The Shape of Water

Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) scrubs floors and cleans toilets at a government research facility in 1960. Elisa is mute, and her only friends are her closeted gay neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins) and her co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer). Making Elisa the hero of a film, as Guillermo del Toro does in The Shape of Water, sounds like a recipe for a humdrum, workaday Mike Leigh-style story of working class lives. But Elisa is special. How do we know? Giles tells us in the voice over that opens the film, referring to Elisa as "the princess without voice". The Shape of Water, which del Toro wrote with Vanessa Taylor, is as good-looking and atmospheric as one would expect from del Toro. The cinematography by Dan Laustsen and production design by Paul D. Austerberry achieve a sort of heightened institutional blandness, a space in which threats could be human or something beyond our understanding. It is a handsome film, with good performances and a fairy tale message about finding love both within one's self and in the world. So, why wasn't I more moved?

The lab where Elisa works is being used to house a character who is credited as "Amphibian Man" (Doug Jones), brought to the lab from South America by a government agent named Strickland (Michael Shannon) and subjected to confinement and torture while the scientists try to figure out what to do with him. All credit to those responsible for the creation and execution of the Amphibian Man's costume. Among the authority figures at the lab, only the gentle Doctor Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) seems to view the treatment of the creature as cruel. Everyone else is just interested in how the creature can help America beat the Russians. Elisa sneaks into the lab to share her lunch with the Amphibian Man, and she quickly becomes determined to be his protector. Every character The Shape of Water is exactly what the film needs them to be at any given moment. Sally Hawkins plays Elisa as a spitfire coming into her own. It's a marvelous physical performance, with Hawkins able to communicate everything she needs with a look or simple gesture. From the opening shots of Elisa's morning routine we know Elisa possesses a sort of secret confidence that is just waiting for a purpose. But the film sort of gets out of the way of Elisa in an odd sense. In one scene Strickland tells her to limit her time by the creature's tank, and immediately after that we see her smuggle in a full-sized record player in order to serenade the creature with jazz. Hawkins is given excellent support by the also Oscar nominated Richard Jenkins and Octavia Spencer, but both of their characters suffer from the amount of time the film requires them just to tell us what Elisa is saying. (Very little of Elisa's sign language is subtitled.) Giles gets a small subplot about an unhappy work history and a crush on a counter man at his diner, but Spencer's Zelda gets only some generic lines about a dull husband until the very end.

Both Elisa and Hoffstetler, working separately at first, are trying to protect the Amphibian Man from Strickland. Michael Shannon plays Strickland, who reads positive thinking books at work, as an overcranked example of mid-century American masculinity. Strickland has a wife and kids, but he's also a candy-chomping workaholic who works for a general (Nick Searcy) who could end his career. By the end of The Shape of Water Strickland is literally falling apart, and del Toro's opinion of this particular American mode of being might as well be printed on the poster. There is a climactic act of violence which - along with an earlier scene in Elisa's apartment - feels like del Toro working a bit too hard to make his points. The Shape of Water is as immersive as any del Toro film this side of Pacific Rim, but I'm not sure I ever felt the effort as I do here. We never know exactly who the Amphibian Man is or what he can offer the world, for The Shape of Water ends with an act of magic that makes everything all right.