cumulative inventiveness turns oppressive and finally tedious.
In the process, the story line just about packs up and goes home. Once through the mirror (actually, the entire dream sequence seems to play out in a drawing Helena has tacked to her wall), the heroine must save the enchanted queen from an all-annihilating Shadow by searching the realm for an unspecified charm. Oddly, this is the same plot as the recent "Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D," not to mention "A Wrinkle in Time."
The dialogue works Helena's adolescent identity crisis for all it's worth. "How do you know you're happy or sad without a mask?" asks the perplexed Valentine, which may prompt furious nods of agreement from certain segments of the audience. While McKean and Gaiman pile on the metaphors for Helena's problems, though, they forget that allegory needs to be anchored to something real if it's to have any meaning at all.
Tellingly, the film's real-world scenes are almost as baroque as the fantasy ones, and that gives the game away. The visual gimcrackery of "Mirrormask" will rightly awe teenagers and graphic designers alike, but as ingeniously cluttered as this film is, it's empty in reality.
Video
