The Shape of Water

Late in Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water, a new character appears on-screen.  This is Brewster, a defeated Black man, the husband of the heroine's friend at work played by Octavia Butler.  Brewster is on-screen for only a couple of minutes and has only a half-dozen lines but they are highly consequential.  Generally, it's accounted a defect in a movie or play to introduce a character within 15 minutes of the ending to drive the plot toward its ending.  And, indeed, when I saw Brewster in The Shape of Water, my first reaction was that this was a bit lame, a defect in del Toro's otherwise conspicuously (even, fanatically) well-designed film.  But, upon further recollection, my response changed -- Brewster is a small character, but he's already been carefully defined for us by his wife's references to him while she's chatting with the heroine at work.  When we first see him, he's already a character that we have met through conversations between the heroine Eliza (she's mute but communicates through sign-language) and her sassy Black friend.  Brewster disappoints us with his response to danger -- basically, he acts in a cowardly way, although to protect his wife.  He's a bit like the assassins and porters in Shakespeare's plays -- they exist to wield a useful knife or open a door for someone after midnight, but Shakespeare conceives them as rounded characters with weight and real dignity.  Brewster acts like many of the other characters in the movie:  he's cowardly and ineffectual, not only by nature but because he's been poorly treated, discriminated against as an African-American man; therefore, he has his reasons to behave as he does.  In this regard, he is like Eliza's neighbor, Giles, a homosexual artist who paints bland advertising images similar to those made by Norman Rockwell.  (The irony is that the closeted lonely homosexual paints pictures of glowing and typical American families as they were imagined to exist in the late fifties.)  Giles isn't a competent hero, but he does his best.  He's been made to feel invisible and helpless and, so, of course, it's hard for him to take action -- but these attributes are thematic to the movie.

The reference to Shakespeare in the preceding paragraph might seem gratuitous and, surely, it would be folly to compare the matinee-movie monster picture that del Toro has made with the works of the Bard.  But there is an important similarity that is should be noticed.  Shakespeare wasn't original -- he didn't invent his material but plagiarized it, adapting previously existing stories and, then, excavating meanings from them that no one really had earlier noticed before.  In effect, he took genre materials and made them more profound and beautiful.  This is how del Toro's works -- he steals from hoary sub-B monster movies and articulates themes present in those films but never really developed.  In The Shape of Water, del Toro draws forth ingenious variations on the theme of the monster ravishing a maiden -- in just about every horror film ever made, a monster takes interest in a beautiful young woman, seizes her, and, as she swoons, carries her half-naked body back to his lair.  The theme was old when the Greeks imagined the dark king of the Dead, Hades, stealing Persephone from the meadow where the girl, herself the fairest flower, was plucking blossoms for a bouquet.  Del Toro takes this concept, an idea that has perennially excited poets and dramatists, and expands it into a film -- he takes what is often just a metaphor and develops it into a theme.  Of course, The Shape of Water steals from The Monster from the Black Lagoon, Beauty and the Beast, ET, The Bride of  Frankenstein and a host of other movies.  Del Toro obsessively recycles this material, much of it pure schlock ( the most obvious allusion, The Monster from the Black Lagoon, for instance, is pretty bad) and creates something that is not new -- in fact, the movie feels deeply familiar -- but exceptionally beautiful, fully imagined, and, even, grave. 

As everyone knows, The Shape of Water is about a mute char-woman, Eliza (played by Sally Hawkins) who works at a sinister government laboratory in Baltimore.  The agency, something like the CIA, has captured a "gill-man" -- that is, a sleek, luminous anthropoid with the uncanny double-lidded eyes of a crocodile and great floral gills around his throat.  This amphibian creature was worshiped as a god in the Amazon where he lived before government agents captured him.  The creature is kept in a vat of salt water -- he's dangerous:  he has bitten off two fingers of the vicious CIA agent, Robert, who not surprisingly advocates for his "vivisection."  Robert tortures the creature with an electrified cattle-prod.  (In one torture scene, the creature is chained to a pedestal that is an exact replica of the round dais on which Lon Chaney was flogged in a famous scene in the old film, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.)  Eliza, mysteriously mutilated at birth so that she can not speak, makes contact with the creature, shows him kindness, and conspires to spirit him away from the government laboratories.  In this task, she enlists the help of her African-American friend at work and the homosexual painter, who lives in the decaying apartment next to hers, both sets of rooms sharing in common hemispheres of a great arched window similar to the windows that you see in Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan's buildings in Chicago.  Soviet agents also have an interest in the "Gill man" and, one of them, aids in the plot to conceal the creature.  The amphibian man is brought to Eliza's apartment.  She has fallen in love with the creature and has sex with him several times.  Robert, who is losing his mind, pursues the lovers -- his reattached fingers have turned green and gangrenous.  There's a final showdown and, after some spectacular violence, the creature escapes with his girlfriend. 

