"Life is made of the shipwreck of your plans."

Rating: 10/10 (23 December 2017)

In brief, with Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water, it's like how you might see a hacky critic say it: I laughed, I cried, I watched the other (first) awesome Doug Jones, and witnessed one of the most gorgeous and moving films of my lifetime. Maybe one of those isn't the usual thing, but you get what I mean.
Longer: Del Toro is a filmmaker so engaged with how people make choices in stories and how the world around them and what is inside them is sometimes at odds and other times really not so, and how that steers a story in a particular direction. Fantasy is often his vehicle and it's to the point where he is so engaged with it that he deals with it directly as reality, or at least he gives it that texture; this is a film where reality and fantasy coalesce into something that is so tactile, pure, wondrous and it's unlike something you've seen before while being reminiscent of many things you've seen before. Pan's Labyrinth was one such way of going about that, and The Shape of Water belongs into that pantheon of a master working with a sharp focus on what he wants and having the cast and craftsmen to pull off his vision.
The movie may belong to a lot of actors actually - Michael Shannon's sympathetic and yet hateful "big bad wolf" in this aquatic 60's cold-war spy-tinged fairy tale; Michael Stuhlbarg's Russian agent who actually has a lot of concern for science and what this creature could mean past its "icky" insides; Octavia Spencer as someone who on the surface appears to be the chatty best friend type (not unlike in a movie that might have come out in the 50's and 60's, whether she would have been played by a black actress I don't know, possibly not), and has to endure the same kind of racism mixed with sexism as nearly all women then; Richard Jenkins, getting many award nominations and deserves them all, as a closeted artist who is not defined by his sexuality (his hair is as much of importance as who he finds attractive, or his cats) - but, with all those noted, it's the Sally Hawkins show. She commands this with a face that is warm and inviting and a little quirky (maybe like a more tolerable Amelie, I'm sure silent comedians or Giuleta Massina from Fellini's films works in there too), and when she listens to people not like her or the typical-to-1962 worldview she's curious and definitely not dismissive. Oh, and she pleasures herself too, so the sexual active part is not submerged, so to speak.
So when this Amphibian Man character, the most creative homage to Creature from the Black Lagoon since that film came out, is engaged by her, it's not like some kind of thing that's too overly quirky or about their differences (so, as good as this movie was, it's not Starman for example). It's about two outsider souls coming together, physically and emotionally (but, at times, certainly physically, though the most, uh, tasteful depiction one might care to see), and how the world around them is... well, it's a fish-man, kill it with fire! Actually, that's how it would have been in the previous generation, and Del Toro knows this. Moreover, he connects that to the political temperature of the period, which is, frankly, a mood that is not unlike at all what we have now. It's a distinctly American story too, and coming from a Mexican filmmaker that's not to be underestimated.
But what makes The Shape of Water so remarkable, among the towering pieces of cinema this decade, is how seemingly effortlessly the emotion runs through this thing, and how Del Toro and his cinematographer and production designer and composer Alexandre Desplat and Doug Jones and so on, manifests that in total cinematic terms. He brings us through every step like a storyteller should to get us to empathize with most of these characters and even, dare I say, understand and see Shannon's guy as a tragic figure, the "All-American" who's been force-fed a lot of garbage and not only accepts it but wants to live up to it (a scene where his boss explains what decency means to him is the most 2017 scene that will ever be, but extends past that).
This is a world that is not all wholly original and doesn't pretend to be - Hawkins and Jenkins live above a movie theater for (Fish-Man) God's sake - but it's sincere in a way that other filmmakers might have found cheaper, or even to the point of not trusting (or simply seeing at all) an actress like Hawkins can be this person. This is beautiful work on all the levels a piece of cinema should be, alive and provocative politically, romantically, in gender, in just how to LIVE in this world with one another. And, maybe, how to look at how we view ourselves in relation to God, or Gods or whatever.