The Shape of Water - Review Thread

Loved this. I want to relax a little bit before I write about the film in any sort of detail, but wow was my reaction to this strong. What a wonderful, creative, and emotionally involving movie. It's without a doubt Del Toro's best film since Pan's Labyrinth and well I'd hesitate to say it's equal to his 2006 masterpiece, at the moment I don't think it's too far off.

The Shape of Water(12/17/2017)

Warning: Review contains spoilers

A few months ago I had the privilege of attending a special 3D screening of the 1954 film The Creature from the Black Lagoon, a movie that’s been lumped in with the canon of Universal Horror classics like Frankenstein and Dracula but which in many ways hues closer to 50s science fiction movies like The Blob or The Fly. At its center is a monster that’s come to be known as the “gil-man”; a half human/half fish hybrid who can breathe both under-water and on the land. The gil-man never seems entirely feral but the extent to which it has human intelligence is never entirely clear either. In many ways the gil-man feels a bit like King Kong in that he’s this legendary creature in a remote location who encounters a group of white explorers as they encroach on his territory. Also like King Kong he becomes infatuated with the one white woman who comes along with these explorers and proceeds to spend much of the movie attempting to kidnap and presumably rape said white woman who spends most of the movie screaming in its presence. Most people who saw this simply accepted it as the slightly silly B-movie convention that it was, but in the mind of Guillermo del Toro there was a lot more potential here; he’s the one guy who saw this dynamic and thought “if only she was a little more open minded and if only this guy came on a with a little more respect maybe this relationship could have worked.”

Set in 1961, The Shape of Water focuses on a woman named Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins), a mute woman who lives next door to her best friend, a middle aged gay man named Giles (Richard Jenkins). During the day Elisa works as a janitor with another friend named Zelda (Octavia Spencer) at a secretive government facility called the Occam Aerospace Research Center which is run by a straight laced but often cruel man named Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon). I’m not exactly sure what this facility normally does, but early in the movie it’s tasked with the unusual job of housing a rare live specimen: a humanoid amphibian entity capable of both breathing water and air that was found in the Amazon and is known only as The Asset (Doug Jones). The Asset is being studied by a mild mannered scientist named Robert Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) who believes it may be a highly intelligent being possibly capable of communication and greater human interaction, but Strickland is offended by its very existence and often mistreats it. While cleaning the room this creature is being housed in Elisa catches a glimpse of it and is immediately fascinated. Unlike Strickland she tries being nice to it and giving it food and playing it music. Soon enough there is a connection there, but Elisa has very little control over The Asset’s fate, at least not without taking matters into her own hands.

The Shape of Water is in some ways a “do or die” movie for Guillermo del Toro given that his supporters have been waiting a long time for him to really live up to the potential he showed in his 2006 triumph Pan’s Labyrinth. In the decade since making that movie he made one solidly entertaining studio film (Hellboy 2: The Golden Army), one lackluster attempt at studio entertainment (Pacific Rim), and most disappointingly one ambitious horror film that proved to be a misfire (Crimson Peak). Given that string of disappointments The Shape of Water could be seen as something of a return to the well if looked at cynically as it’s “adult fairy tale” tone feels a lot like a return to what worked for him so well in Pan’s Labyrinth and to some extent The Devil’s Backbone. That’s in terms of tone anyway; the film’s plot is certainly divergent from that movie and from what people normally expect out of movies in general. Most notably this is a movie that wants it audience to root for a relationship that is unconventional to say the least and could be called straight up bestiality when looked at in a particularly uncharitable way.

That Elisa would find a way to empathize with the creature in the film is logical and speaks to her purity and spirit. That she would be so stricken as to want to begin a sexual relationship with this thing is a little harder to swallow and in some ways feels like a couple of steps were skipped. We see early on that the creature is gentle and not the threat that he seems to the people running the facility, but he never really develops a way to converse with Elisa in any comprehensive way to the point where she doesn’t even know his name and there isn’t necessarily a conventional courtship where they come to realize they’re right for each other. In this sense the fact that she’s drawn to him seems to say more about her own isolation than about how charming he is, and his interest in her seems to have more to do with the fact that she’s the only person who’s been nice to him in quite a while. Of course that’s perhaps looking at this a little too logically. This is after all a movie that begins with a voice-over which all but says “once upon a time” and refers to the protagonist as “the princess without voice” and which seems to be set in a particularly heightened world that feels almost like a Lynchian pastiche of the Eisenhower era. Clearly we’re in the world of fairy tale, much as we were in Pan’s Labyrinth but this time there isn’t such a clear line between the real world and the fantasy.

Of course there can at times be a tension when you set fairy tales in the real world or an approximation thereof simply because the aesthetics of the modern world occasionally demand more modern readings. That clash is particularly troublesome here when it comes to the film’s villain Richard Strickland, who is described in that voice-over as “the monster who tried to destroy it all.” Strickland is very reminiscent of Captain Vidal, another authoritarian character who is plainly evil almost from the moment you see him and who becomes oddly fixated on an injury he receives at one point as he descends into madness towards the end. The over-the-top evilness of Vidal stood out a bit less given that he was a literal fascist within the Franco regime rather than a mid-level American government worker. One could perhaps view this parallel between Strickland and Vidal as some sort of statement that there may not have been quite as much of a difference between the paranoid and often prejudiced power structure in place in 1961 America and Franco’s Spain, but given that even Strickland’s superior officer seemed a little more reasonable than Strickland, that only goes so far.

