Guillermo del Toro’s human themes are so simple that they’re often mistaken for clumsy. Old men pine for their lost virulence and attempt desperately to stave off their imminent expiration. As children transition from innocence to experience they learn to prize their personal resilience above earthly rewards. Much like the poet William Blake, del Toro sees man as ensnared by an eternal cycle of weakness, discovery, and forgiveness. But Blake had a mercurial side, too – he was sinisterly, cynically funny, he invented his own mythologies, and he was fixated upon the tactile representation of his words (via printmaking). Del Toro may not have learnt his genre craft from a deceased, hell-bound sibling as part of an eschatological tutorial, but such apocrypha seems to foreshadow the Mexican auteur’s universe.
If Cronos is the least taut of Del Toro’s Mexican fables, it’s because the sincerity of the above themes precludes the storytelling. Pan’s Labyrinth is a children’s book and a wax museum, a big, brassy odyssey with a melting silicon moral; The Devil’s Backbone is an adolescent’s eye view of political upheaval, with one intimidated foot steeped in bewildering sex symbols and the other stuck in a safer but more macabre comic book world. Cronos, though earlier in del Toro’s filmography, takes place in a more skeptical, selfish world (though one hesitates to call it “mature”). The supernatural elements are nearly incidental, and only understood through the prism of the characters’ personal motives.
Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi), an elderly antique shopkeeper, pries open a pandora’s box of costly immortality when he discovers a bright, gold, mechanized scarab in a small archangel statue. Dieter de la Guardia (Claudio Brook) is an eccentric mogul, dying of an unknown ailment, who searches for the scarab after learning of its inventor’s history through yellowed parchments and Latin journals. (In one of the film’s most masterfully mood-enhancing but ultimately vacant gestures, a collection of archangel statuettes from the hitherto fruitless search for the object hang from thick chains in la Guardia’s strange, antiseptic chamber – totems of senescence, vanity, and futility.) La Guardia’s son and primary henchman, Angel (a hilarious Ron Perlman), helps the old man with his scouring despite being impatient for the inheritance his death will leave behind. This “brooch of youth” turns out to contain some kind of elixer-producing beetle which provides life-prolonging injections by way of a skin-breaking grip — side effects, by the way, may include blood thirst and *serious* exfoliation! — but this is not content that the main characters explicitly navigate. They’re slaves to their compulsions — their curiosities and their regrets — moreso than to any vampiric cicada.
Cronos is funny, as well, and most of the jokes serve to underscore the sharp pointlessness of the dramatic environment. After Angel shoves Gris’ off a cliff in a car, a plastic surgeon meticulously restores the withered remains only to learn that the body will be cremated before the funeral; there’s a pleasant running gag involving Angel’s broken nose, the potential reconstruction of which he ponders endlessly until receiving a terminal blow to that area in the third act. Not coincidentally, both of these examples serve as counter-arguments to the rejuvenation impetus of both Gris and la Guardia — del Toro posits corporeal disintegration as predestined, final, and, though grisly, a hell of a lot of fun to watch. (Del Toro’s worldview is nothing if not visually enthralled — his camera snatches at sparing colors and light sources eagerly, like a child full of wonderment, savoring what sights it can.) Like in the best horror films, rendering the calculated destruction of the human body becomes a celebration of it. Not just of the body in its prime, but of the body as a cyclical, almost mystical narrative being continuously written and reenacted.
Much of Cronos feels incomplete – in particular, Gris’ relationship with his wife and all but mute yet “holy” granddaughter feel more distant than the plot wants us to believe, and the latter hardly earns the right to provide del Toro’s deus ex machina in the manner shown. The film’s three central male characters are reduced to their desires and insecurities with such elegant straight-forwardness, however, that one wants to read the movie as del Toro’s earliest and most honest conversation with his own bodily fascinations and anxieties. These men offer the audience an implicit choice between the cold, merciless grip of dotage/decay and the equally cold and merciless, but more intoxicating, prick of denial. We feel del Toro quite seriously weighing the advantages and shortcomings of both these options throughout, and as a result, Cronos may oddly enough be his most down-to-earth and sympathetic effort.
The aforementioned Loren Bouchard created and developed Bob’s Burgers with King of the Hill alumnus Jim Dauterive; for both writers, environments and relationships preclude premise and storytelling. So unsurprisingly, I’ve encountered—and sympathized with—fans of FOX’s Sunday-night lineup who’ve been reluctant to embrace Bob’s Burgers’s admittedly weak exposition. For starters, the pressures of a family-owned fast-food joint feel like fodder for a high-concept studio film that can squeak a few winking innuendos past a PG rating. Furthermore, the show’s pale, crayon-like color palette and five-o’-clock-shadow fetish seem to lazily amalgamate King of the Hill’s doodly aesthetic with Arrested Development’s instantly recognizable orange-on-white branding strategy. (The theme to Bob’s Burgers even prominently features a ukulele.) Despite all this sputtering, however, the half a season thus far aired has been a welcome attempt on Bouchard’s part especially to fuse Home Movies’s interpersonal orientation with more traditional situation comedy.