Atmospheric take on early-1960s America, with an aquatic "monster" thrown in

Rating: 8/10 (1 July 2018)

Most likely you're going to be needing 123 minutes - if not a whole lot longer - to work out if there's anything great about Guillermo del Toro's "The Shape of Water".
But I gave the film that much time and ultimately choose not to regret that.
Remember "The Creature from the Black Lagoon"? That 1954 movie in which an expedition up the Amazon encounters said creature, which at one point cavorts aquatically with (an unknowing) Kay Lawrence as portrayed by a pretty good-looking Julie Adams in a swimsuit (as well as by her stunt double Ginger Stanley)?
Well fast-forward to 2017 (or slow-forward to 1962 in the movie's own terms) and that creature is back, captured, enchained and being looked upon as a potential "asset" for the US military that the Reds (who REALLY ARE under American beds, as well as in Cuba) would also like to get their hands on, or at least spirit away from the Yanks.
But gone is that pretty gorgeous Julie Adams, and in her place Sally Hawkins as Elisa Esposito - a cleaner at the Baltimore-based research facility that's carrying out research (aka torture) on "The Beast". Now the film is ostensibly steadfast in reminding us that there is no "Beauty" to match with that, as Elisa is (made to seem) plain and dowdy, lacking male company (other than the apartment-sharing fatherlike-figure called "Giles" (played by Richard Jenkins) who emerges as repressed-gay), and she's also mute!
Yet, in the first of many strong-contrast elements that this film throws at us - from the very first scene(!) - Elisa goes home and reveals (several times) a sensuous-enough body, and it is made clear to us in no uncertain terms that Elisa has a determined (and increasingly imaginitive) interest in matters (hetero)sexual, up to and including inter-species!
This is something refreshing in a movie, and the makers allow Hawkins to make an impression with it, though the boundaries of good taste are several times being probed.
Indeed, whimsical as this piece may at times seem, this is no kiddy-flick whatsoever, but actually grim, gory and upsetting in several places.
This begs a strong question as to who this film is for, and answers come there few. Nevertheless, "The Shape of Water" resembles a slew of recent films in regarding the early 60s as now-fair game for "historical" movie-making, and no expense is spared here to portray the several different worlds converging that America of that era represented. First recall how it had been in January 1961 that outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower had warned against the military-industrial complex ... only for that complex to seem so very much needed just a year later in the context of Cuba.
Here the military-industrial complex dominates the film as Elisa works for it, as does her colleague Zelda (in another classy performance from Octavia Spencer that again sees her up against scientist guys in white coats, or short-sleeved white shirts with badges hanging from the pockets, as well as guys in sharp suits and Sinatra-type hats who are basically secret agents - as exemplified by Michael Shannon's character Richard Strickland.
Now Elisa and Zelda are good people, if poor-ish, and they live in surroundings that owe more to the '40s than the '60s. Elisa gets what joy she can from the fantasy musicals that play in the cinema beneath her apartment. In contrast, bad-guy Strickland and his family live in the bright, shiny, heavily-advertised world that is promised to all of America, but is actually available to his kind, as when he enters an automobile showroom and drives off straight away in a teal-coloured Cadillac.
And that, in a nutshell, is this movie's actually-controversial and subversive and accurate-looking portrayal of the apparent wealth and clean-cut, all American joys of the 1960s, as laced with the fake world of Hollywood, a good dose of hypocrisy of other kinds on many levels, the arms race, the threat of the bomb and the red menace, and the scarcely-suppressed evil and gainsaying of liberty that the military-industrial complex, CIA and so on were able to generate against that background. In short, many of the same extremely-contrasting elements and aspects that one can find described tellingly (if also wittily) in a book like Bill Bryson's much-to-be-recommended "The LIfe and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid".
If you buy into that kind of multi-stranded world of a 1960s America not at all what it seems to be on the surface, you may end up seeing more here than just a lame-ish monster movie; instead finding something at once chilling and atmospheric and far more authentic then it ostensibly purports to be.