[Peace-discuss] Hellboy II: a modern Bosch

[C. G. Estabrook]

[John W.'s animadversions re Hellboy II have the unintended effect of alerting 
us to some contemporaneous artistry that's reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch's 
Garden of Earthy Delights (ca. 1500 CE).  Bosch's triptych (now in Madrid) has 
always seemed to me a characterization of an age; a college friend had a 
reproduction of it over her mantelpiece, and it reverberates down the years for 
me. (One minor correction to what follows: the veteran English character actor 
is Roy Dotrice [not Ray], now in his mid-80s.  About the time I came to 
appreciate Bosch, Dotrice was in the US with a one-man show based on the great 
book Brief Lives by John Aubrey, the 17th-century gossip who even had 
discreditable stories about Shakespeare.) --CGE]

http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2008/07/11/hellboy_ii/print.html

	"Hellboy II: The Golden Army"
	The fanciful, witty follow-up to "Hellboy" is so beautiful,
	you may forget it's a "special-effects" movie.
	By Stephanie Zacharek

Jul. 11, 2008 | There's a minor character in Guillermo del Toro's "Hellboy II: 
The Golden Army" who wears a king's robes and a crown that resembles the spires 
and turrets of a European fairy-tale city. Except it's not a crown -- this 
skyline of towers and curving walls springs directly from his head. Explaining 
the character's conception in an online New York Times feature, del Toro said 
this regal creature -- who came to be known as "Cathedral Head" -- was "somebody 
that instead of thinking about his home city, he kind of carried it around."

Del Toro himself is a kind of Cathedral Head, a filmmaker whose strong sense of 
place -- whose sense of preserving the notion of a personal, if not literal, 
home -- has been the foundation of pictures like the extraordinary post-Spanish 
Civil War fairy tale "Pan's Labyrinth" and its precursor "The Devil's Backbone," 
as well as the two "Hellboy" movies. That the 2004 "Hellboy" and, now, "Hellboy 
II: The Golden Army" are both mainstream pictures based on comic books (created 
by writer-artist Mike Mignola), and not "small" pictures initially designated 
for the art house, doesn't diminish the scope of del Toro's vision. The bald 
truth is that del Toro is one of the few young filmmakers working in the 
mainstream who actually has any vision, as opposed to just a knack for dreaming 
up cool effects. "Hellboy II" -- poetic, funny, darkly romantic and beautifully 
structured -- is a very different picture from "Pan's Labyrinth." But there's no 
doubt that it springs from the same cathedral.

Hellboy, for the uninitiated, is a strapping demon with red skin and a right 
hand and forearm that resembles a block of concrete. (As an infant, during World 
War II, he was rescued from a remote Scottish isle and raised by his adoptive 
father, professor Trevor "Broom" Bruttenholm, played here, as in the first 
movie, by John Hurt.) Hellboy (Ron Perlman) is a swaggering, wiseacre presence 
in a duster raincoat: He works for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and 
Defense (which happens to be in New Jersey), and, along with a band of fellow 
misfits, fights evil wherever it rears its ugly head. Hellboy is a misunderstood 
beastie, and average citizens don't know what to make of him: His looks scare 
people, and his inability to tolerate idiots makes him cantankerous. But even 
though he comes off as something of a roughneck, a cigar-smoking, beer-guzzling, 
TV-watching guy who's always spoiling for a fight, he's at heart a tremendous 
softie, as evidenced by the throngs of affectionate kittens who swarm around his 
feet when he's relaxing at home, in Bureau headquarters. Hellboy's closest 
friends, the only "people" who really understand him, are his colleagues at the 
Bureau, including his girlfriend, Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), a mite half his 
size who has the ability to start fires spontaneously with her fingertips, and 
the elegant, well-read aquatic creature Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), who has the 
gills of a fish and the soul of John Donne.

Del Toro -- who wrote the story and script, working from Mignola's material -- 
opens "Hellboy II" with a back story in the form of a mythological bedtime tale 
that Trevor, in a flashback sequence, reads to the young Hellboy (Montse Ribé) 
about a king (played by veteran English character actor Ray Dotrice) who, in the 
fight for dominance between the elf world and the human one, assembles a "golden 
army" of superwarriors. But these troops cause nothing but more heartache and 
destruction. The king repents, declaring a truce between the two worlds and 
disbanding the army by literally breaking up his crown and scattering the 
segments. His power-hungry son, Prince Nuada (Luke Goss), a malcontent in an 
Edgar Winter hairdo, slinks away from the scene in disgust, only to reemerge in 
the modern day with a plan to reassemble the army and thus take control of the 
human world.

You can imagine what Hellboy thinks of that plan once he gets wind of it. The 
biggest complication is that Nuada has a twin, Princess Nuala (played by Anna 
Walton, in a performance that's both serene and vampish). It's not clear at 
first where Nuala's sympathies lie. But she is connected to her twin by 
supernatural bonds: When he bleeds, she bleeds too.

