| Film Review | Celeste Hollister |
MirrorMask
Directed by Dave McKean
Written by Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean
Now on
DVD
File this one under: ‘Wish I’d Seen It on the Big Screen.’
Fortunately, it’s on DVD now, and with the lights turned
down and a bag of microwave popcorn, the experience can be
mimicked to a reasonable degree. MirrorMask, the
collaborative screen adventure by Neil Gaiman and Dave
McKean, brings a beautifully layered cinema-graphic
masterpiece to life, giving the audience something unlike
anything it has experience before.
Gaiman’s stories often borrow themes from stage and carnival
backgrounds, but he twists and contorts them into something
new and delightfully warped. He does so in MirrorMask:
a fifteen-year-old girl, Helena (played by Stephanie
Leonidas), dreams of running away from the circus to join a
normal life. But Helena’s Real Life in the capital sense
collides with the Dream when her mother falls suddenly ill,
derailing her parents’ circus act and the lives of the
players around them. On the night of her mother’s operation,
Helena goes to bed, riddled with guilt over an argument they
had just before the onset of the illness. That’s when the
true fun begins.
Helena
finds herself in the Mirror World, a half-dreamy,
half-nightmarish and hauntingly familiar place in which
everyone wears masks, except Helena. The Mirror World is a
realm of dichotomy, where the White Queen sleeps and will
not wake, and the Dark Queen wrecks everything in her
reckless search for her errant daughter. Gaiman and McKean,
who have paired up to bring us The Sandman graphic
novels, and whom I’m certain must be soul-bound symbiots,
excel in striking that familiar yet disturbing chord of a
collective conscious. They draw on what we already know
about symbolism and archetypes, giving audiences a menagerie
of creepy creatures, such as a sphinx who resembles a
housecat, but threatens to devour Helena ‘bones and all’ if
she doesn’t provide him with the answer to his riddle. In
another instance, Helena and Valentine are surrounded by a
pack of hungry sphinxes that can only be appeased by a
literal literary feast: they consume the pages of books. And
yes, they have a mime.
Also trademark to Gaiman is his subtle turns of wit and
double entendres. For example, Helena and her
pseudo-boyfriend-hero-type Valentine surf through the city
streets on dejected books that return immediately to the
city library when they think they aren’t wanted. The dialog
is at times nonsensical and Pythonesque. For instance, the
city guard, upon arresting Helena, proclaims: “Dangerous.
Not dangerous. Same thing.” Another example: Helena says,
“If I tell you something weird, will you think I’m crazy?”
To which Valentine responds, “Yes. I expect so.”
Gaiman is a master at denying the normal mode of
storytelling. He nests stories within stories. He employs
extraneous characters and objects to take up strands of
narrative and provide the back-story. In a way,
MirrorMask is like stepping into the pages of a Sandman
story. It’s a fully realized graphic novel on film. The
elongated, stylized set designs and characters cobbled from
ordinary objects (toasters, books, pieces of glass and bone)
are the inhabitants of the Dreaming brought to life by
McKean’s dark artistic vision.
Of particular note are Stephanie Leonidas as Helena and
Jason Barry as Valentine. Leonidas is warmly vulnerable and
at-home in Helena’s mad world of scribblings and lucid
dreams. She could easily pull off playing Death in another
Gaiman movie, should a production company pull together the
resources to fund it (hint, hint Universal Studios). Jason
Barry plays the dynamic Valentine with frenetic yet sidewise
charm.
Although MirrorMask probably made for an unparalleled
cinematic experience, there are upsides to the DVD. The
first is that you can immediately re-watch it. This is the
kind of movie that gives something new every time you watch
it. The second is all of the goodies, like interviews with
Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman, regarding the magic they pooled
to make the movie. With Jim Henson’s name attached to the
production credits, MirrorMask has been compared to
The Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal.
MirrorMask definitely finds a home alongside these
classics.
