Pan's Labyrinth and the Overgrown Conceit

Well, I haven't made it to the theater yet, I haven't worked up the stomach to re-watch Hostel, and I haven't found anyone who wants to sit around and watch bad teen movies for a few hours, so my initial slate of posts is on hold...for now. But never fear! There's a lot more where that came from. Today, I'd like to talk about Pan's Labyrinth. Spoilers, by the way. I'll be talking about the ending.

Pan's Labyrinth was a difficult movie for me. The visuals were always compelling, the fantasy elements were well-executed, and juxtaposition of the girl's secret world with the war going on around her was poignant and compelling. Nevertheless, the movie strikes a dissonant chord with me. The girl is killed, shot by her stepfather, and yet, it turns out her fantasies were true: she really is a magic princess, and she lives happily ever after.
It could be that the film is suggesting an afterlife. For being virtuous, she is rewarded in death. But this is unprecedented by the rest of the plot. The girl's religious beliefs are not a major focus, nor is the subject of religion in general particularly crucial to the film.
It could be a metaphor, del Toro's way of giving closure to the viewer's cinematic experience of the death of a child. If this is the case, however, we are looking at a greatly overdeveloped filmic metaphor.
My position, then, is that the events of the film are meant to be taken as true; that is, magic is real, there really are fauns, and the little girl is a long lost princess. And this is my problem with the movie: it suffers from a severe case of an overgrown conceit.
We'll get back to Pan's Labyrinth momentarily. First, a few words on conceits. In fiction, and especially in fantasy, a conceit is the plainly unreal idea that the reader accepts as true in order for the story to work. Conceits are useful. They allow authors to shrug off the fetters of reality and explore all sorts of interesting literary territory. Indeed, to some extent, all fiction is "conceited" in that it asks the reader to imagine as real a whole menagerie of characters, places, and events that have at best marginal claims to reality.
Conceits can also be literary deathtraps. That is, authors can get caught up in their own conceit. They expound upon a created world for its own sake rather than the sake of the story. In doing so, they surrender something which I consider to be a critical component for successful art. Art should say something. The message doesn't have to be earth-shattering, mind-boggling, political, or even moral, but it has to get beyond itself.
A good, popular example is Star Trek. The series has a rigorously detailed fictional universe which can be investigated to no end by a fan, but it never was the parameter specifications on the warp drive that made it so enduring. The Star Trek universe is a means to an end, and that end was a hopeful vision of the future. The Trekkie who can quote from memory the star date of the Federation/Klingon alliance, but doesn't know the significance of putting the Russian Chekov in a leadership position misses the point. They are stuck in the conceit and missed the message.
The point of all this introductory stuff on conceits in a film blog is that I think the ending to Pan's Labyrinth is hardly an ending at all--it is merely the extension of the conceit. It's great for the girl (Ofelia) that, though she seems to have been killed in the world you and I might recognize as real, she's still alive in the one where everything turns out for the best, but for the story, it's a dead end.
What I found interesting about the concept for Pan's Labyrinth was it's positive perspective on a child's fantasy against the cruel reality of the Spanish civil war. Her fantasy world gave Ofelia strength, happiness, and a measure of hope when the real world provided no such things. The film's message was that imagination is not idle, that creativity can help us cope, and that even at its ugliest, life is not irredeemable.
There are limits to fantasy, though, and consequences for exceeding them. In fiction and in life, delusions of grandeur foreshadow a harrowing encounter with reality. Fantasy is a solace, not a solution, and to believe otherwise is to lose touch with the world and everyone else in it. Pan's Labyrinth's overgrown conceit breaks the rule by making Ofelia's fantasy the solution to her situation.
This is particularly problematic because the positive message of the film is softened by the overgrown conceit. The hope provided by the escape into fantasy is ultimately presented as valuable because the fantasy turns out to be real. While this makes narrative sense, it understates the value of fantasies that don't happen to be true. Guillermo del Toro is a famously imaginative filmmaker, and Pan's Labyrinth is supposed to be his magnum opus. But rather than a profound celebration of creativity as something valuable for life, what we recieve is another beautiful conceit.
I don't claim to be qualified to sit in the director's chair, or make the filmic decisions that make something like Pan's Labyrinth work. I still believe it to be a very good film; one worth watching more than once. But the overgrown conceit is what keeps it from being a great film, and I can't help but wonder how else the narrative could have been tied up.