Directed by: Guillermo del Toro
Starring: Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer
Rated R, 123 minutes
Guillermo del Toro is the rare artist who, since making his masterpiece, actually hasn’t exhausted himself trying to recapture its magic. “Pan’s Labyrinth,” still one of the best movies released this century, was so deeply satisfying and novel that everyone got excited to see what del Toro would make next, only to get a series of wannabe blockbusters that were ultimately underwhelming. But now, with “The Shape of Water,” del Toro has finally revisited the nightmarish fantasies and dreamy atmospherics that made “Pan’s Labyrinth” so appealing. The difference, though, is that where “Pan’s Labyrinth” was otherworldly and indelible, “The Shape of Water” is formulaic and distractingly uneven.
Set during the space race, “The Shape of Water” is a love story that dares you to imagine a more implausible premise. Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins, “Blue Jasmine”), a custodian at a top-secret government lab, whose only friends are her coworker Zelda (Octavia Spencer, “Hidden Figures”) and her neighbor, the artist Giles (Richard Jenkins, “The Visitor”), discovers one day that the lab has acquired a living, breathing mermaid-like creature. Herself a mute, Elisa is drawn to the inscrutable creature, and is sympathetic to the abuse it suffers at the hands of the men who run the lab, namely the ominous Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon, “Take Shelter”), who takes to torturing the creature with a cattle prod. It’s not long before Elisa, falling in love with the mermaid, plans a jailbreak, which leads to a series of violent ordeals for Elisa, the creature, and everyone around them.
This is not a bad movie, but it is a capital-R Romance, wherein everything that’s supposed to happen happens, and nothing accidental gets in the way. Gunshots are instantly fatal, except when the victim still has something to say; the lab has cameras and security personnel galore, except when Elisa wants to visit the mermaid alone; and in the movie’s most laughable moment, Strickland, searching for Elisa, finds the word “docks” written down and instantly knows where to go, showing up in the next scene at precisely the right moment. Willing suspension of disbelief can carry a movie a long way, but “The Shape of Water” misguidedly presumes that characters are beholden to plotlines and not the other way around.
Accordingly, the movie is full of stock characters designed to help the story take a more familiar shape. Elisa is Cinderella, the homely floor-scrubber who discovers her inner beauty with the help of an unlikely friend. Strickland, meanwhile, is the most unequivocally sinister of villains, a man who will tear off his own fingers just to prove a point. But the sorriest character is Zelda, whose presence in this movie continues the long cinematic tradition of equating being a black woman with being a sassy, matronly servant. If del Toro’s M.O. in filmmaking is that anything, no matter how fantastical, is possible, then he should be able to dream up characters that defy cliché, but instead he seems content to lean on stereotypes almost to the point of lying down.
That’s a shame, because the love story that drives “The Shape of Water” is actually quite touching. Sally Hawkins and a man in heavy prosthetics playing the mermaid make for a surprisingly cute couple, wordlessly conveying the almost unbearable joy of improbable love. If Jerry Maguire summarized true love with “You complete me,” Elisa and her amphibian man revise the sentiment as “You make it OK to be incomplete.” Of all the movies that have ever tried to sell the message that everyone is perfect just the way they are, “The Shape of Water” is surely one of the more convincing.
It’s almost unbelievable that two such disparate filmmaking endeavors—one a heartfelt exploration of human emotions, the other an amateurish reliance on easy tropes—coexist in one movie. Yet this also makes sense. Guillermo del Toro directs from the heart, rather than the brain; what he boasts in emotional instinct is countered equally by an unconscious deference to certain images that he’s seen elsewhere and therefore can’t picture any other way. “The Shape of Water” may be a well-made movie, but its vision of the possibilities of life is disappointingly all or nothing.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 1/26/18.