Director: Guillermo Del Toro
Date: 21 July 2018
jamesintexas rating: ***
Guillermo Del Toro's The Shape of Water has an assured quality in its storytelling, a loving hand which offers homages to The Creature from the Black Lagoon and other touchstones of Del Toro's cinematic life, and its weird assortment of creatures, human and non, make it one of the most unusual films of the year. It did not move me, and writing about it in July after it won Best Picture means that the film has taken on a life of its own. It is a phenomena of creativity.
Mute janitor Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) works alongside Zelda Fuller (Octavia Spencer) in a secret 1960's lab run by autocrat Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), and one night after seeing a bloodied Strickland emerge sans fingers from the lab, Elisa begins to communicate with the creature that is kept chained up in a pool, the remover of those fingers, an amphibious gilled-creature (Doug Jones). Elisa starts a burgeoning friendship with the creature, and she begins to fantasize about rescuing him from his torture at the hands of the government, including Dr. Robert Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) who offers a more humane way to treat him opposed to Strickland's ferocity. To do anything of this magnitude, Elisa would need help from her artistic neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), himself an outcast of sorts because of his hidden sexuality. Strickland's harassment of Elisa in addition to his authoritarian control over the creature and the lab lead to an inevitable showdown of sorts. The film is about being outcast because of ability, race, sexual orientation, and even politics, and Del Toro lovingly shoots it with attention to the blues and yellows of neon, the windows on the bus Elisa takes to work where she traces the raindrops.
The film works best with Hawkins and Jones marvelously playing off of each other, or Hawkins and Spencer, or Hawkins and Jenkins. Sally Hawkins really shines, making Elisa a compelling and dramatic figure. What troubled me was so much time spent by Del Toro on and with Strickland. Michael Shannon is a fine actor giving a fine performance, yet the amount of screen time given to him in the second half of the film undercuts the power of Hawkins and Jones. And, it does not lead to any greater understanding of him, any epiphany, or any denouement that seems worthy of the amount of time spent with him. Del Toro is sure to include scenes of Strickland's viciousness and also his insecurity with his superiors, especially with him being a veteran. I guess that I just don't think the shape of the script matches the grandeur of Del Toro's images. But to see the creature watching a film in the old-fashioned style of theater with water dripping from Elisa's underwater apartment above is a special moment. What an odd choice of film to be enshrined forever in the public consciousness as a Best Picture! I think I would always prefer Pan's Labyrinth over this film, but Del Toro delivers his own unique vision in his own unique way.
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