Butler's Cinema Scene

Sally Hawkins, Doug Jones

“THE SHAPE OF WATER” My rating: B+

122 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Blend the whimsey of “Amelie” with the sci-fi fantasy of “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” wrap it all up in Cold War paranoia, and you’ve got Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water,” an interspecies love story that will leave you swooning.

Horror and beauty are never far apart in del Toro’s cinema; what’s noteworthy about this picture is that the horror is generated not by the fantastic creature at its heart but by human fear and loathing. This time around we’re the monsters.

Set in early ’60s Baltimore, where it’s always raining and everything is tinted bottom-of-the-sea green, “The Shape of Water” opens with Elisa ( Sally Hawkins) awakening from a watery dream and getting ready for work. Elisa is mute and communicates through sign language (we get subtitles); she works the night shift mopping floors at a top-secret government research station that looks and feels like a giant concrete mausoleum.

Michael Shannon

The scientific staff is all agog over their new acquisition, an amphibious creature captured in a river in South American, where the natives worshipped him as a god. The current condition of this beautiful/disquieting creation (that’s frequent del Toro collaborator Doug Jones under the spectacular prosthetics developed by Legacy Effects) is anything but god-like; he’s in chains and is the subject of the sadistic cattle-prod attentions of Strickland (Michael Shannon), a malevolent CIA type who can’t wait to vivisect this new species.

Using her passkey to gain entrance to the creature’s prison, the empathetic Elisa brings hard-boiled eggs and a portable phonograph player with a collection of jazz LPs. This frog/man may not be able to speak, but he digs eggs and music.

Elisa soon discovers that the captive is not a mindless beast; before long they’re conversing in sign language. And and as her affections for this scaly  newcomer deepen, Elisa hatches a plan to spirit the amphibian man out of the lab before he can be vivisected. He can live in her claw-footed bathtub.

She is abetted in this quest by her co-worker, the mop-swinging Zelda (Octavia Spencer),  by her neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), a mild-mannered commercial artist, and by one of the scientific eggheads, Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg), who wants to preserve this great discovery at any cost.

Richard Jenkins, Sally Hawkins

Del Toro and Vanessa Taylor’s screenplay is remarkable for they way it balances (mostly) the yarn’s wild tonal twists.

There’s some terrific comedy in the form of Spencer’s cleaning lady, who enlivens workday drudgery with nonstop chatter about her lazy husband (“If farts were flattery he’d be Shakespeare”) and the inability of men — even brilliant scientists — to hit the toilet when peeing.

Then there’s Jenkins’ Giles, a closeted gay man (it’s the early ’60s, remember) yearning for human contact. On one level Giles is a sad, tormented character — but on another he’s a classic movie nut who, in one of the film’s most charming scenes, does a duet tap dance with Elisa while seated side-by-side on a settee.

Shannon’s security man sums up the dark side of the Cold War.  He’s a jingoist, a racist and a sexual predator (sound like anybody we know?) yet he’s never cartoonish.

Sally Hawkins, Olivia Spencer

One can only marvel at how Jones humanizes his water-dwelling character, turning him into a romantic figure without a word of dialogue.

Holding it all together is Hawkins, whose movements and facial expressions are so telling that after a while you totally forget that she cannot speak. Often she goes about her day with a mysterious smile, as if enjoying a joke only she can hear. And when she gets angry or excited, her body becomes a furious knot of activity.

We instinctively understand why one mute individual would gravitate toward another mute. As Elisa puts it, “He does not know what I lack or how I am incomplete.”

If there’s a weak link here it is Del Toro’s taste for the grotesque (there’s some disturbing bloodletting on display), which is at odds with the story’s romantic/fantastic aspects. Same goes for his use of in-your-face female nudity. Perhaps these elements are meant to shock us; mostly they threaten to derail the delicate mood set by the rest of the picture.

But that is a small  criticism of an adult fairy tale that takes us to a places we’ve never been before.

| Robert W. Butler