National Post (National Edition)
‘BUOYANT AND UPLIFTING’
HEROINE PLAYED BY SALLY HAWKINS CARRIES THE LATEST GUILLERMO DEL TORO OFFERING
Guillermo del Toro has spent his career slicing his way through decades and monsters. In 2004 he gave us Hellboy, featuring demons in the present day. Pan’s Labyrinth was about fairies in Franco’s Spain; Pacific Rim put giant monsters in the near future; and Crimson Peak was an Edwardian ghost story.
His newest, The Shape of Water, starts on a mid-September Monday in 1962. Played by Sally Hawkins, Elisa is a mute cleaner who lives over a movie theatre called the Orpheum — ever notice how it’s more important what you live over than where you live? She works in a government facility that has just received a “most sensitive asset” in the form of an Amazonian amphibian-man, close cousin to the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Think that’s the monster? Think again. Amphibian Man arrives in the company of government operative Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), who might just be the devil incarnate. Sure, he knows his Bible, but Lucifer would. He even has a pitchfork, minus the forks. “Look but don’t touch,” he says by way of introduction to Elisa. “That lovely dingus right there is an Alabama Howdy-do; moulded grip handle, low-current high-voltage electric shock cattle prod.” He’s very attached to it.
Elisa soon becomes very attached to Strickland’s aquatic prisoner, feeding him eggs, playing records, and even teaching him some sign language. Two lonely outsiders, they find in each other a kind of kindred spirit, or perhaps a soulmate — which of course presupposes a spirit, even a soul, in her new acquaintance.
There are other outsiders, and each will play his or her part in this very grown-up fairy tale. Elisa’s complicitous co-worker is Zelda, played by Octavia Spencer, who continues to toil in supporting roles but really deserves better. Elisa’s neighbour across the hall is a creative type named Giles (Richard Jenkins), a gay man born 20 years too soon and on the wrong coast; his story might be the richest, most melancholic subplot in a movie this year. And there’s Dr. Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg), a man trying to solve an equation with three unknowns — science, patriotism and emotion.
Finally, it’s important to note the part played by Doug Jones, who is to del Toro’s monster movies what Anthony Daniels is to C3PO; their beating heart. He gives Amphibian Man a mix of animalistic and human characteristics. He can be sweetly, even shockingly sensual. (I told you this was a grown-up fairy tale.) He even has powers reminiscent of E.T., although that visitor never consumed any house pets.
The director revels in his midcentury mise en scène. I haven’t seen so much teal in a movie in decades; it’s quite possible you can find a swatch of the colour in every shot. Elisa’s homestead recalls the ramshackle surroundings of Amélie, and everywhere else there is the delightful crumple and clink of the past and the future colliding in, as Jenkins poetically puts it in voice-over, “the last days of a fair Prince’s reign.”
The camerawork is fluid, somehow watery in its own right. And Toronto does a fine job playing 1962 Boston, with the historic Elgin theatre doubling as the Orpheum. (In a lovely moment of synchronicity, it also played host to the film’s Canadian première at the Toronto festival last September.)
But Hawkins carries the movie, letting us experience its wonder through her maid’s-eye point of view. Her character’s backstory, hinted at though never fleshed out, is truly tragic. But just as villains need a precipitous perch from which to tumble, so must a heroine start somewhere low. The Shape of Water opens and closes on a sub-aqueous scene, but everything else about it is buoyant and uplifting. The Shape of Water opens Dec. 8 in Toronto; Dec. 15 in Montreal and Vancouver; and across Canada on Dec. 22.