Creature from the Black Lagoon Inverted

Rating: 8/10 (23 October 2018)

Perhaps slight for a Best Picture Oscar winner, its cloying simplism extending to its self-reflexivity--that movies are magical, "The Shape of Water" is, nonetheless, stylishly made and interestingly the inverse of the film it most pays homage to, "Creature from the Black Lagoon" (1954). The subject of a few plagiarism accusations, including a failed lawsuit for a play I'm not familiar with; I think the accusations of stealing from other movies tend to be overblown (as if it weren't already a prevalent practice) and overlook the dreariness of those cinematic borrowings. Not the obvious superficial similarities a romantic reworking of Universal's Gillman trilogy was bound to have as a gender reversal of "Splash" (1984) and "The Little Mermaid" (1989), either. The look, with its greens and golden light colors, not counting the addition of blue to reference water here, and the familiar sense of whimsy, rom-com quirks and simplistic characterizations, indeed, resemble "Amélie" (2001). By the time a French song plays after the consummation of the central romance, it would seem like the movie is more likely set in the Paris of Jean-Pierre Jeunet rather than in Baltimore, if not for the Cold War and Civil Rights politics providing bearings. Then, there's the bland wonder at movies from "Cinema Paradiso" (1988). It does sound and look nice, flowing camerawork included, even if it's essentially artful but immature creature-feature fan fiction complete with bathtub moments of masturbation and bestiality.
I appreciate the visual effects and how they add to the water theme, including shooting dry for wet for the fantastic underwater scenes, the rain drops and the water dissolves in editing. Moreover, Elisa's daily routine is built around the use of water, from her morning masturbation in the bath and, later, sex in water, to boiling eggs, from firemen turning the hoses on a factory fire to the mood-setting rainfall later, and even her workplace mopping up of men's errant urine and receiving a lecture on the implications on a man's character as to the washing of hands. The time motif, too, bends to water via the daily thoughts of her calendar expounding that, "Time is but a river flowing from our past," and "Life is but the shipwreck of our plans."
The acting is fine, too, but the characters are overly simplistic. The good guys are very good, and the bad guys are very bad. Only the Russian scientist occupies a bit of gray area. Michael Shannon is typecast, once again, as the villain, his Colonel who captures the fish-man lacking about as much complexity and empathy as his General Zod from "Man of Steel" (2013). Octavia Spencer plays another sassy sidekick in a movie set in America's racially-segregated past, à la "The Help" (2011) and "Hidden Figures" (2016). Meanwhile, the gay neighbor appears rather childishly innocent in his escape into musicals and near retreat from the horrors of mistreated minorities. And Sally Hawkins is always fantastic, although the casting of a Brit seems a bit of a sop to the expected audience for a character that seems to be coded as ambiguously Latin American. On the other hand, having a mute character that partially relies on others (gay narrator and black coworker) to talk for her may have come across as too on the nose in alluding to Spanish-speaking immigrants in the U.S. with the casting of a Latin-American actress.
"The Shape of Water" manages to be more black-and-white in its characterizations than "Creature from the Black Lagoon," despite that film's 1950s sexism and colonialist underpinnings. In that original creature feature, there was one man who was somewhat unsympathetic, but everyone else, the Gillman included, had complex motives, benign and sinister characteristics. Not so here. The pie shop teller isn't only homophobic, but a racist, as well (he even has a fake Southern accent, for whatever that matters). The Colonel doesn't just mistreat "the Asset," he defends his actions with Old Testament appeals to bigotry, he's misogynistic in his adulterous lust, and he even becomes physically deformed. The fingers business seems to undermine the movie's message, though, as it's essentially an old ableist trope that villains be physically crippled.
Otherwise, "The Shape of Water" is from the perspective of marginalized peoples: the protagonist, disabled by her muteness, the homosexual, the African Americans and the merman. I like that even smokers are included here--mainstream in the 1960s, but largely discriminated against today--it also reverses the cliché of cigarettes being associated with the baddies. The one here consumes candy, instead (ironic, though, that a movie that vilifies candy and pie is itself so saccharine). This is the inverse of the original Gillman trilogy, where scientific colonialists ventured to the Amazon to capture the monster. The IMDb review by TheKing87 is on the right track in regards to Elisa and the creature being the same species, including by the inference of her backstory of gill-like scars on her neck and Spanish and river-based origins. The implication is that he's human, as he was the racial "other" to the white American colonizers in the 1950s, as was the giant ape in "King Kong" (1933) before that. There was always a colonialist ideology underpinning this, and "The Shape of Water," headed by its Latin-American director, reverses that doctrine.
This is so apt that I'm largely willing to overlook the flaws in story and self-reflexivity otherwise. I mean, the creature being cinema is too obvious--both blandly magical, even godly--culminating in a scene where he's found alone in a theatre watching a Bible movie. Even that's preferable to the Beauty-and-the-Beast love story annotated by musicals, including the fantasy sequence where Elisa dreams herself a voice. Even if not everything holds water, it's so well-shaped, to borrow from the title's allusion, by its container that's it's hard not to be swept up in it.