by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I went to the San Diego Public Library to see
Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 Academy Award winner for Best Picture, The Shape
of Water. I’d previously seen the films I
regard as del Toro’s masterpieces, The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), both fantasy-horror melodramas about
children victimized by the oppression of the late-1930’s Civil War in Spain. I
watched Pan’s Labyrinth at a
Landmark Theatres press screening when it was new and gave it a rave review
which began, “Like the title character(s) of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — which would actually make a good story for him to
film — Guillermo del Toro is two personalities in one body. The American
Guillermo del Toro knows what’s required of a modern-day horror-film director,
and methodically churns it out: steel-grey Gothic imagery, teenagers in peril
and blood, blood, blood spurting everywhere. But get him out of this country —
either to his native Mexico or to Spain, where he’s made his two best films, The
Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth — and he turns into a different director altogether,
filling his films with human emotion and genuine terror, and creating
legitimately frightening sequences instead of just freaking out his audiences
with the modern-day de rigueur blood
and gore.” The Shape of Water was
his attempt to combine his two approaches, making a movie in English and with
an American studio (20th Century-Fox’s Searchlight specialty film
division) backing him — though the movie was actually shot in Canada — with at
least some of the poetry and emotion of his Spanish masterpieces. It emerges as
an oddly schizoid film, restrained in some ways while all too blatant in
others, and at times genuinely moving and touching in ways del Toro and his
writing collaborator, Vanessa Taylor (the first woman he’s ever worked with in
co-writing a script), intended, while at other times it gets so risible it
begins to look as if Mel Brooks had seen Pan’s Labyrinth and decided to do a parody of it. The
Shape of Water takes place in a
super-secret U.S. government lab in Baltimore run by five-star general Hoyt
(Nick Searcy) and his straw boss on the project, Richard Strickland (Michael
Shannon).
While on a trip to South America Strickland discovered a Creature
from the Black Lagoon-like evolutionary
throwback, an aquatic hominid who has both gills and lungs so he can breathe
either air or water. He captured the creature but it bit off two of his
left-hand fingers, though they’ve been surgically re-attached. Hoyt and
Strickland decide to kill the creature so they can autopsy it, figure out how
it breathes and use that information to help the American space program.
Meanwhile, a sinister group of Russians are determined to break into the lab
and kill the creature themselves so the U.S. can’t use the information from it to help their astronauts
survive in space. Early on in The Shape of Water it becomes apparent from the big cars and the
black-and-white console TV’s that the time the film is set in is not the present, but it’s only about two-thirds of the
way through, when we hear President John F. Kennedy deliver his speech
announcing the Cuban missile crisis and demanding that Soviet premier Nikita
Khrushchev pull out the missiles he was sending Cuba, that the time is
definitively established as October 1962. So this is the height of the Cold War
and after the Russians embarrassed us big-time first by sending a dog into
space in 1957 and then a human, Yuri Gagarin, into earth orbit in 1961. As part
of their plot the Russians have infiltrated a scientist into the lab, Dmitri,
under the identity “Robert Hoffstetler” (Martin Stuhlberg), only Martin has
become scientifically fascinated by the creature and believes the human race
can learn more from it alive than dead. The film’s heroine is Elisa Esposito
(Sally Hawkins), a mute (but not
deaf) cleaning woman at the lab, who accidentally stumbles on the creature and
instantly takes a liking to it, offering it a hard-boiled egg and playing music
to it via a portable phonograph and two big-band LP’s, The Great Benny
Goodman on Columbia and Music
from “The Glenn Miller Story” by Glenn
Miller. (The Goodman LP has the correct red-and-black label Columbia was using
in 1962 but the Miller is on a green label. Miller’s record company, RCA
Victor, used black labels with white lettering and the colored “His Master’s
Voice” logo for their LP’s at the time. Miller never recorded for a company that used a green label.) She
thus breaks through the creature, determines that he (it’s definite from later
on that it’s a “he”) has emotions and can communicate — he picks up some of her
sign language — and therefore it’s intelligent and the last thing that should happen is that he should be killed
for science.
Elisa’s only friends are her fellow cleaning worker, Zelda Delilah
Fuller (Octavia Spencer), an African-American who’s married to a singularly
uncommunicative male-chauvinist asshole named Brewster (the appropriately
named, given his unsympathetic character, Martin Roach), and her roommate Giles
(Richard Jenkins), a super-closeted Gay man who laments that age and the loss
of his looks keeps him from having sex with anybody anymore. He’s also an artist who at the start of the
film gets fired from an advertising agency and keeps submitting work with which
he hopes to get his job back. We don’t realize Giles is Gay until he goes to a
pie stand and hears the owner making snippily racist comments about two Blacks,
including Zelda, who try to buy pie from him; then the pie man makes some
comments along the lines of Howard da Silva’s comments as the bartender in The
Lost Weekend to the effect that he’s as
much a psychiatrist as a dispenser of comestibles. Somehow this convinces Giles
that the pie guy is interested in him, and he puts his hand around the pie
man’s arm — and the pie man flinches and orders him never to come to his shop
again. (One wonders if del Toro, a cultural omnivore if there ever was one,
deliberately copied that scene from one of the most famous literary “outings”
in the pre-Gay Liberation era: the crude pass teacher Adolph Myers makes at one
of his students in “Hands,” the opening story in Sherwood Anderson’s collection
Winesburg, Ohio.) The plot
thickens as Elisa realizes that they’re going to kill the creature within hours
unless she can rescue him, so he enlists Giles in their plot, he makes them
fake ID’s and paints a van to look like a laundry truck — only the very night
and time they pick to kidnap the creature and hold him somewhere until the
river floods the canal outside town and they can safely release the creature
back into the water is also the night the Russians (ya remember the Russians?) use an Israeli gadget to turn off the building’s
electricity and enable the four plotters — for “Robert” and Zelda have stumbled
into the plot as well — to get the creature away, where they keep it in Elisa’s
bathtub and buy large quantities of salt because it’s a salt-water creature and
needs to be in water that contains 3 percent salt.
