An eccentric love story between a woman and an amphibious creature, Guillermo Del Toro's The Shape Of Water has moved ahead to the front-runner spot in the Oscar's Best Picture, racking up the total of 13 nominations including the four acting categories. Del Toro's trick of turning B-movie grotesquerie -- interspecies sex, for instance -- into a darling of cinema bourgeois can still work wonders. And while this sweet and weird story isn't entirely unpredictable -- think mid-century beauty-and-the-beast flicks such as King Kong or, obviously, Creature From The Black Lagoon -- the director's imagination gives it an authentic vintage texture and enough doses of shocks and blood.
The Shape Of Water consciously frames itself as a fairy tale -- a dark, R-rated fairy tale set against the Cold War, US-Soviet scientific contest. It's also a tale of misfits and outcasts, of the disabled, gays and underdogs who have to rise up against everyday fascism. You could even say it's a story of immigrants from foreign lands exploited and then discarded by the heartless US government. That reading may fit into the narrative of liberal Hollywood in the Trump era -- though I don't want to indulge too much in that.
British actress Sally Hawkins plays Elisa Esposito, a mute cleaning woman working night shift at a top-secret science research centre in Baltimore in the 1960s. Elisa is an orphan and a loner living in an apartment -- warm, semi-Gothic and enchanting -- above a cinema. Her neighbour next door is Giles (Richard Jenkins), a sensitive illustrator who has lost his drawing job when photography has taken over. Her friend at work is Zelda, played by Octavia Spencer as the wisecracking big mama type the actress has come to specialise in (among the supporting actress nominees, she's the least memorable). Both Giles and Zelda, naturally, talk to Elisa with sign language.
The entire film takes place in the night-time, and Guillermo gives the 1960s a romantic gloom -- shadows everywhere, but also halos of light illuminating handsome retro furniture. It's the height of the Cold War, and at the research centre where Elisa and Zelda work, American soldiers and scientists are racing to send man into space before the Russians can. One day, an iron tank arrives. It carries some kind of aquatic creature to be used in an experiment -- a monster, perhaps, or a god from the Amazon, as one puts it. Along with it also arrives Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon, again playing a tormented brute), head of security whose eyes shine with a sadistic glint. It doesn't take too many guesses to tell who the real monster is.
Soon Elisa bonds with the creature through boiled eggs, Benny Goodman and the simple fact that they're both freaks. That Elisa and Zelda can enter the maximum security dungeon where government secrets are kept may sound like a plot convenience, but it's also the point: these low-wage workers, often of ethnic minorities, are invisible in the eyes of the top ranks, there but not there, ignored and non-existent. The 1960s, besides steeped in the Cold War, also saw the Civil Rights Movement gaining momentum, and the film makes a passing reference to it. Del Toro is a Mexican who has made a solid career in Hollywood, and with President Trump's weekly bluster on minorities and especially on Mexican, the filmmaker may have another subtext in mind here.
Del Toro is a devout practitioner of the horror genre (Cronos, Mimic), a rotund, bright nerd who mixes the bizarre and the terrifying with stylish execution. One of his best films -- a moderate hit here back in 2007 -- is Pan's Labyrinth, in which a girl enters a phantasmal underworld populated by outlandish creatures, before her adventure is revealed as an allegory to the barbarism of the Spanish Civil War.
The Shape Of Water hews close to that in as much as it's a dark fantasy about a difficult period in history, and about a helpless woman who relies on her quick wit rather than physical strength. While Pan's Labyrinth is creepy, trippy and disturbing -- a work of an indie auteur in his own element -- The Shape Of Water feels handsome and expensive, a beautiful-looking tale of a prince and princess trapped in mortal hell, and even when blood is splattered and something is murdered, it's more like obligatory shocks than genuine terror. The "creature" that Elisa falls in love with is a green-hued man -- obviously a man, though his gender is discreetly concealed -- finned, webbed, slimy, bright-eyed, multiple-lunged, and yet charming, sensitive, a misunderstood angel abducted from his swamp paradise to a Baltimore shithole. A beautiful amphibian, in fact, that's not difficult to fall in love with.
Like Alfonso Cuaron (Gravity) and Alejandro G Inarritu (The Revenant), both Mexican Oscar winners, Del Toro is a former-indie maverick who, after toiling away in semi-fame, is claiming a shot at Hollywood's highest glory. By doing that he's given us a more refined version of his obsessions -- monsters, cruelty, blood -- something that doesn't betray his roots and yet is appealing enough for a larger multiplex audience. This isn't his best film, but maybe it's good enough for the celebration of the middlebrow that is the Oscars.
The Shape Of Water
Starring Sally Hawkins, Michael
Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer
Directed by Guillermo Del Toro
