Love at the interface between water and air

Rating: 7/10 (11 December 2017)

It's romantic, it's blue-gray-green, it's wet, it's passionate. It's really hard to classify. This film defies any form of convenient categorization, as is typical with the adult fantasy fables crafted by Guillermo del Toro, he of the visually poetic mind. This is lush romance, adult fairy tale, violent cold war thriller, supernatural fable, dark comedy, social justice parable, and horror film, all in one lush, wet, subterranean visual dance.
Del Toro has mixed those ingredients before (with the exception of the dance number dream sequence), most beautifully in his master work from 2006, "Pan's Labyrinth." And he brought captivating, otherworldly mysticism to sequences of the two Hellboy films he directed. His films glue the eyes to the screen. You cannot look away.
Here, not all of this exotic mix works, but the parts that do work, Really work, and are decorated by lush production design by Paul Austerberry, many shades of blue-gray-green. A joke is made about it when a "teal" car gets purchased in the plot. The love affair is the most effective thread, in an extremely powerful way, as a mesmerizingly emotive Sally Hawkins plays Elisa Esposito, a cleaning woman who is mute. She befriends the "Asset," played with great physical grace by Doug Jones, an amphibian man who is the subject of a cruel government experimentation program under way in a murky underground lab in Baltimore. Think Creature of the Black Lagoon treated as a Cold War asset. The Amphib-man is intelligent, peaceful at heart, and is graced with amazing healing powers, he was worshiped as an aquagod by the locals in the Amazon basin, before he was captured and brought in a tank to the States.
Elisa yearns for a soulful connection, and as she joins the overnight cleaning crews at the lab, she draws the Amphib-man out, tempting him with hard-boiled eggs and Benny Goodman records. She teaches him Sign. He teaches her about his pure heart. The year is 1962, and the lab's secret government staff seek a leg up on the Soviets. It's thought the Amphib-man's unique twinned breathing systems could yield an advantage in the space race.
That thread is mostly window dressing, it doesn't work so well as did the fight between partisans and fascists in the Spanish Civil War context that was so deftly applied to "Pan's Labyrinth," but it serves to lay out a twisted homicidal antagonist, a true believer, Col. Strickland, played by Michael Shannon with sadistic perversion. It's amazing to contrast these heavy roles he gets now with his part as Fred, the Wrestle Mania fan from "Groundhog Day." As Strickland blithely tortures the Amphib-man and domineers his yellow-housed family, Elisa flies under his radar and enlists her coworker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) and best friend from her apartment building, Giles (Richard Jenkins), to spring the Amphib-man from his laboratory prison, with an assist by a sympathetic scientist, Dr. Hoffstetler, played with a proud ethical posture by Michael Stuhlbarg, amidst a subplot of Soviet spying (which also doesn't work so well; I would have preferred more of the budding human-Merman romance thread).
Spencer's Zelda is the film's incisive comic relief, and she can read Elisa's moods in detail, setting up a mirthful exchange when Zelda discovers that Elisa has ... consummated her bond with the Amphib-man. The line, and the explanatory miming, is flatly hilarious, I won't spoil it. Zelda is Elisa's workplace touchstone, her defender and translator, her unquestioning friend. Spencer hits a home run with the role, another one for her after "Hidden Figures."
Jenkins is also fantastic, as professional illustrator Giles, fired from his ad agency because he's gay, and bereft of the special contact of love, which is also Elisa's condition. She struggles to express to Giles why she loves the Amphib-man: "When he looks at me, he does not see how I am incomplete." (Her muteness.) "He just sees Me." Giles, too, is beguiled by the pure heart of the persecuted merman, despite an unfortunate incident with one of Giles' pet cats. The tragedy of the story is the emotional weight of being alone, a condition shared by Elisa, Giles, and the Amphib-man. None of them are complete, all of them yearn for contact.
About Doug Jones, he of the virtuosity in acting while clad in layers of prosthetic latex: he was the magical Faun, as well as the monstrous Pale Man in "Pan's Labyrinth," he was another merman, Abe Sapien, in the Hellboy films by del Toro, and now he's Lt. Saru in Star Trek Discovery. All roles in which his height and athletic posture help him act sensitively while covered in layers of prosthetics. In this film, he's like Elisa: mute from the human perspective, but his vocalizations are appropriately intense (which were credited to del Toro).
Del Toro simply does not make Hollywood formula films. Every item he directs winds up being a singular entry of entrancing strangeness, some working better than others. But every one of them unique and special. I wonder what he might do with a conventional script, something not immersed in the mists of fantasy. But then again, he seems most happy plumbing those shrouded, tragic, romantic depths. More power to him.