The Shape of Water

by , under Now Playing


Directed by Guillermo del Toro 
Screenplay by
Guillermo del Toro
Vanessa Taylor

Starring
Sally Hawkins
Michael Shannon
Richard Jenkins
Doug Jones
Michael Stuhlbarg
Octavia Spencer  

Music by Alexandre Desplat
Cinematography Dan Laustsen
Edited by Sidney Wolinsky
Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures
Running time
123 minutes

Rating: R (for sexual content, graphic nudity, violence and language)

 

With films like The Devil’s Backbone, and his fantasy masterpiece, Pan’s Labyrinth, to his credit, there’s no denying that Guillermo del Toro is a cinematically imaginative, gifted writer/director, capable of creating sumptuous visuals, complex plots, and fully realized characters, but his resumé also includes a lot of contrived, manipulative, gratuitously violent schlock, like Blade 2, Crimson Peak, Pacific Rim, and the FX TV series, The Strain. Despite the critical praise and awards showered on The Shape of Water, I found it to be a frustrating, unconvincing amalgam of both tendencies.

Featuring gorgeous cinematography, accomplished editing, and a stellar cast, led by Sally Hawkins and Michael Shannon, del Toro pays homage to 1954’s The Creature From The Black Lagoon, a literal “creature feature,” by reframing it as a 50’s romantic fantasy in which the real monster is a sadistic human. As skilled as he and his actors are, though, del Toro fails to make the characters or romance convincing, or stop himself from indulging in excessive and unnecessary spilled blood.

With deliberate contrivance, Sally Hawkins’ Elisa is not only a mute, low paid cleaning woman, but a single Latina as well, guaranteeing sympathy from the first frame, while Michael Shannon’s Strickland is the heartless, cruel, loud, overbearing director of some clandestine government agency, an irresistibly contemptuous combination. Doug Jones’ Amphibian Man’s marvelously lovable eyes, all too human lips and chin, appreciation of hard-boiled eggs and classical music, and agonized response to Strickland’s painful, irrational torture, is inescapably pitiful. Richard Jenkins’ lonely gay man, Olivia Spencer’s shameless revival of a black female stereotype, and Michael Stuhlbarg’s self-sacrificing “good” scientist are stock characters, driven by a plot intended to pluck an audience’s heartstrings, and ensure that no one underestimates just how cartoonishly awful Strickland is.

The most important element of the story, what determines the success or failure of the entire movie, is the development of the amphibian biped/human female, interspecies romance, and it’s at the consummation of that romance that I thought the movie fatally lost its way. At that crucial moment, when Elisa disrobes in a deliberately flooded bathroom and has sex with a scaly, web-fingered, gill breathing member of another species, my willingness to believe was pushed beyond its limit. It felt like she was having sex with her household pet. I never doubted that she had a real soft spot for the gentle, music loving, speechless, amphibian animal of undetermined sex, rescued by her from the super-evil clutches of that monster, Strickland, and living mostly in her bathtub. Like any abused animal, I felt affection and pity for it, too, but have sex with it? A bridge too far. Whatever drives Elisa to see the creature as a lover, or the creature to reciprocate, is never sufficiently developed, leaving it up to the audience to just accept it, or not. I didn’t.

What follows this unbelievable moment is predictable melodrama, grotesque, gratuitous violence, and possibly the most manipulative plot device of all: implications of the creature’s possible god-like powers, including resurrection of the dead. It saddens me that so much undeniable talent was invested in such a poorly written story. Maybe it’s the zeitgeist, but why this movie has charmed so many people completely escapes me.

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