Disappointingly Strange (I wanted to love it)

Rating: 6/10 (13 January 2018)

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NOTES
This bizarre love story marketed as a Cold War thriller executes well, but doesn't quite come together in the end, achieving a B-. I hate it when they market movies incorrectly just to get people into the theaters. It's not what you're expecting folks. Usually writer/director Guillermo del Toro is a sure thing for me, but "The Shape of Water" misses the mark for reasons difficult to put my finger on.
REVIEW
Sally Hawkins's Elisa Esposito in "The Shape of Water" is not deaf, but is unable to speak for unknown reasons and is referred to as a "mute" who lives an orderly, simple little life. She lives above a rickety old movie theater that never has an audience and next to Giles (a superb Richard Jenkins (come to think of it, when is he ever not superb?)). Giles is a gay man in 1962 who is self-conscious about his age and his loss of hair. Both of them are understandably lonely and outcasts. Giles is in love with the local (much younger) pie restaurateur and Elisa pleasures herself every morning in the tub like clockwork. Elisa works at a government lab cleaning the floors alongside Zelda Fuller (Octavia Spencer), who carries on one-sided conversations until it's time to clock out. One day a mysterious canister arrives trailed by the ultra-macho Richard Strickland (a sadistically sensational Michael Shannon), a government agent who dragged the thing all the way up from South America where the Amazon people worshipped it like a god. Once we see the Amphibian Man (Doug Jones) chained up, helpless as Strickland tortures him with an electric cattle prod, he doesn't seem so godlike. What starts with a sympathy Elisa has for the creature becomes an affection, as she brings him boiled eggs, teaches him sign language, and plays him records during her lunch break. This otherworldly romantic sequence is at the heart of the story, but del Toro doesn't give it time to develop leaving it weirdly misplaced among the secretive Russian spies and off-the-wall racist comments provided as atmosphere. Strickland and his boss, a five-star general, decide to kill the creature so the knowledge of whatever it is and whatever humans can learn from it won't get into the hands of the Russians. Dr. Robert Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) pleads that it must be preserved for science. Elisa finds out and must save the Amphibian Man no matter the cost.
If you look at all the pieces separately they're executed flawlessly. The color palate is made up of varying shades of teal (not green, teal), and is explained to be the color of the future. Strickland's car is teal, the Amphibian Man is green, the water is green, Elisa's apartment is green, the tile is green, the....you get the picture. And it's beautiful. It sets up a beautiful dreamlike tone for the story. Director of photography Dan Laustsen does excellent work making nearly every waking frame drip with water or moisture of some kind. The basement of the laboratory where Elisa and Zelda work appears to be growing moss right before your eyes. The smell of mildew translates from the screen to your unappreciative nose. All this is perfectly executed. Even the choreography of little dance numbers scattered here and there are cute and fun. Alexandre Desplat's score lifts you up and takes you on a journey to a Parisian dream where you're floating in a romantic mist. All this contributes to a dream-like beautifully greenish romantic tone.
Tone is del Toro's main problem here. There are pieces that are masterfully presented, but when they all come together they're shattered by del Toro's abrasive use of graphic images, his sexual solemnity, and his callous use of racist atmosphere. Somehow it doesn't fit together, and it's too bad, because it could've been extraordinary. This all comes to a strange end, which I found to be unsettling, but not because del Toro wanted me to feel unsettled. Maybe because the second half of the film does not fit with the first as if it's two different visions being spliced together, and the ending is the final attempt to force them together.
Hawkins as Elisa is a irresistibly charming and one can't help comparing her to Audrey Tautou in "Amelie" (one of my favorites). Her shyness and silence draws you in and makes you want her to be happy. Del Toro makes a point to comment on a couple of social issues rather overtly. He teaches us that the "outcast" or the "other" should not be looked down upon and deprived of human decency. He makes this clear with the use of a janitor with the inability to speak, a black female janitor, a gay man past his prime (in the 1960s), and an Amphibian Man who are all treated abhorrently by Strickland and his superiors, who represent the privileged white American male. Strickland even makes it a point to bring up that man is created in God's image, and that God looks like him, not so much Zelda, and definitely not the Amphibian Man, but him and his kind alone. Strickland represents the conservative, traditional American man with his immaculately white sunny house, his perfectly put together housewife, and his 1.5 children, which is the past, literally smelling of decay. While Elisa and the Amphibian Man represent the liberal future. A future where love knows no bounds, whether gay, straight, black, white, mute, fish, doesn't matter.
I appreciated del Toro's messages here, and I really wanted to love this movie. I am a supporter of his and have thoroughly enjoyed his past endeavors such as "Pacific Rim," "Hellboy," and "Pan's Labyrinth," but this most recent work fell a bit flat. The feeling I got is that this was a personal project, that del Toro cared about this story on a deeply intimate level, but it emulates the title - coming across formless and disappointingly elusive in the end.