Guillermo del Toro (2017)

Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins), the mute heroine of Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, works shifts as a cleaner at a government aerospace research centre in Baltimore.  It’s the early 1960s:  the Cold War is heating up, the Space Race between the US and the USSR gathering momentum.   Winning that race is the Occam Centre’s top priority and it takes delivery of a humanoid amphibian, captured from the Amazon by the centre’s head of security, the malignant, ambitious Colonel Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon).  The creature, with its complex respiratory system, may assist the development of American space travel technology; Strickland’s superior, General Hoyt (Nick Searcy), orders him to vivisect the ‘Asset’, as it’s known.  Another scientist at Occam and his bosses have different ideas.  Robert Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) is actually a Soviet spy called Dmitri, instructed by his controllers to euthanise the Asset immediately to prevent its helping the enemy.  Elisa’s life is apparently drab; her workplace, as its name suggests, is thoroughly unmagical.  Yet she’s immediately drawn to the Asset (Doug Jones) and wins its trust, through a combination of her gentle sweet nature, easy listening music and the hardboiled eggs – a regular part of Elisa’s daily lunch – which she places on the edge of the tank of water in which the Asset lives.  A beautiful friendship develops between them – wordless (she can’t speak, it has no human language) but deeply communicative.

On the day the Asset is to be harvested or destroyed, Elisa executes a plan to get it out of the centre and into her apartment – with the help of her neighbour Giles (Richard Jenkins), her fellow-cleaner Zelda (Octavia Spencer) and, it turns out, Dmitri himself.  At the eleventh hour, he unilaterally defies Russian orders and supplies chemicals to enable the Asset to stay alive in Elisa’s bath.  Keeping the taps running for longer than is good for the fabric of the building, Elisa achieves an underwater physical relationship with the creature but it must return to its natural environment in order to survive long-term.  Elisa intends to release the Asset, on an appointed day, into a canal close to where she lives.  Strickland, his future now on the line, tries desperately to retrieve the Asset and the canal-side at night is the site of a climactic Manichaean struggle.  Strickland shoots, killing Elisa and wounding the Asset.  The creature has already demonstrated thaumaturgic powers by reversing toupee-wearing Giles’s hair loss.  It now steps things up a gear to heal its own wounds, before using its claws to slice Strickland’s throat.  The Asset disappears, with Elisa’s body, into the canal.  Underwater, it replaces the scars on the sides of her neck – marks left by the slashing of her vocal chords in infancy – with gills.  She starts to breathe again.

‘If I told you about her, the princess without voice, what would I say?’ asks a voiceover at the start – an emphatic hint that a fairytale will follow.  The voice – Giles’s – returns at the very end to imagine the happy-ever-after life aquatic that Elisa and her lover might enjoy together.   Del Toro’s film turns out to have a dual framework, however – or, at least, to link to two strains of fairytale.  The second strain is soon apparent too.  Elisa’s and Giles’s apartments are located above an old cinema; lonely Giles, who has lost his job as a commercial artist, spends plenty of his time at home watching old Hollywood movies on television.  The Shape of Water is steeped in references to other movies, most obviously The Creature from the Black Lagoon and ET (the Asset causes domestic chaos, overcomes failing health, returns home).  The story takes place in a world enclosed within movie history.  Although Dan Laustsen’s cinematography makes it often atmospheric, the ingenious production design has a stylised artificiality that occasionally evokes Martin Scorsese’s Hugo and keeps The Shape of Water in the emotional shallow end.

As Elisa’s relationship with the Asset develops, del Toro inserts a black-and-white Hollywood musical fantasy sequence:  the couple dance together and she mimes to ‘You’ll Never Know’ (first sung on screen by Alice Faye in Hello, Frisco, Hello in 1943).  The sequence is no more than mildly charming and, because it’s conceived as a highlight, falls flat.  The fairytale aspect, though no surprise given del Toro’s track record in fantasy films, is rendered in some unusual ways – The Shape of Water is more sexually explicit and more violent than might be expected.  When Elisa takes a bath alone, she masturbates.  The brief coverage of Strickland’s home life includes an abrupt burst of grimly determined humping with his wife (Lauren Lee Smith).  By the time he shoots Elisa and the Asset, Strickland has already killed Dmitri’s two compatriots, after they have shot Dmitri.  Mortally wounded but still breathing, he’s then tortured by Strickland.

Del Toro and Vanessa Taylor, who shares the screenplay credit with him, also use the main characters’ moral starkness to work up a more contemporary relevance.  The goodies represent the variously marginalised.  Elisa is a woman not only disabled but forcibly deprived of her voice.  Giles is gay – though seemingly closeted, he may have been released by the advertising agency that employed him because of his suspected sexual orientation (though a drink problem is mentioned too).  Zelda is a resourceful, good-hearted African American.  (The much smaller role of her lazybones husband (Martin Roach) strikes the jarring note of a more antique racial cliché.)  The Asset is an alien political prisoner – so, in a way, is Dimitri.  This shamelessly PC concoction the editor of Sight & Sound sees fit to describe as the film’s ‘sly political undercurrent’.

