Aquatic love flows in ‘Shape of Water’
It’s the amphibious vs. the invidious in virtuoso director Guillermo del Toro’s dazzling new fairy tale, taking “The Shape of Water” in Cold War America of 1962.
Let’s not waste any time (Mr. del Toro doesn’t): His unlikely heroine is the mute janitor Elisa (Sally Hawkins), who swabs the decks of a top-secret government research facility. She and her co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) learn of the arrival of a strange aquatic creature recently captured in South America — the most dangerous and sensitive “asset” ever to be housed in their oceanographic laboratory.
“The Amazon natives worshipped it like a god,” declares lab boss Strickland (Michael Shannon), the thing’s handler. “We need to take it apart, learn how it works.”
Two problems: The Soviets want to do the same. And Strickland (whose bible is Dale Carnegie’s “Power of Positive Thinking”) soon loses two fingers to the creature.
The fingers get reattached, temporarily. Elisa gets attached, permanently, to the strange, mistreated critter, who resembles — well, no man or beast ever seen before. His silent, captive isolation reminds her of her own. She woos him with — what else? — hardboiled eggs and Benny Goodman music. Soon enough, they have a relationship.
But his miserable days are numbered. Strickland is counting them down, in eager anticipation of the autopsy — barring some improbable Great Escape.
Director-writer del Toro paints 1962 America as a dystopia of paranoia and violence, full of truly nasty people — spies, racists, sexists, militarists — while Dobie Gillis and Mister Ed blather away idiotically on TV in the background. Villainous Strickland drives a big teal Cadillac Fleetwood (”a Taj Mahal on wheels”) while, in cartoonish contrast to his sadistic brutality at work, leading the Ideal American Life at home.
Mr. del Toro began his movie
career in the makeup and special effects department, learning from the legendary “Exorcist” master Dick Smith. You can take or leave his wild-and-crazy sci-fi monster films (”Hellboy,” “Blade II,” “Pacific Rim”) — I mostly leave ‘em.
But I’m in awe of his astonishingly beautiful and original fairy tales for adults, “The Devil’s Backbone” (2001) and “Pan’s Labyrinth” (2006), both set during the doomed Spanish civil war struggle against fascism, both breathtaking fables interweaving history with fantasy. In “Pan,” a praying mantis metamorphoses into a Tinkerbelltype homunculus and leads a little girl into underworld encounters with a faceless ghoul (whose eyes are in his hands!) and a frightful faun played by Doug Jones.
That Pan was no Peter. The creature he plays here has even more amazing eyes, with multiple expressive eyelids — no otherworldly but a this-worldly relative of E.T.
This Doug Jones — not to be confused with the newly elected senator from Alabama — is simply terrific.
So is luminous Sally Hawkins, despite giggles (at thepreview screening) for the bathroom love scenes, when waterdrips down into the theater below her apartment — shot, BTW, in Toronto’s gorgeous Elgin Theater in precise replication of Edward Hopper’s great “New York Movie”painting.
Fine humorous support is provided by Richard Jenkins as gentle Giles, a wannabe artist (”this is some of my best work...”), the one really nice guy in Elisa’s life, who whips his toupee on and off, as needed for the situation; and by Ms. Spencer (so deserving of her 2011 Oscar for “The Help”), who could’ve played this similarly subservient role in her sleep but instead, in her consciousness, elevates it — dispensing wisdom in the men’s room where Strickland dispenses with washing his hands.
Since the main protagonists are mute, communication largely depends on those two — a black woman and closeted gay man — to provide words for the eloquent things Elisa says with her hands.
Mr. Del Toro juxtaposes humanity and eroticism with sudden bursts of graphic violence. Extravagantlyromantic, sweetly sorrowful, exquisitely crafted, perverselyintelligent.
“What I love about fairy tales,”he has said, is that — unlike politics, religion and economics—“theytellthetruth.”
Like the other two in Mexico’s trinity of great film makers — Alfonso Cuaron and Alejandro Inarritu (”Birdman”) — Mr. del Toro’s unique style is hard to characterize: almost-butnot-quite magic realism? Romantic surrealism?
“The Shape of Water” is a little “La La Land,” a lot of “Beauty and the Beast” and a touch of Fred & Ginger.