The Princess and the Frog: A Fractured Fairy Tale

Rating: 10/10 (27 December 2017)

GRADE: A-
THIS FILM IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
IN BRIEF: A lyrical re-telling of an age-old love story that is hauntingly beautiful.
SYNOPSIS: A mute falls in love with her outer beast.
RUNNING TIME: 2 hrs.
JIM'S REVIEW: We all know of Beauty and the Beast, a tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme, etc. Mismatched souls who fight adversity and become one. The famed director, Guillermo Del Toro's, takes that most cliche of notions and creates a tender love story about a plain-looking mute servant who falls for a big scaly Creature from the Black Lagoon type. Not the most typical movie fare, granted, but doomed lovers nevertheless. Such is The Shape of Water, a swoon-worthy romantic story that is glorious filmmaking.
Pure poetry in fact.
It is 1963 during the Cold War. In a hidden laboratory, the government has a top secret experiment in the form of a captive beast. Chained and tortured, this creature searches for the tiniest bit of compassion and finally finds it in a lowly worker named Elisa, a lonely mute waif who also yearns for that human touch...or the next best thing.
The director carefully sidesteps the sexuality and walks that fine line masterfully, avoiding any unintentional uneasiness with its sensitive subject matter. He fabricates a totally believable world of romance and longing. Adding to the overall romanticism is an insightful and poignant screenplay by Mr. del Toro and Vanessa Taylor that takes its rather rudimental storylines of espionage and governmental conspiracies and wisely pushes those plot devices aside to concentrate on the relationship of two misfits who happen to fall in love. The dialog and voiceover narration is quite beautiful and touching. Also noticeable is the subtleties of racial tension and homophobia in the plot. Yes, there is much at play in this film.
The Shape of Water works its magic with its strong visual images, lensed by Dan Lausten, and a lush romantic score by Alexandre Desplat. The production design by Paul D. Austerberry is exquisite. The muted colors, all teals and rustics, cast a melancholy aura to the story which most effectively transports the moviegoer into a otherworldly universe. "The world is a lonely place " it seems to say, and its characters reinforce that sense of desperation and sadness.
The entire ensemble is splendid. Sally Hawkins is an appealing presence as Elisa. The actress relies on her facial expressions and graceful movement to convey the character's isolation and angst. She glows with a radiance that embellishes Elisa's pain. Doug Jones is her love interest and he literally provides such fluid movement and elegance to the role. (Kudos to the creature design, an elongated mass of aqua scales and gills forming rippling musculature that enhances the attraction factor. Let's face reality, the surreal story is far-fetched and if the beast were a gelatin mass of ooze or a furry fanged monster, the love story could have been a tad unpleasant and possibly intolerable.) Yet, we too fall under the filmmaker's charming spell.
Michael Shannon plays the real monster in the film, a villain with no redeeming traits. He provides the necessary hostilities and is a compelling force that advances the narrative, although one wishes the character was written in less black and white terms. Michael Stuhlbarg is Dr. Robert Hoffstetler, an impassioned scientist who sees positive communication with this alien as a breakthrough for mankind and shows the many sides of a conflicted man wanting to do right. As Elisa's friends, Octavia Spencer and Richard Jenkins are simply wonderful. Also memorable is Nick Searcy as the military-minded General Hoyt.
As this fractured fairy tale gently unfolds its love story about "a princess without voice" and a giant amphibian as her "frog prince", it all sounds absurd. And it is. But The Shape of Water exists and works its magic so completely that one longs for it to be real. One of the year's best.
ANY COMMENTS: Please contact me at: jadepietro@rcn.com