The several heroes’ almost lone adversary Strickland is a fascist patriot, a materialist Christian.  He buys a Cadillac that ‘represents the future’.  He describes the Asset as an affront to God, through ‘not being made in His image’.  When he needs to subdue – or wants to abuse – the creature, Strickland uses an electrified cattle prod, which he refers to as an ‘Alabama how-dee-doo’ – a term that links the device to a brief clip of news coverage, on Giles’s television, of Southern white cops laying into black civil-rights protesters.  (The news bulletin, which Giles quickly switches off, is the only serious television output in evidence:  whereas the old movies broadcast are nostalgic heaven, del Toro presents the made-for-TV entertainment as pap.)    The Shape of Water, full of visual invention, is a distinctive and engaging, if predictable, good vs evil story.  I enjoyed it a lot but that didn’t stop me being aware that I’d have resented the picture as sentimental, right-on whimsy if it hadn’t featured several actors it’s always a pleasure to watch.

The metamorphic quality of Sally Hawkins is the film’s most positive magical element.  The age of Hawkins’s Elisa is, as with the title character she played in Maudie, intriguingly indeterminate.  Her soulful dark eyes, her pallor and thinness – the long fingers, the slender throat – have never been used to such eloquent effect as they are here.  She gives the mousy Elisa a spiritual beauty from the start.  Naked in water, she’s an authentic naiad.  The opportunities in this role for fakery and contrived simplicity are many but Hawkins resists:  as usual with this actress, we believe she’s telling the truth.  There are welcome moments of controlled fierce humour too – as when Elisa signs an expletive to an uncomprehending Strickland.  Her urgent signing, as Elisa desperately tries to persuade Giles to join in the mad scheme to rescue the Asset from Occam, is wonderfully passionate.

Michael Shannon’s formidable face and powerful presence threaten at times to hijack the film – rather as Sergi López’s baddie came to dominate (for this viewer) del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006).  Shannon’s integrity as an actor, however, gets him inside the villain’s skin; he expresses Strickland’s strong motivation as well as his rancid soul.  (Shortly after arrival at Occam, the Asset bites off two of Strickland’s fingers.  The increasing stink that hangs about him subsequently is the result of Strickland’s festering hand wound but it’s the stench too of his essential rottenness.)  The sassy, supportive Zelda is a condescending conception but Octavia Spencer, like Sally Hawkins, steers clear of obvious charm.   She also carries with her traces of characters of greater ethnic significance that she’s played in other films (The Help, Fruitvale Station, Hidden Figures), which helps give Zelda substance.  This was the second day running that I saw a London Film Festival offering with Michael Stuhlbarg in the cast:  you admire his work as the good Russian Dmitri not least because the style of acting required in del Toro’s world of fabular unrealism is so different from the naturalism of Call Me by Your Name.  Stuhlbarg, something of a late bloomer, is becoming one of American cinema’s most reliably excellent character actors.  On which subject …

The wry, rueful gay-next-door in mourning for his unfulfilled life is by now a stale idea in stories set in the sexual dark ages.  The type also has an inbuilt innocuousness yet this isn’t how Giles comes across in the hands of Richard Jenkins, one of American cinema’s great ennoblers.  Jenkins makes affectingly funny Giles’s tentative (until disastrously clumsy) attempts to chat up the young man (Morgan Kelly) who works behind the counter at a local café.  One of the film’s nicest sight gags is the display of portions of dessert, each with an alarmingly fluorescent green filling, that Giles has bought from this ‘Pie Guy’ (as he’s shown on the cast list) and stashed in his refrigerator at home.   (The Pie Guy affects a homey Southern persona that turns out to be false, though his racism and homophobia are real.)   Even Giles’s unexpected hair growth is amusing.  As usual, Jenkins uses wit and empathy to illuminate the character he’s playing.  Whenever he’s on screen, he grounds the narrative in a semblance of reality and gives it human warmth.  This role is fundamentally demeaning but Richard Jenkins makes it delightful.  And at least Giles isn’t made to get a crush on the Asset, even though the latter is a fine figure of a humanoid male (The Shape of Water hardly qualifies as a Beauty and the Beast tale).  Doug Jones is remarkably expressive inside his scaly costume, evidently inspired by the ‘Gill-Man’ of The Creature from the Black Lagoon.  Unlike this screen precursor, the Asset is benign, except for biting off, as well as the Strickland digits, the head of one of Giles’s pet cats.  Needless to say, I could have done without this echo of the Frankenstein’s monster incident with the little blind girl.

This is Guillermo del Toro’s tenth feature.  Most of the previous ones have made money; Pan’s Labyrinth in particular received critical plaudits and several prizes; but the odds are that The Shape of Water will bring del Toro new international prestige.  (It’s already won the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival.)  I suspect, though, that some of his regular admirers will see it as disappointingly compromised – a sop to audiences who would normally stay away from fantasy-cum-horror movies.  Although Pan’s Labyrinth, the only del Toro film I’d seen until this one, was widely praised as a charming dark fairytale, I found that the darkness eclipsed the charm.  Except for the resonance of the López-Shannon characters, The Shape of Water is almost the reverse of its predecessor – in spite of the elements that ensure it won’t be enjoyed in cinemas by all the family (the BBFC has given it a 15 certificate).  Its transforming-power-of-love theme and especially its wallowing in old Hollywood give it a soft heart.  It’s almost symbolic that the action is lathered in an Alexandre Desplat score, melodic but thoroughly conventional.

11 October 2017