SHIMMERING BUT SACCHARINE
Uneasy mix of comedy and Cold War spy noir is not helped by characters who are a little thin and one dimensional, writes
Fresh off four wins at this year’s Golden Globes, Mexican director Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water arrives on screens with high expectations and plenty of fawning critical praise in its wake. This is something to be wary of especially as Del Toro hasn’t really done much to cement his reputation since Pan’s Labyrinth in 2006. There was the overblown blockbuster noise of Pacific Rim, the all-over-the-place horror of his television series The Strain and the sumptuously Gothic styling covering the empty story at the heart of Crimson Peak.
The Shape of Water begins with beautifully dappled lighting, offbeat whimsical voice-over and production design heavily reminiscent of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie. Yet it falters in its sentimental retelling of the Beauty and the Beast fable, set against the backdrop of the Cold War paranoia of the 1960s. Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) is a daydreaming, mute cleaning woman at a secret government research centre who becomes entranced with an amphibian creature brought to the facility by the ruthless, cattle-prod-wielding military operative Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon). When Strickland and his Pentagon bosses decide that vivisection will be more useful than observation, Elisa with her co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) and her best friend and neighbour, closeted gay artist Giles (Richard Jenkins) hatch an escape plan for her slimy-skinned, gill-breathing boyfriend.
Del Toro certainly has a unique ability to paint his fabulous visions on screen and there’s enough nudity, sex and violence to make everything a bit more Brothers Grimm than Disney, but the story and characters are a little thin and one dimensional and we’ve seen this all before. The horror in The Shape of Water is diluted by an uneasy mix of comedy and Cold War spy noir and infuriatingly heavy daubs of overblown villainy left to Shannon’s Strickland to carry out. As Shannon tries his best to show Strickland’s desperate descent into madness and rage, he unfortunately becomes increasingly cartoonish because everyone else is so unambiguously righteous and valiant.
Some may argue that Del Toro’s collection of socially marginalised heroes could be seen as a rallying cry for the oppressed and victimised in the age of Trump. But it’s a stretch to give them much relevance beyond the boundaries of the director’s undeniably beautifully crafted frames. While Hawkins gives a strong and engaging performance as Elisa, there isn’t much beyond her serving as the stereotypical ingénue to give her character the depth needed to engage our interest for the plodding two hours it takes us to get to where it’s been obviously heading.
Octavia Spencer plays the same sassy, put-upon but good-natured black woman sidekick that we’ve seen her pull off so many times before and Richard Jenkins offers a version of the troubled but goodnatured guy he’s played in so many previous roles. That’s not to take away from their performances but rather to point out that in this particular fairy-tale universe it’s far more about the look of love than the feeling.
In spite of all the hype and critical swooning, Del Toro’s film is ultimately a disappointingly familiar story wrapped up in some shimmering and often quite breathtaking visuals. It leaves a horribly sentimental, sugary aftertaste that only briefly distracts from its flimsy storytelling and too-comfortably twee take on the traditional morality tale.
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LThe Shape of Water is on at cinemas