{"id":6251,"date":"2017-12-24T09:58:06","date_gmt":"2017-12-24T14:58:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=6251"},"modified":"2018-01-31T20:04:30","modified_gmt":"2018-02-01T01:04:30","slug":"the-shape-of-water","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2017\/12\/24\/the-shape-of-water\/","title":{"rendered":"The Shape of Water."},"content":{"rendered":"

The Shape of Water<\/em> is hands-down the best love story between a woman and a fish-man that you will ever see – and, I would hope, the only one. But despite a trailer that makes it look like a Cold War thriller and a romance at the heart of the plot, Guillermo del Toro\u2019s masterful new film is also a profound meditation on the essential loneliness of mankind.<\/p>\n

Eliza Esposito (Sally Hawkins) is a mute but hearing cleaning lady working at a secret military facility and laboratory in Baltimore in the late 1950s, along with Zelda (Octavia Spencer), who rarely stops talking but also serves as an interpreter for Eliza\u2019s sign language. One day, the women learn that the lab is now home to \u201cthe Asset,\u201d a humanoid sea creature, capable of breathing both in and out of the water, kept in chains and tortured by the security agent Strickland (Michael Shannon). Eliza, fascinated by the creature, begins to eat her lunch in the lab where it\u2019s held, and forges a relationship with the Asset through gestures and shared hard-boiled eggs. Strickland has convinced his military superiors to vivisect the Asset, then kill it, while the scientist Hofstatter (Michael Stuhlbarg) sees that it is intelligent and capable of communication, arguing that it should be kept alive and studied humanely. Eliza, already hoping to rescue the Asset from Strickland\u2019s cruel treatment, learns of the plan and hatches an escape plan with the help of her painter neighbor (Richard Jenkins).<\/p>\n

The trailer for The Shape of Water<\/em> emphasizes the chase for the Asset once Eliza has sprung it from captivity, but that takes up, at most, the last 15 minutes of the film; about 3\/4 of its running time is dedicated to the budding relationship between her and the fish, first friendship and then romance. The film requires you to suspend your disbelief in many ways, but the emotional connection between the two characters is convincing: Eliza is entirely alone in the world, abandoned as a baby and raised in an orphanage, with only her neighbor and Zelda as any kind of friends at all; the Asset may be the only creature of his type, and is certainly alone now that he\u2019s been stolen from his home in South America. <\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not merely those two who are alone in this film, even if they exist at the script\u2019s emotional core. Her painter neighbor is a closeted gay man in an era when coming out was not a viable option; he\u2019s lost his job due to his drinking, lives alone with several cats, and says to Eliza at one point that he\u2019d starve if she didn\u2019t show up to encourage him to eat. (He also knows sign language.) Zelda is married to a useless husband, complaining daily to Eliza how he doesn\u2019t appreciate or help her.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s Strickland, the most problematic character in the movie. Shannon\u2019s performance is excellent, as you\u2019d expect, but Strickland is as one-dimensional a villain as you\u2019ll find. He sees the Asset as an abomination, not an intelligent creature, citing Scripture as it suits his beliefs. He\u2019s racist, sexist, and elitist. He develops a spontaneous sexual obsession with Eliza (because she\u2019s mute) and harasses her, while also treating his wife as a prop and his children as if they were barely there. And there\u2019s no attempt to explain his selfish, misanthropic behavior – he is just what he is. This is not a good man making a difficult decision for God and country, or a complex individual faced with a black swan dilemma; he\u2019s a horrible person in every way, which makes him as dull as the serial killer in a horror movie. <\/p>\n

The remainder of the film, however, is superb, not least in how del Toro asks you to suspend that disbelief and then runs with the license you\u2019ve given him. There is much that would be ridiculous if you thought about it, but the fabulist script builds the world so quickly and convincingly that very little of what comes after seems out of place. (I had one quibble: why was Hofstatter the only scientist around the Asset? You\u2019d think there\u2019d be a mob of biologists, anthropologists, and so on trying to study it.) The score mixes sounds you might find in French romance films with some more art-house tracks, and even has a fantasy musical number near the end that, again, asks you to just roll with it.<\/p>\n

Hawkins should be nominated for all of the awards for Best Actress, and while the competition is stiff this year (Frances McDormand for Three Billboards<\/em> is also worthy, and you know Meryl Streep will get her annual nod), she might be my pick to win right now. Her role requires her to express everything through expression and gesture, and the character herself grows from this mousy, childlike woman counting out her life in hard-boiled eggs (and other morning routines) to a woman capable of plotting a heist and risking her life for her lover. She\u2019s utterly convincing at both stages of her character\u2019s development. It\u2019s a tour de force performance, with the higher level of difficulty that voters often tend to favor.<\/p>\n

Jenkins and Spencer have both earned Golden Globe nominations for their Supporting roles, and Shannon would also be worthy of a nod, although his character\u2019s stock nature might hurt him. This also seems like a lock to earn nods for Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, and Score, at the very least, and if the fish counts, for Costume Design too. I still have three (or more) major Best Picture contenders left to see, but of the 25 films I\u2019ve seen so far this year, The Shape of Water<\/em> would only be behind The Florida Project<\/a><\/em> on my own rankins.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Shape of Water is hands-down the best love story between a woman and a fish-man that you will ever see – and, I would hope, the only one. But despite a trailer that makes it look like a Cold War thriller and a romance at the heart of the plot, Guillermo del Toro\u2019s masterful […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[973,972,925,215],"class_list":["post-6251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2017-best-actress-nominees","tag-2017-best-picture-nominees","tag-2017-movies","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6251"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6253,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6251\/revisions\/6253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}