Labyrinth!

The Jim Henson operation was riding high in 1986 when Labyrinth hit the big screens. This was actually their second big fantasy film (if you don't count The Muppets), following the critical acclaim of The Dark Crystal. This time Jim Henson wanted to blend puppets and people in a believable way in an unbelievable story. We have a modern fairy tale with many of the classic elements, a story about a young woman coming into her adulthood and resisting the rigors of that adulthood. That friction creates stress in her home and eventually danger for her baby half-brother, a child she loves yet also resents. 

The young woman is portrayed by Jennifer Connelly in a very early role. The late and great David Bowie is the star of this vehicle, lending his peculiar talents to a role as the Goblin King. Other than the baby brother played by artists Brian Froud's young son, the rest of the cast are puppets of various and sundry kind. I like much if not most of the movie a great deal, but it gets too cute by half in places. 

The Labyrinth is a failed opportunity. That failure was due to the fact that movies like this need to make money and to do that they need a happy ending. While one could have logically given Labyrinth a satisfying ending, it wasn't what one might have deemed necessarily happy. The young girl has an exotic experience in which she must learn to put away her childhood and grasp the powers and responsibilities of adulthood. She has been resistant for a host of reasons, not the least of which is unresolved grief for her mother, and jealousy of her little brother. She feels shoved out of the warm tidy nest and wants to stay. But that cannot be, and through trial and tribulation she learns better. 

That's a pretty good solution to a fairy tale narrative, but it doesn't ring with huzzahs. To get that Henson sticks on an abominable ending which to some degree undermines the hard-won lessons of the film. He wanted everyone to smile as they left the theater, and he should have trusted his work to simply fulfill them. Because of this last-minute lack of confidence in his narrative and in his audience, he allows the story to feel incomplete. 

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