9 / 10
Official trailer
Labyrinth is the strangest mainstream studio film of 1986 and the last great Jim Henson production.
Henson directed it. Terry Jones, of Monty Python, wrote the screenplay. George Lucas served as executive producer. Brian Froud, the conceptual artist behind Henson’s earlier The Dark Crystal, designed the creatures. David Bowie plays Jareth the Goblin King. Jennifer Connelly plays Sarah. Toby Froud, Brian’s son, plays the baby Toby.
The film is a coming-of-age fantasy in which a fifteen-year-old girl has to get through a magical maze to rescue her infant brother from a goblin king who’s also, increasingly clearly, in love with her in some uncomfortable way.
Nothing else in eighties fantasy is as strange as this, and I adore it for that. A studio handed Henson, a Monty Python writer and David Bowie twenty-five million dollars to make a fairy tale full of puppets, and what came out is weirder and warmer than anything the genre produced that decade. I’d move into the Goblin City tomorrow if they’d let me.
The film flopped at the box office. It made approximately twelve million dollars on a twenty-five million dollar budget and effectively ended Henson’s ability to mount large-scale fantasy productions. Henson died four years later. The film became a cult classic over the next decade and is now among the most-watched fantasy films of the 1980s, helped considerably by Bowie’s performance and by repeated home video and cable airings.
David Bowie
The casting of David Bowie as Jareth is one of the more inspired decisions in 1980s fantasy cinema.
Bowie was thirty-nine years old and had been a major rock figure for fifteen years. He could sing and move, and he had the right kind of androgynous menace for a goblin king pursuing a teenage girl. The script lets him write what he writes. He performs five original songs across the film, all written for the film.
Bowie’s ability to be threatening and ridiculous in the same scene sustains the performance. Jareth is dangerous. He’s also wearing a wig that gets more elaborate as the film goes on. You can’t decide whether to be afraid of him or laugh at him, and Bowie knows it and plays both. I can’t take my eyes off him, and those songs are a big part of why I rate the film a 9.
For Writers
An antagonist who’s both threatening and absurd is one of the harder character types to write. Most attempts collapse into one tone or the other. Bowie’s Jareth works because the script and performance commit to both at once without trying to reconcile them. The lesson is that contradictions in a character can be features instead of bugs. If you can hold two opposite tones without resolving them, the character becomes harder to predict and more interesting to watch.
Jennifer Connelly
Jennifer Connelly was fourteen years old during principal photography and fifteen when the film was released.
She had to carry the central role of the film against David Bowie and a cast of puppet creatures. The performance is the major reason the film holds together. Connelly plays Sarah as a young woman who’s childish at the start and meaningfully less childish at the end. The arc is small but earned.
The character ages emotionally across the runtime while the actress was also aging emotionally during production, and that gives the performance an honesty that adult casting couldn’t have reproduced. Connelly was doing in real life what her character was doing in the film, and the line between them is thinner than the script probably intended.
Connelly is the anchor, and I don’t think the film survives without her. She’s playing against a rock star and a cast of puppets, and she makes you believe every creature in that maze is real because she so clearly believes it herself.
For Writers
Casting a young performer at the actual age of the character preserves something that older casting can’t replicate. Connelly’s Sarah is a teenager because Connelly was a teenager. The performance shows it. The lesson is that age-appropriate casting matters in ways that adult-actor performances can’t reproduce. Only performers the age of the character can play some characters. Accept the production complications and cast accordingly.
The Puppets
The creature work in Labyrinth is the foundation of the film. Multiple puppeteers including Brian Henson work Hoggle, the bitter dwarf gatekeeper, with the face controlled by remote servos.
Ludo, the rock-summoning beast, is a man-sized creature suit with a remote-controlled face. Sir Didymus is a smaller puppet. Hundreds of additional creature designs populate the Goblin City, each worked by Henson’s puppeteer team. The opening sequence of goblins in Sarah’s bedroom involves approximately fifty puppets in the same shot.
None of this could be reproduced today at reasonable cost, and that makes me a little sad.
The labor needed to work so many practical creatures at once stopped being economical when CGI arrived. The film is a document of what Henson’s company could do at the height of its powers, and nobody has done more since. Hoggle alone has more life in his face than most of the digital creatures I’ve seen.
For Writers
Practical effects have a tactile quality that digital effects struggle to reproduce. The creatures in Labyrinth are physically present on set. The actors are reacting to objects in the same space as them. The audience can feel that the creatures have weight, scale, and texture. The lesson is that the production methods you choose affect what the audience receives. Digital isn’t always cheaper than practical in the dimension that matters, which is whether the audience believes what they’re seeing.
Craft Note
Jim Henson directed. Terry Jones wrote the screenplay. George Lucas executive produced. Brian Froud designed the creatures. David Bowie as Jareth. Jennifer Connelly as Sarah. Toby Froud as Toby. Henson Creature Shop produced the puppets. Trevor Jones composed the score. Five original Bowie songs. Released June 1986. Approximately twenty-five million dollar budget. Twelve million dollar domestic gross. Box office failure on release. Later home video and cable distribution rehabilitated the reputation.
Is Labyrinth as good as people say?
9/10, and the strangest, most committed fantasy film of 1986.
Bowie gives a performance unlike anything else in his filmography, the Henson creature work is foundational and the score is excellent. It drops a point for me because the Goblin King’s interest in a fifteen-year-old gets uncomfortable, and the film never quite works out what to do with that. Watch it as a Henson production made with maximum resources at the moment he was working at his peak, and you’ll forgive it a great deal.
