‘The Shape of Water’ is sick, brilliant and worth seeing.
Del Toro creates a film that may reveal more than he intended
“The Shape of Water” is writer-director Guillermo del Toro’s first real attempt at a masterpiece since “Pan’s Labyrinth” in 2006, and he comes closer this time than last. It is, frame by frame, a beautiful-looking film, and not only beautiful, but of a piece. Del Toro imagines a whole world, one that has never existed before, and then creates it with a meticulousness and fidelity that can inspire awe. As in “Pan’s Labyrinth,” it is a world of pretty surfaces and underlying evil, an evil that hates innocence and purity. It wants to destroy the good, the pure and the defenseless, and
although del Toro is emphatically on the side of the angels, there is something in his artistic impulse that is irresistibly drawn to scenes of violence against the weak. How you see those scenes will determine how you ultimately feel about “The Shape of Water.”
To some, the film will seem like a modern myth, a brandnew fairy tale, with Sally Hawkins — as a cleaning woman in a government laboratory — its heroine. I see it as something darker, as a cruel fantasy given a veneer of wholesomeness through its unrelenting pathos. The poignancy, the little smiles and gentleness are a cover for the movie’s aggression, so that even if del Toro’s mind is with Hawkins, his heart is somewhere else and can’t be controlled.
This lack of control, this sense of our watching a wildly unconscious document that has been, at the same time, committed to film with precision and planning, makes “The Shape of Water” a movie to be reckoned with. Even if you see it as a film with an ugly spirit — as ugly as its filmmaker believes it to be pure — and even if you see it as phony and not on to itself, it’s a fascinating look inside its creator’s mind.
It takes place in the early 1960s. John F. Kennedy is president, and the Cold War is at its most lethal. Elisa (Hawkins) is mute and lives in a small apartment on top of a movie theater with green seats. In fact, everything is green in “The Shape of Water.” Elisa wears a green hat. Men wear green suits. The city buses are green, and all the interiors are green. Del Toro expects us to notice. At one point, Michael Shannon, as a government security expert, tries to buy a green Cadillac, only to be told by the dealer that the car isn’t green. It’s teal.
One day at work, Elisa and her friend and co-worker (Octavia Spencer) are brought in to clean a secret lab, where they discover that an amphibian man (Doug Jones) is being held captive. He is going to be studied by the government and then destroyed. In the meantime, he is being tortured by Strickland (Shannon), just for fun.
Slowly, but inevitably, Elisa strikes up a friendship with the big-eyed, soulful-looking amphibian fellow. Both can’t speak, but they communicate a shared dislocation and goodwill. For Hawkins, Elisa is an almost entirely silent role, but within those limits, she is able to convey profound depths of feeling. Mawkishness may be the strategy of “The Shape of Water,” but Hawkins occasionally finds her way into something real and moving.
Here and there, del Toro locks into a perfect, poetic moment, as when Elisa sits at a table, in her humble apartment, and fantasizes being able to speak, and then being able to sing. The movie lifts into a black-and-white dance number — a brief re-creation of the set and choreography of “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” (from the AstaireRogers film “Follow the Fleet”). And then the scene settles back into mundane reality, except that now we know: This reality is not really mundane, because it’s elevated by love and longing.
Yet as in “Pan’s Labyrinth,” del Toro can’t contain an impulse toward cruelty, though at least he does a better job of hiding it this time. There’s a core creepiness here, an unwholesomeness that can’t be disguised by the filmmaker’s unconvincing assertion of love’s eternal power.
“The Shape of Water” is brilliant, but sick — or maybe it’s sick, but brilliant. In any case, it’s something to see.