Labyrinth, back in theaters through Sunday from Fathom Entertainment, is the supreme creative thesis from a pioneering artist. The last film Jim Henson directed, 40 years ago in 1986, expresses maximum creativity in every scene.
Teenage Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) is a loner who escapes into her fantasy world. When tasked to babysit, she wishes the goblins would take her infant brother Toby (Toby Froud) away and free her.
The Goblin King, Jareth, (David Bowie) obliges, so Sarah has 13 hours to solve his Labyrinth and rescue her brother.
Each scene in the Labyrinth is a puzzle for Sarah to solve, encountering helpful and mischievous creatures brought to life by the Henson Workshop. By far the most breathtaking image is the Helping Hands, a pit Sarah falls into where disembodied hands catch her.
Those hands combine into faces which speak to her. Five or six performers at a time coordinated their hands to make those images, and the human ingenuity to create that tops any subsequent computer generated effect.
The Helping Hands offer one of the simpler choices of the Labyrinth. They’ll either lift her up or push her down, so she has a 50/50 chance of going the right way. Other puzzles become tests of moral fiber as much as logic.
Sarah learns that an infinite hallway is actually an optical illusion with hidden turns embedded within. Alas, a helpful worm (Karen Prell) ends up steering her away from the castle.
She tries to mark her progress but miniature beings turn her markings around. Eventually, Sarah learns how to navigate an unfair world by leveraging her advantages, a useful life skill for viewers young and old.
The Labyrinth also contradicts Sarah’s assumptions. She rescues faeries from Hoggle (Shari Weiser with Brian Henson’s voice) spraying them only to find they bite and don’t grant wishes or other niceties. Sarah will learn to stop making such assumptions again.
Hoggle meets Sarah at various obstacles in the Labyrinth, representing the disgruntled burnout who doesn’t believe Sarah will change anything. Sarah shows him kindness despite even direct acts of sabotage, which subtly demonstrates the most powerful tool in Sarah’s arsenal.
He does help explain some of the irreverent puzzles of the Labyrinth. False Alarms try to scare Sarah away and then pout when Hoggle tells her not to listen to them.
Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Sarah’s party grows the more characters she meets along the way. She rescues the lumbering Ludo (Rob Mills with Ron Mueck’s voice) from bullies and endears herself to bridge guard Sir Didymus (Dave Goelz and David Alan Barclay with David Shaughnessy’s voice) by presenting a question no one else ever broached before.
The Bog of Eternal Stench is essentially a fart joke, and arguably the best fart joke in all of scatalogical cinema. Jareth’s minion The Junk Lady (Prell with Denise Bryer’s voice) tries to tempt Sarah with her toys but Sarah’s come too far in the real Labyrinth to go back.
Henson did make an attempt with CGI, with the Fireys who pop their heads off and play catch. In those early days of digital effects, the blend of elements is glaring, but they suit the surreal world of Labyrinth. It’s modern-day day supposedly seamless effects that feel disembodied.
Perhaps the most inspiring message of Labyrinth is that Sarah does not totally abandon her fantasy when she empowers herself. The movie leaves her on a note of still valuing her fantasy life, just recognizing when to engage and when to shift back to adulthood.
Connelly, already an accomplished young actor, displayed the soul that would accompany her later, more harrowing work, but with the confusion and frustration that plagues teenage development. She also performed with puppet characters impeccably to sell the magic of the world.
It’s also a musical. Bowie wrote five original tracks from the rock operas “Underground” and “Magic Dance” to the enchanting ballad “Within You.”
When the film cuts back to Jareth, he interacts with goblin puppets like all the best actors in Muppet movies. Bowie is not condescending to the puppets. He treats them as dramatic co-stars and partners in the dance numbers, as he does baby Toby.
When he interacts with Sarah, Jareth represents an adult threat without ever crossing lines that would be inappropriate with a teenage character. Jareth’s prominent package was apparently Bowie’s idea, but his offer to make Sarah his queen if she’ll just stay with Toby is more a Serpent in the Garden of Eden than a predator.
Labyrinth was ahead of its time in 1986 but lasted 40 years due to the purity of creativity on display and evergreen techniques that brought them to life. And the music rocks.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
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