Mute woman finds beauty in ‘Water’ beast
In the way that Guillermo del Toro’s Academy Awardwinning “Pan’s Labyrinth” rearranged Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” to tell a story about a little girl during the Spanish Civil War, his latest magical mystery tour, “The Shape of Water,” is an even more macabre reimagining of “Beauty and the Beast” for these dark, cruel times.
The movie tells the Cold War-set tale of a filmloving, frustrated dancer and mute janitorial worker named Elisa Esposito (Brit Sally Hawkins, “Maudie”), who works in a top-secret government facility. This unlikely heroine is an intelligent, sexually frustrated woman who falls in love with a mysterious humanoid creature captured by U.S. scientists and spooks in the Amazon River mud and transported back to a wintry military base. The creature is kept in chains in tanks, cruelly examined and subjected to painful experiments and tortured by a cattle prod-wielding civilian named Strickland (Michael Shannon, this film’s true beast).
Elisa and her wisecracking best friend and co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) catch a glimpse of the creature with flaring fins and nictitating eyes behind a pane of bluish glass when they are summoned to clean a literal bloody mess after a violent encounter between Strickland and the creature.
In her apartment above an old Orpheum movie theater, Elisa watches romantic musicals with her cat-loving neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), an aging, closeted, vain gay man who paints Norman Rockwell-like advertising images for peanuts. During the screen’s most oddball courtship, Elisa feeds the amphibian being hard-boiled eggs, and she is soon enchanted by this first cousin to the Creature from the Black Lagoon (played by the remarkable del Toro regular and “creature stand-in” Doug Jones of “Hellboy II”).
When Elisa learns of a dire plot against the creature hatched by Strickland and B-movie military overlord Gen. Hoyt (Nick Searcy), she enlists seemingly sympathetic scientist Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) to help rescue her beloved and set it (him?) free.
An R-rated, art-house/ genre-movie hybrid, “The Shape of Water” is precisely the sort of film del Toro, who was once attached to a live-action version of “Beauty and the Beast,” should make on a regular basis. As he did in “Pan’s Labyrinth,” the filmmaker captures a mixture of Gothic romanticism, offbeat eroticism, dreamworld logic and monstrous cruelty common to such classic fairy tales as the aforementioned “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Beauty and the Beast” and such unforgettable films as “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” and “The Bride of Frankenstein.”
On one level, “The Shape of Water” can be construed as a macabre valentine from del Toro to his wife, Lorenza, who just happens to be a veterinarian. The film is the rapturous dream of a romantic besotted by everything from Carmen Miranda songs, Alice Faye musicals and 1960s biblical dramas.
The Academy Awardwinning Harry Warren/ Mack Gordon love song “You’ll Never Know,” made famous by Faye, becomes this film’s soulful theme song, one mute Elisa imagines herself singing to her demon lover in a moment that makes “The Shape of Water” the “La La Land” of monster movies. We’ll never know, indeed.