Beauty of the Beast

THE SHAPE OF WATER (B) - Sally Hawkins is a wonder as a love-starved woman during space-race America in this beautiful, lyrical fantasy from Guillermo del Toro. For a standard love story and cheeky period piece, it hits the right notes.

With a heavy does of cartoon villainry and a dash of idiot plotting, del Toro -- drafting the screenplay with Vanessa Taylor ("Divergent," HBO's "Game of Thrones") -- sculpts an epic ball of cheese that is surprisingly effective at times. Hawkins portrays Elisa Esposito, a mute cleaning lady at a military installation that is housing a top-secret project -- a South American fish-man that might be of use on Apollo missions.

Michael Shannon (who else?) is the big awful meanie who runs the program and gets a kick out of torturing the rough beast. Elisa can't bear the brutality, and she finds ways to get some alone time with the mute lunk and learn to communicate with him. (The most egregious of the plot devices that require the suspension of disbelief (besides the premise itself) is the fact that a key turn of events revolves around security cameras on the loading dock; yet no one pays attention as Elisa lugs a hi-fi into the secret room to play pop standards for her new beau while feeding him hard-boiled eggs and teaching him sign language.)

There's nothing deep about this romantic ideal or the notion of heartless super-powers exploiting the body of a less-than-human to gain an edge in world domination. It's all a big cartoon, but it is often an enchanting one. And del Toro knows how to churn a story along. He stuffs it too much with classic movie clips and swelling old 78-rpm standards, but he can't help himself, deep-diving into the derivative, it seems.

This being the early '60s, we get the requisite oppressed pals -- her lonely gay neighbor, Giles (a spry Richard Jenkins), and black co-worker Zelda (a sassy Octavia Spencer) -- a pair of borderline stereotypes who help her plot the rescue of the creature identified in the credits as Amphibian Man (Doug Jones). (Speaking of stereotypes, a disturbing choice around the climax of the film features a black man too meek, lazy or cowardly to defend his wife; it's a bizarre, if perhaps unintentional, slap at a culture.) Jenkins and Spencer are fine, and they know how to spit out a wry one-liner, but these characterizations are nothing new.

Del Toro doesn't tiptoe around the daintiness of the era or just dally in poodle skirts and Cadillacs. Elisa is a woman with a soul and a full range of desires. A worker on the overnight shift, she starts her work day with a furious bout of masturbation in the bathtub, racing against that pesky egg timer. (And she and Amphibian Man even get intimate at one point, with Elisa later filling in Zelda on the biological mechanics of the coupling.)

Shannon's character, Strickland, is quite the brute -- but one with some serious insecurities. Shannon gets a lot of mileage out of chomping on candy treats, and he really milks a running gag about the sketchy reattachment of two fingers (lopped off by the monster). Michael Stuhlbarg ("A Serious Man") does what he can with his role as a Russian spy with a conscience, but nothing here would give the cardboard cutouts of "The Americans" a serious challenge. Del Toro does manage to hit a few notes that echo in the Trump era. At one point, Stuhlbarg's character urges his handlers to steal and maintain the specimen rather than destroy it, so that Russia can study the creature and learn what makes it tick. "We don't need to learn," a military superior spits at him. "We need the Americans to not learn." Give it time, comrade.

As the clock ticks toward the two-hour mark, there is a race to save Amphibian Man by this rag-tag gang of society's outcasts. Give del Toro credit -- he's having fun with this mash-up. It's all a cartoon fairy tale, complete with a "happy" ending that provides one more brilliant visual flourish. If only we, too, could live happily ever after so easily.

BONUS TRACK
"The Shape of Water" was our annual Christmas Day Mainstream Movie. It falls smack in the middle of the rankings of our longtime tradition:

  1. Up in the Air (2009)
  2. Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004)
  3. Dreamgirls (2006)
  4. Charlie Wilson's War (2007)
  5. The Fighter (2010)
  6. American Hustle (2013)
  7. The Shape of Water (2017)
  8. La La Land (2016)
  9. The Wrestler (2008)
10. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)
11. Young Adult (2011)
12. This Is 40 (2012)
13. Into the Woods (2014)