Fairy Tale for Adults

Rating: 8/10 (31 December 2017)

With "The Shape of Water," Guillermo del Toro has crafted a wondrous fairy tale for adults. Many are saying it's not as good as "Pan's Labyrinth," but I didn't much care for that movie and liked this one much more. It's anchored by a marvelous and silent performance by Sally Hawkins, as a mute cleaning lady in a government installation during the Cold War who falls in love and tries to rescue a strange, amphibious being who is wanted by both the American and Russian governments. She's aided in her efforts by gay next door neighbor Richard Jenkins and work partner Octavia Spencer. It's notable that the three principal characters are people pushed to the fringes of society because of various things "wrong" with them from the perspective of 1960s America: being handicapped, being gay, being black. That a rag tag group of disenfranchised misfits dare to go up against the government and military establishment of a world superpower gives the film both a tremendous rooting interest and mirrors what's happening right now in American culture, in which groups who previously had no voice in the cultural conversation are now being heard loud and clear.
The one thing I did not like about this movie is what it chooses to do with its villain, played by...who else?...Michael Shannon. I guess he's meant to represent the white establishment, but del Toro and Shannon take the character too far, turning him into a nightmarish psycho, when really the story would have been more interesting if the villain had remained more of a faceless institution rather than one single crazy dude with a score to settle. del Toro also can't resist the urge to peddle in gratuitous and graphic violence, most of it connected to Shannon's character, and which doesn't really serve any purpose other than to pull the audience out of the movie. The film doesn't need it and would have been better without it.
Still, even with its flaws, "The Shape of Water" is a visually absorbing and evocative beauty and the beast tale with one foot planted in old Hollywood and the other in our current unsettled times.
Grade: A