Guillermo Del Toro is one of the most indispensable living
filmmakers working today. His knack for unique creature designs and smothering
his unique vision onto basic genre faire are what makes great movies out of
something that would’ve been bog standard if not for his touch. Pan’s Labyrinth sounds like a typical
“girl finds out she’s the special” fantasy story on paper, but in truth it
takes the inherent darkness of Grimm’s fairy tales by cranking the danger up to
11 and making the real world she’s offered a chance to escape from just as
nightmarish as the fantasy world. Pacific
Rim is basically a Saturday morning anime come to life, but Del Toro’s
understanding of how that genre works made it one of the most satisfying action
movies of the decade. Now with The Shape
of Water, we get Del Toro’s spin on the Beauty
and the Beast story, and all the implications that it entails.
Our story takes place in the early 60’s and follows Elisa
(Sally Hawkins), a mute who works as a janitor at a secret government research
facility in Baltimore. Her life is rather lonely and mundane, but not unhappy,
with her only friends being her closeted neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins) and
her talkative coworker Zelda (Octavia Spencer), but that changes when the
bigwigs at work bring in their latest discovery: an amphibious humanoid
creature (Doug Jones) that was captured and brought back from South America.
She quickly bonds with the creature, which blossoms into romantic and sexual
love. When she sees him being tortured by his captor (Michael Shannon) and
finds out he’s about to be killed so he can be dissected and experimented on,
she conspires to break him out of the lab and return him to the sea.
You can tell a lot about a movie by its opening scene, and
the one in The Shape of Water brings several
of its main elements into one. We see a short montage of Elisa’s morning
routine; she gets up, boils some eggs for breakfast, draws herself a bath, and
masturbates. Water, eggs, and sex. These
three symbols are the key components in the thread that runs through the movie.
But it’s more than just interspecies erotica. It’s also a movie about misfits.
Elisa and the fish man’s kinship and intimacy are enhanced by their mutual
silence, her friends are all outcasts shunned and discarded to various degrees
by a conformist society, even the villain, who is more caricature than
character, seems to be the way he is due to a vain attempt to fit into that
all-American nuclear family lifestyle despite his psychotic tendencies.
The Shape of Water
juggles a lot of genres around. It’s equal parts supernatural romance, adult
fairy tale, monster movie and Cold War thriller, with a few not-so-subtle
references to the golden age of cinema because they need to get the Oscars’
attention somehow. There’s also an abundance of subplots that are more about building
character than adding to the plot, but it manages to keep everything
streamlined because everything comes back to the animal magnetism between our
two leads. On the surface, it seems like a hypothetical scenario that asks if
those woman from The Creature from The
Black Lagoon who gets carried off to be the monster’s bride turned out to
be really into it, when it’s really a subtle movie about misfit love, even if
the contrast with the backdrop of conformity obsessed 1950’s America (with all
the racism, sexism, homophobia and anti-communist Cold War paranoia in tow)
makes it stand out more.
The acting is what really brings this whole thing home, but
that’s what happens when get a group of talented characters actors under one
roof with a director who knows when to lay back and let them do their own
thing. Sally Hawkins is especially outstanding, given that she spends nearly
the whole film completely silent. There’s one moment that would’ve been a
monologue if she could speak, but even when someone is dryly translating her signing,
the anguish and urgency of what she’s saying is abundantly clear. But Hawkins plays
Elisa with such consummate grace and confidence that no one really questions
when she makes it clear that she wants to do the monster mash with a merman.
(They’re more curious about how that would work, and believe me, they explain
it.) Doug Jones (who’s worked with del Toro before on Mimic, Pan’s Labyrinth and
Hellboy) is an actor who excels at playing monsters in heavy prosthetics, does
wonders conveying the merman’s intelligence and kindness through its monstrous
design, but leaves no doubt that he’s still a wild animal despite all that. Michael
Shannon’s character is an unambiguously evil walking embodiment of toxic
masculinity to a point beyond believability, but Shannon rises above the
material and is able to sell it with such gusto and intensity. Octavia Spencer
sells her character of the chatterbox friend who goes on and on about her
lowlife husband and uses Elisa’s listening skills as a form of therapy, Richard
Jenkins brings tenderness to a man who never lets life bring him down despite
being a target of unfair ridicule, and Michael Stuhlbarg brings empathy a
scientist/Russian spy is a typical “scientist with a heart of gold” character
who can’t bring himself to kill the merman even though both parties want him
dead.
There was one thing about the movie that bugged me, though,
but it’s not an inherent problem with movie itself, just more of a pet peeve of
mine. There were several blatant nods to classic cinema, and I’m not talking
about transplanting subtle references into dialogue. Giles regularly watches
movies at home, fawning over Betty Grayble and Shirley Temple, there’s one particularly
meta scene of the fish man standing in the middle of a movie theater, and there’s
one pastiche moment that’s so violently different from the rest of the movie style
and tone-wise that it’ll give you cinematic whiplash. Del Toro himself is, of
course, one of Hollywood’s biggest film geeks, so it comes as no surprise that
he’d find ways to squeeze his love of the classics. It just feels kind of blatant,
especially since he’s not the kind of director to do that. But when you also
consider the fact that this is coming out in Oscar season, and the Academy loves it when movies pay lip service to Hollywood's past, something seems a bit (no pun intended) fishy.
Bottom line, The Shape
of Water is a phenomenally beautiful movie and easily the best thing Del
Toro has made since Pan’s Labyrinth. The
story is familiar yet cleverly executed, the acting is on point, and I didn’t
even get into the technical aspects like the gorgeous cinematography, the
beautiful score, or the masterful camera work. While it’s not without its
shortcomings (I’d be lying if I said that certain plot points didn’t give me me
déjà vu to Pan’s Labyrinth), they
weren’t nearly enough to bring the experience down. Now will somebody please
give this man a bag of money so he can make his adaptation of At The Mountains of Madness already?
9/10
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