The Shape of Water

Directed By: Guillermo del ToroWritten By: Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor Starring: Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Stuhlbarg

The fact that The Shape of Water is so

difficult to pin down is the first suggestion of its enormous, captivating power. Overviewing the plot is the easy part, a kind-of Beauty and the Beast for adults in which the most unlikely of romances flourishes between a mute female janitor working at a government laboratory (Elisa, played by Sally Hawkins), and the half man, half fish, possible deity that is being studied there (Doug Jones)— dredged from the Amazon by the U.S military in the hope that it/he might prove an “asset” in the escalating Cold War conflict with Russia. It’s a creature to whom Elisa is firstly sympathetic, and then enamoured of.

Inspecting the style with which director Guillermo del Toro embraces this narrative, or, rather, styles, proves a more complicated task.

In terms of genre, The Shape of Water could be described as a romantic, sci-fi, noir, horror, espionage, comic, heist, thriller, fantasia, all underpinned with a Golden Age Hollywood playfulness and whimsy that is firstly blindsiding in its inclusion, and then warming. By the time the ripples in this narrative’s waters have settled, we would have seen grotesque violence, sparkling comedy, glowing affections, the sort of twists and turns in characterisation that might have been lifted from a John le Carre novel, even a pair of song and dance numbers which wouldn’t be out of place in La La Land, the second of which ranks among the purest expressions of love I’ve seen in movies.

And then there are the thematic elements which are as abundant as the film’s genres, studies in the nature of communication, in what defines true monstrousness, in being an outcast. Impossibly, all of these seemingly disparate parts coexist seamlessly within the final piece. It’s no minor miracle; a complex tapestry deftly woven by director Guillermo del Toro, who marshals this textual and sub-textual cavalcade with a balletic grace.

The whole thing has no business working. Tonally, The Shape of Water ought to contradict itself at every turn. Emotionally, each attempt at affect ought to be undermined by the next. But it does work. We go with it, sucked into its pull, entranced by its ambition, swept away by its soulfulness, by the love which courses through it— after all, The Shape of Water is, if nothing else, a love story.

It’s an absurd spectacle to be sure, a romance between a mute janitor and an Amazonian fish monster, but such is the magic of the film, where the affection between its two central characters is so well sketched, so sincere in its realisation, that the lunacy of the whole thing never dawns on you until long after the final credits have rolled and you have skipped back to your car, equal parts haunted and overjoyed.

Sally Hawkins and Doug Jones are to be thanked in large part, their mutually unspoken, but entrancingly expressive performances articulating love in ways that needn’t words anyway. Doug Jones, a former contortionist, has made a career in these sorts of non-speaking roles (especially in del Toro movies); his physical prowess is well documented. More of a surprise is Sally Hawkins, who, along with her gentle yearning, also surfaces courage, fierceness, and temerity in her apparently meek veneer. Hawkins and Jones between them parlay a bond initially concentrated in the sharing of hard boiled eggs (a staple of Elisa’s diet), and an appreciation for old-time jazz records, into something more intuitive— a comfort and feeling of acceptance, the two gazing at each other with a humanity that they so seldom, if ever, experience for themselves.

Playing fine support, Richard Jenkins and Octavia Spencer join the unlikely romancers at society’s marginalised edge. Jenkins plays Giles, Elisa’s neighbour and dear friend, a homosexual illustrator who fills his days buying cake from a waiter he’s developed an attraction towards, and quietly rejoicing in vintage Shirley Temple footage. He’s quirky, humorous, and straining fruitlessly for self-assurance.

Spencer’s Zelda is in less need of confidence, but too finds herself on the social perimeter. Zelda is Elisa’s sole ally at work, a firecracker who serves as her mute compatriot’s translator, and who effortlessly caters for Elisa’s unmet quotient of dialogue. She’s also African-American, a cardinal sin in 1962 Baltimore. One pointed scene at a café sees a black family face rejection from the ostensibly family-friendly setting just as they set foot in it. It’s a blunt, bruising reminder that underneath this period in which Golden Age Hollywood and Benny Goodman still reverberate, there too is malingering civil unrest, director del Toro never letting his apparent affection for the period in which he is working skew its horrors. Del Toro, along with co-writer Vanessa Taylor, underpins this bygone era with notes of racism, homophobia, misogyny- startling, inhumane cruelties. It’s a delicate amalgamation of light and dark leant texture by the photography of Dan Lausten, laden with mossy greens and noir-like shadows, even as it narrows in on a certain vibrancy and glossiness.

The cruelties are embodied by Strickland, the lab’s sadistic head of security (the true monster of the piece) played, it seems almost redundant to say, by Michael Shannon. Strickland borders on caricature in his dastardliness, an affectation-bloated villain of comic-book proportions— a square-jawed militant who incessantly chews green candy; drives a lavish Cadillac; champions self-motivational dialogues; and takes great pleasure in exerting his dominance, whether it be over “the Asset” via an electrical baton, or making grotesque advances towards Elisa. Shannon is conversant with this brand of role, one in which he is as adept as he is typecast, instilling Strickland with appropriate, albeit familiar menace. There is then, unavoidably, a nagging scent of “seen it all before” encompassing Strickland, both in the content of his character, and in Shannon’s casting of him. As any Jeff Nichols movie will attest, Michael Shannon is as much a master of understated humanity as he is of reptilian villainy, but too seldom is the actor granted the opportunity to exhibit the former. It’s towering stuff to be sure, but it’s also cliched.

In fact there are more cliches at work than one might initially realise. Peel back the menagerie of sub-stories and genre composites, and one will notice routine, almost Disney-like mechanics at work in The Shape of Water, where the film unspools by means surprisingly conventional given the immense originality shown elsewhere. Perhaps that derivative framework is a symptom of del Toro’s affinity for those Golden Age classics which hang so visibly in the background. Perhaps the film is its own worst enemy, so indelible is so many ways, that when it leans too reliantly on its antecedents the disruption in slipping from imagination to pastiche is felt doubly.

Criticisms can’t help but feel glib against a canvas this dense with feeling and macabre vitality however. One stroke of his pen—a blindsiding musical fantasia; a sample of that wry wit, a moment of luminous romance (bioluminescent in the case of “the Asset”)—and del Toro has us back in his domain, a domain as utterly cinematic as it is spellbinding. Just like the film’s central monster, underneath the scaly, gothic surface of it all, beats a very human heart. And just as Elisa is seduced by that heart, so too are we.

Rating:

3.75/4