It probably doesn’t help that this is something like the hundredth time that Michael Shannon has been chosen to play the role of a dangerously insane villain and in general I feel like the movie makes casting choices that are a little too on the nose like that. Octavia Spenser’s sassy janitor certainly has shades of what she did in The Help, and Michael Stuhlbarg and Richard Jenkins are also falling pretty comfortably within their usual ranges. Granted, complaining that people fit their roles a little too well probably seems like an incredibly odd complaint but it would have made some of these characters resonate just a little more if they were being portrayed by people who were doing something a little more unexpected. Of course I cannot make this same complaint about the movie’s most important performance, that of Sally Hawkins as the film’s lead. Hawkins is an actress I primarily know for her work in the film Happy-Go-Lucky, which is a somewhat lesser known Mike Leigh film about a woman who is somewhat annoyingly chipper, but in a very human and interesting way. This is hardly a copy of that performance but you can see the same persistence of spirit underneath it. Combine that with the fact that she defines the character as well as she does without being able to speak at all even in voiceover is really impressive.

Ultimately one’s ability to love The Shape of Water is going to come down to how willing you are to go along with its “modern adult fairy tale” tone. Audiences that don’t pick up on that or aren’t into it will be more bothered by the over the top villain, the unlikeliness of the romance, and certain other elements while those who are into the tone won’t have a problem with these things at all. That was also what Pan’s Labyrinth was going for and on some level this feels like a very intentional companion piece to that movie some ten years later. On some level I guess I find it a little disappointing that Del Toro’s first really respectable movie since Pan’s Labyrinth is a movie that feels so much like that last success rather than a new and exciting direction for the director. On the other hand it’s pretty hard to call a movie where a woman bones a fish man who’s being tracked down by American and Soviet agents unoriginal. I feel like I’ve spent a lot of this review looking a gift horse in the mouth, make no mistake I think The Shape of Water is an exceptionally well made movie that takes a frankly crazy concept and manages to make it work really well on screen in a way that few other movies could. If I’m hard on it it’s because I feel like this is the movie he should have made in 2010 or so and should be on to the next thing had he not gotten stalled in his evolution, but better late than never.

**** out of Five

Yea I had some issues with this. The Michael Shannon sex scene which just set up a throwaway line later in the film, absolutely zero depth to his entire character. He's evil because... He's evil. What a novel idea. And let's stop putting him in these roles... It's so boring by now.

And the love story... What love story? She gives him some eggs, he looks at her, they listen to music, that's what love is? Has del Toro ever been in a relationship? He's the only thing that sees you for you? Have you tried going out with anyone but your shut in day dreaming neighbor? On all these egg trips you never ran into someone that liked the cut of your jib? Seems farcical.

And some of the more fantastical themes involved bothered me but I get suspending disbelief for a story like this.

I thought the movie was acted brilliantly, and looks gorgeous, but I just wasn't moved by it like others clearly have been. Jenkins was great, Spencer was great albeit in the exact same fucking character we see her as in every role she gets... And I think the end with the voiceover was just for the audience in a more subtle pans style ending, I'm pretty sure we all know what happened and it wasn't what was put on screen.

6/10

I agree a whole lot with Dracula's review... This is not an artist evolving... Del Toro is running in place and has been for years. We get it you love monsters and creatures... Let's focus on the story telling aspects of the medium in the future though.

Just re-posting my write-up from the Top 10 of 2017 thread:

Mysterious sea creatures, Russian spies and a creepy Michael Shannon performance - The Shape of Water has it all! And it all springs from the imagination of writer/director Guillermo Del Toro, so you know you're in for a unique experience, and boy, does this deliver on that front. The Shape of Water feels like the most passionate effort from Del Toro since Pan's Labyrinth, matching that particular film in terms of vision and creativity, but perhaps topping it in terms of emotion and storytelling. It has the trademark genre elements we've come to expect from Del Toro at this point in his career, but above all else, The Shape of Water is a beautiful love story with echoes of Creature From the Black Lagoon and Beauty and the Beast; a combination that works wonderfully. At the center of it all is Sally Hawkins in a captivating performance as the mute night janitor who falls for the sea creature being kept at the facility she works in. Hawkins does a fantastic job of getting us to care for her character, even with her lack of dialogue. But as with all great performances, Hawkins is able to communicate so, so much with just her facial expressions. Richard Jenkins also shines in an equally likable supporting performance. But above all else, The Shape of Water is the work of a master storyteller well and truly in his element. Del Toro tells his story with so much confidence and passion that it's hard not to get caught up in. It combines many different types of story threads and elements, but it never loses sight of its enormous heart.

****/****