The plot isn't interesting at all.  It's just a compound of old monster movie tropes stitched together -- a little more explicit sexually than the Universal horror films made in the 30's, less explicit than Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein.  The film's excellence lies in its execution, the innumerable details that decorate the action, the fluid, rapturous camera work, the melodramatic lighting , and the acting, which is generally expressionistic, "over-the-top" but, also, emotionally gripping.  The first forty-five minutes of the picture is probably the most technically assured and effective narrative film-making that I have seen in several years.  (Del Toro can't quite keep up to this exceedingly high level and there are some slight weaknesses in the last half of the movie.)  The heroine's dark and crumbling apartment is like a box built by Joseph Cornell, dimly lit, a sort of Victorian fantasia that encompasses and dramatizes the heroine's oddity, her beauty, and her loneliness.  In the first couple scenes in which del Toro introduces his characters, the viewer's eye wanders over all the spectacular sets -- a chocolate factory is burning down the street and the heroine who takes a night bus to work (she clocks in at midnight) is shot with her face radiant from the flames billowing out of the conflagration a few blocks away.   The gill-man is transported in an elegant Art Décor sarcophagus, a bronze cylinder with ornate curves that looks like a decorative fin-de-siecle entrance to the Paris Metro.  The film is set in 1962, at the time of the March on Selma, and discrimination is a principal theme in the movie -- but it is a dream-1962 that is everywhere half-drowned and aquatic:  it rains all the time, and the heroine masturbates vigorously in her Victorian claw-footed bathtub and we see eggs boiling under water and teal-green Cadillacs that look like submarines.  The décor is delirious, like Todd Haynes riffing on an old Douglas Sirk melodrama.  The horrifying villain, Robert, played by Michael Shannon seems a combination of zombie and predator sea-creature himself -- his ruined hand turns green and, in one alarming sequence, he literally rips off the rotting fingers.  Eliza's apartment is above a movie theater, a great abandoned picture-palace that is always playing a double-feature, The Story of  Ruth and Mardi Gras, and del Toro, of course, exploits the dark, luxurious red-womb-like theater for all of its scenic possibilities.  The movie is designed to within an inch of its life -- all of the imagery is aquatic:  the hallway outside Eliza's apartment is like a submerged version of the nightmare corridor at the end of Scorsese's Taxi Driver:  everything seems mildewed, the color of algae.  A sex scene between the evil Robert and his wife is filmed like something from a horror movie -- it is far more disturbing than the tender scenes between the gill-man and Eliza.  Inviting her husband to make love, Robert's Barbie doll wife pops one huge breast out of her blouse and requires Robert to stroke it with his rotting hand.  The sudden appearance of a single breast is like the serpent monster popping out of the chest of the poor astronaut in Alien -- it's an indelible and frightening effect.  By contrast, a kitschy embrace between the monster and Eliza under water is made poetic by the detail of one of her shoes dropping off her foot and slowly drifting away from the couple down into the blue-green abyss. 

There are a few defects in the movie.  The monster is imbued with magical powers similar to those possessed by E. T. and, in fact, the last forty minutes of the movie is a little too obviously modeled on the "E.T. phone home" sequence in Spielberg's movie.  There is some fearsome violence that seems, maybe, a little out-of-place:  in once sequence, Robert uses a bullet hole through the cheek of one of his victims as a convenient way to drag the poor dying man -- he simply hooks a finger through the hole in the guy's cheek and pulls.  There's a dance number between the Gill Man and the heroine that is beautifully designed -- it's a parody of a thirties era Black and White musical but it falls flat and could be cut from the picture.  (It would have been better for del Toro to adapt for the couple the step dance with Bojangles and Shirley Temple that we see on a TV earlier in movie.  My guess is that this was the plan but the monster suit was too awkward to allow the sequence to be filmed.) A speech by a General threatening Robert with all sorts of dire consequences if he doesn't bring back the escaped amphibian is showy but overly Baroque -- it seems to belong in a different movie; it feels like one of Christopher Walken's deranged speeches in any number of movies.  But, by and large, the film is spectacularly successful and warrants the Best Picture Academy Award for 2017.  The level of design extends to subliminal elements -- del Toro had one wall in Eliza's apartment painted with a huge reproduction of Hokusai's engraving "The Great Wave".  The mural was, then, effaced with water marks, mold, half-covered with crumbling plaster.  You can't see the mural at all in the movie but it was important to del Toro to know that it was there, nonetheless, buried under the crumbling grunge on his heroine's wall.  There's nothing subtle about this picture but it's a wholly impressive tour-de-force of design, lighting, and action -- a fully integrated work of art on all levels and technically more impressive than anything else produced in 2017. (This is all the more surprising when one considers that the movie was shot in Toronto on sets built for del Toro's TV series, The Strain, a much more highly budgeted production.  Apparently, the picture was made with the technical and craft workers hired for that show and filmed during breaks in the production of The Strain.)