Fairytale for all

Rating: Null/10 (8 February 2018)

This film's subject matter of inter-species/culture communication/romance have been compared to "E.T.", "King Kong", Starman" and "Beauty and the beast". The one comparison struck me most, however, I have not seen mentioned anywhere: Cocoon. Here we have human interaction with a benevolent extraterritorial species that has special power of healing and rejuvenation, almost god-like. At the end of "The shape of water", a character said to the amphibian man "you ARE a god" (preceded by an unprintable exclamation in four letters).
The film opens with VO of one of the key support characters and an eerie (in a mesmerizingly beautiful way) image of the protagonist underwater, tantalizingly unclear whether dead or alive. The narrative then plunges right into the repetitive daily life of Elisa (Sally Hawkins), a mute (but not deaf) cleaning woman: gets up, prepares hard-boiled egg, fills bathtub then immerses herself and masturbates (with foreshadowing not yet understood by the audience). Working in a state-owned top scientific research outfit in Baltimore in the 60s, Elisa is in the lowest layer of the social structure, due to her handicap as well as her deprived childhood. Her view of herself is, sadly, summed up in one word: incomplete. She has meaningful communication with only two people, both minorities and therefore targets of bigotry: a black co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) and elderly gay neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins).
Elisa's mundane existence is disturbed by the arrival of a critical top-secret project. First, it is the typical WASP project leader who now takes charge of the institute. Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon) advertises his bigotry not with common abrasive language but in subtler way. In a conversation with Zelda on how ridiculous it is that Amazon natives worship the amphibian man like a god, he reflects that a god would perhaps look like himself, "maybe even like you, but a little more like me, I guess".
Yes, the project is the amphibian man. Regardless of whether a god should look like him, he is clearly modelled after the iconic Creature of the Black Lagoon. Situation-wise, he is very much like Caesar in The Planet of the Apes re-boot, a subject of human's ruthless experiment. While Andy Serkis's Caesar is motion-captured, Doug Jones plays the amphibian man in flesh and blood. If you want a comparison, there is a very good one, Karl Urban playing the deadly cop called Dredd, in the movie with that same title - the entire face under a mask, exposing only his mouth.
Once you have accepted the basic premise, the rescue plot is all but natural. This is now the "E.T." trajectory: the government threatening the life of the subject experimented on and the "little people" team up in a miraculous rescue mission. The Russian spies that want to kill him before the U.S. learns anything from the experiment are thrown in just to spice up the plot a little. The interspecies romance, so beautifully depicted, is the forte of this film. The aforementioned "Cocoon" aspect serves nicely to conclude this fairytale.
Sally Hawkins, even in this near tragic role of Elisa, retains some of the irrepressible cheerfulness seen in her Golden Globe winner (Comedy or Musical category) of best actress in "Happy-go-lucky". While life is more of a mere existence rather than living, Elisa's indomitable spirits sores when she is enjoying her music, which occasionally moves her to try a few Astaire-Roger type of dance steps, sometimes even in synchronization Giles, both sitting on a sofa. The love for music plays a large part in the bonding in the interspecies romance with the amphibian man.
In 1949, Jane Wyman won an Oscar by portraying a deaf-mute in "Johnny Belinda". While Hawkins is recognized to have a shot this year, Frances McDormand is just too strong a competition.