Nuada and his henchman, Wink (Brian Steele), a giant, scaly creature with a 
right hand that's something like a retractable mace (a parallel to Hellboy's own 
"deformity"), unleash an assortment of ills upon the world, beginning with boxes 
full of small, skittering creepy-crawlies who wreak havoc at a Manhattan auction 
house. (They're called "tooth fairies," and you don't want to know what their 
deal is.) Del Toro works confidently on both the small scale and the bigger 
canvas. Minute details are important: He originally wanted to have little people 
living inside Cathedral Head's towers and ramparts. (When he realized what the 
movie's budget was, he told the Times, "the people suddenly left the city.") But 
there's also something intimate about his large-scale creature creations, which 
include a hungry beanstalk with a pointed, impassive, masklike green face, whose 
dual purpose is to give life and take it away. Everything -- not just everyone 
-- in "Hellboy II" has a discernible personality that emerges through his, her 
or its movements within the frame, or simply from the movie's vivid visuals. 
(The cinematographer is del Toro's frequent collaborator Guillermo Navarro; the 
production design is by Stephen Scott.)

There's so much to look at in "Hellboy II" -- so many weird beings with 
crepelike skin, or eyes in all the wrong places -- that the picture runs the 
risk of being excessive. But in the end, its grandness works because it's so 
well balanced by the expressions on the actors' faces (even when those faces are 
laden with latex and makeup), or by offbeat little touches like the troupe of 
cats who cautiously emerge from beneath Hellboy's bed after he and Liz have had 
a particularly noisy dust-up. I confess I've come to dread movies in which the 
hero faces down an "army" of anything: Elaborate battles are now a staple of 
fantasy movies, and the big CGI showdowns of the "Lord of the Rings" pictures 
set a standard that everyone is now trying to top. But bigger isn't necessarily 
better -- in fact, it seldom is. Even del Toro seems to realize that, and he 
constructs the climactic battle sequence so that it caps off everything in the 
story that's come before -- the movie ends with an emphatic (if somewhat 
open-ended) period instead of three exclamation marks.

And as with the first "Hellboy," del Toro is most interested in using fantasy to 
explore the humanity of his decidedly nonhuman characters. There are some new 
ones, including Johann Krauss (his voice belongs to Seth MacFarlane), a walking 
suit of armor that serves as a container for a personality, which is essentially 
an ectoplasmic vapor. (The fact that Krauss is German gives Hellboy, who was 
rescued from the Nazis as an infant, no end of wisecrack material -- although 
his prejudices aren't permanent.) There's some domestic strife between Liz and 
Hellboy, who strive to do good in the world even as they're finding it difficult 
do right by each other. Blair and Perlman have a lovely, prickly give-and-take 
here: Their recurring annoyance with each other is part of the electricity of 
their love.

And in "Hellboy II" del Toro has created an expanded role for the wonderful Doug 
Jones as Abe Sapien. (In "Hellboy," David Hyde-Pierce was the voice of Abe, but 
Hyde-Pierce realized that Jones was so completely responsible for the shaping of 
the character that, magnanimously, he withdrew his name from the credits. In 
"Hellboy II," the voice we hear belongs to Jones.) It was only a matter of time 
before a deeply romantic creature like Abe fell in love, and in "Hellboy II," he 
does. As he explains to Hellboy in his most lovesick moment: "She's like me -- a 
creature from another world," a simple way of explaining how wonderful it feels 
to be connected to someone when you've spent your life feeling isolated.

Special effects have so radically taken over the content of mainstream movies -- 
particularly summer blockbusters -- that they've reached the point of being 
nothing special at all. We're still seeing more action movies that use special 
effects to beat the audience into a state of something resembling awe (as "The 
Incredible Hulk" did) than ones that put the focus on live performers, using 
special effects judiciously and with some sense of how they need to serve a 
story and its characters (à la "Iron Man").

But Guillermo del Toro's "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" is something else again: 
It's too wildly fanciful, too witty, too operatic in its vision, to fit 
comfortably into any of the convenient folders we might use to keep our 
mainstream entertainments sorted in our minds. I left the theater so enraptured, 
so energized, that it didn't immediately register that I'd just seen a 
"special-effects" movie, although, of course, I had. The alien-looking eyes of 
Jones' Abe Sapien are difficult to read by themselves. And so Jones expresses 
his character's deepest fears and longings just by blinking, or by a subtle 
inclination of his blue-striped, almond-shaped head. These delicate, precise 
movements are also special effects, small curlicues in the movie's grand design, 
and del Toro's boldness lies in the fact that he sees their value as part of the 
magnificent whole. Unfazed by the noisy Hollywood industry around him, del Toro 
always carries his home city in his head.

-- By Stephanie Zacharek