Elisa and the creature
ultimately make love twice — the second time they flood her bathroom with
shower water so she can be in his sort of environment — and there’s a bizarre
sequence in which Elisa pantomimes for Zelda’s benefit how the creature opened
its body to let out its cock. (This would answer Charles’ objection to the Creature
from the Black Lagoon that the creature as
depicted couldn’t be male because you never saw evidence of a penis — so, he
reasoned, since it kept falling for human females it must be a Lesbian
Gill-Woman.) Unfortunately the second time she floods the bathroom and it
starts leaking into the movie theatre below — a grungy third-run place that
only shows old 20th Century-Fox films like The Story of
Ruth and Mardi Gras — and ultimately, on a night when a driving
rainstorm signals that it’s time for the creature to return to the sea,
everyone converges on it. Strickland finds out the creature’s whereabouts, he
also pulls out his severed but reattached fingers because they’re turning
gangrenous, and he hijacks another staff member’s car to chase the creature —
whom he corners at the canal and shoots Bob, tasing him with the electric
cattle prod he’d previously used on the creature, and getting him to reveal who
helped him abduct the creature and how many Russian special forces agents are
involved. The dying Dmitri a.k.a. “Bob” tells him it’s just the janitorial
help, which freaks out Strickland that much more that a bunch of mere shit
cleaners and piss wipers (as he referred to them earlier) outwitted him, and
eventually Bob is mortally wounded but Giles gets the gun and shoots
Strickland, while the creature returns to the sea and Elisa returns with him,
presumably to drown for love of him, though one imdb.com “trivia” contributor
suggested that the slashes on her neck, which we were told earlier were made by
the injury that rendered her mute, may actually be nascent gills so she’ll be
able to be with her aquatic boyfriend under water as well as on land. The
Shape of Water has some of the rich stew of
allusions that made The Devil’s Backbone and especially Pan’s Labyrinth so great, but it’s also got some bits that are just silly — I found
myself laughing through much of the film, and though some of the laughs I
believe were intentional, I doubt that others were.
The film’s most bizarre
scene occurs when Elisa is alone after one of her nights with the creature and
she’s starting to make little noises with her mouth — earlier she’s been
depicted as totally silent — and they soon take the form of a vocal to Irving
Berlin’s song “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” del Toro changes the image to
black-and-white, and soon she’s dancing with the creature against a backdrop of
columns from the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical Follow the Fleet and they’re duplicating Fred and Ginger’s moves in
Carroll Clark’s original setting. Indeed, I believe del Toro and his effects
crew simply used digital CGI technology to “paint” Sally Hawkins and Doug
Jones, the tall, lanky actor who played the creature (and who did similar roles
for del Toro in Pan’s Labyrinth
and the Hellboy movies) over
Astaire and Rogers, thereby posthumously turning Fred and Ginger into
motion-capture actors. It’s supposed to be a magical moment but it just seemed
risible to me! It also doesn’t help that, despite the wide array of computer
artists and technicians listed on the final credits, the creature, especially
in its first appearance, looks like del Toro did it the old-fashioned way,
dressing up Doug Jones in a body suit with a helmet-like mask over his head,
and just like in the old days at Universal in the 1940’s and 1950’s, you can
all too easily see where the creature’s eye sockets end and Doug Jones’ real
eyes begin. And it doesn’t help that del Toro tried to turn Strickland into a
psychopathic villain in the mold of General Vidal in Pan’s Labyrinth whereas the film might have been more chilling if
he’d been a cold, insensitive “just following orders” bureaucrat instead of a
monster in human guise — though there is a nice scene in which he and his wife are having a sexual quickie, she
begins to speak and he puts his hand over her mouth in a threatening-looking
gesture and tells him that only if she keeps completely quiet can he reach
orgasm. (It’s one of del Toro’s sophisticated allusions, only reinforced when
he makes a crude, Weinsteinian pass at Elisa later in the film — this is a man
who’s so afraid of women speaking up that he can only have sex with one who’s
totally silent.) To sum up, nice try, Guillermo del Toro, but you won the
Academy Award for this film you really deserved for Pan’s Labyrinth! Indeed, it does seem as
if del Toro’s inspiration for this film was the thought, “Hey, what would The
Creature from the Black Lagoon have been
like if the leading lady had actually reciprocated the creature’s affections?”
