There's no easy sell in The Shape Of Water, the new (-ish now) movie from celebrated and iconoclastic director Guillermo Del Toro. It is a love story between a woman, and a half-amphibian/half-man hybrid creature. While on the surface this gives it a fantastic bent, close to horror in parts, it is really nothing more basic than the universal beauty and the beast love story, told countless times before in works of classic French literature such as La Belle et la Bete, The Phantom Of The Opera, and The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, and various incarnations since. It was never palatable before to have the beautiful girl ride off into the sunset with the 'monster', except in Beauty And The Beast where he must be turned back into a handsome (human) prince in order to provide the happy ending. Del Toro has explicitly stated in interviews that part of the concept of making this new movie was to see a beauty/beast love story where the girl DOES end up with the 'monster'.
Working at a government science research facility in Baltimore in 1962, mute Eliza (Sally Hawkins) discovers the newest asset within the facility: a captured amphibian creature the size of a man to be investigated for possible weaponisable properties. As she spends more time with the creature at its holding tank, she begins to fall in love with him, just as the Colonel in charge of his study Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon) makes a decision about the creature's fate.
Del Toro has never hidden the fact that he is a huge cinema geek, in love with cinema and specifically classic Hollywood cinema. Not only is The Shape Of Water a love story between two people, it's also a love story between Guillermo Del Toro and classic cinema. The 1962 that the movie takes place in is the early 1960s of the movies, almost a pastiche of how the era has been portrayed over the years, rather than how it actually was. And there are movies everywhere here, from the obvious fact that Eliza and her friend Giles (Richard Jenkins) live above a cinema, to television sets that seem to only play old movies, and finally to a late set piece involving a gorgeous recreation of a classic Fred Astaire style song and dance routine. In that sense, the film is reality masquerading as fantasy, the fantasy of movie-land, and of Hollywood.
Otherwise the narrative plays out in the classic way of the beauty and the beast narrative. Girl discovers monster, finds it gentle and kind, falls in love, factions and mob form who wish the monster gone, girl must save monster. There's a beautiful simplicity to how the bare bones of the story proceed through the classic narrative tropes. This is timeworn, watertight, sturdy as a suspension bridge story telling of the highest calibre.
The trappings used to tell the story too are just lovely, and a joy to watch. The cast is uniformly superb. Sally Hawkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, and Michael Stuhlbarg are all highly dependable actors and they all turn in reliably fantastic work here, with Richard Jenkins particularly lending his character real pathos and a suitably weathered, disillusioned exterior. The production is glorious, as has become expected with Del Toro's productions, the government facility itself seeming scientifically plausible, of its time, and yet entirely alien and unknown. Del Toro's camera too, constantly fluid and flowing like water, never stops roving over the sets, drifting among the actors in long, unbroken takes, adding flow and momentum.
Some of the predictable 1962-era elements are less pleasing. There are some rather on the nose efforts at social conscience, touching on the plight of African Americans and gay men that seems somewhat irrelevant when the story is already about the feeling of otherness felt by its central characters in Eliza's mute, and the amphibian man. But it does help to round out the portrait of the 1960s as an era when suspicions and prejudices were high among Americans, with 1962 coming just a few years after the McCarthy led paranoia of communism and the rooting out of communist sympathisers.
By the end, we're left with a very simple story of love between two people, two very different people, but two people nonetheless. This is a movie in love with movies and steeped in the language and progressions of cinema, using this as a way to tell this love story. There is darkness in the world, as Guillermo Del Toro has told us many times before, but there is also warmth and feeling, and love. And there'll always be movies.
