I liked The Shape of Water, but my reaction to it was more thoughtful that ecstatic. It’s more than a Good Film; it is a Beautiful Film, in Every Respect.
It’s not the movie I thought it would be, it is only partially the movie it was marketed as, and I understand how this could get in the way of either seeing what the film is doing, or appreciating it. One of the things del Toro is best at as a director is taking what people typically consider schlock(especially horror), and turning it into deeply sensitive examinations of emotions and the human condition. To Wit: a big deal has been made of TSoW being a “monster-fucking” movie; about del Toro’s interest in a movie where “the monster gets the girl”. Eliza and the Amphibian Man certainly DO get naked for some all-but-filmed sexytimes(Twice no less owo), but it doesn’t end up being the interspecies love-film it was sold as. That’s unfortunate in that I continue to want to see that movie, but irrelevant(to me) in that the movie it IS, is still Excellent. Fundamentally, The Shape of Water is a movie about companionship, and the monster-fucking and romance, such that it is, only works to serve that theme alongside other examples and examinations of intimacy, connection, and feeling. The Shape of Water is, most centrally, about the search and desire for Companionship and Acknowledgement; not JUST to have someone, but to See and Be Seen, to Hear and Be Heard, to Touch and to Be Touched. To be Accepted rather than Denied and Rejected.
Eliza feels the world refuses to see her instead of her disability; that she lives in its shadow. The Amphibian Man is homeless, friendless, surrounded by incomprehensible enemies who refuse to acknowledge him or communicate, who torment him physically and care nothing for his feelings, in the charge of a man who reviles him as an offense precisely because of his difference from him, and revels in the pain and anguish he causes “The Asset”(he is, quite literally, commodified!). Giles feels abandoned and rejected by the one person he thought he had a true connection with -his old lover, a person(I got the sense) he had dedicated years and possibly decades to, but who is determined to remain in the closet, and who asked him to quit his old job at their ad agency to preserve that closeting- clinging to him by the end of a thin, slippery line, desperate to keep that connection alive in a dangerous world now turned upside down where he understands nothing, has no-one(but Eliza) and where anyone, no matter how fair their smile, could secretly revile him for his love. Zelda is locked in a dying marriage with a man who has shut himself off from her, and from all those human connections that are the sinew of any vibrant relationship, because he has given up on himself. Dimitri has left home out of patriotism and idealism to live as someone he is not, with his only lifeline back to his true Self and true Ideals a pair of brutish, criminal fools who care about as little for those things as they do for his safety. All these people are alone. All these people desperately don’t want to be; want a real, reciprocal connection. All these people are reaching out in what variously pitiable ways they have available to them. The Shape of Water is a film that asks you to empathize. It is a film that asks you to reach back. It is a film that asks you to be human.
Which is its central, and powerful, irony, I think, because it’s also a film where the main protagonist, the most humane of them, is very likely not human in the biological sense, though this is only possibly confirmed at the very end. At the opening of the movie we see that Eliza has six “scratches” on her neck, three to each side, that look like nothing so much as gills. This lays down a marker that slowly, very slowly, pays out through the film, as Eliza’s growing connection with AM opens up her life and unlocks her true nature. The film is skillfully cagey about it though; Eliza is associated with water from the opening scenes, starts to show a preternatural affinity for water as the story proceeds(she knows exactly when the rainy season will start, and controls drops of rain on a bus window), but the nature of the film makes you question the reality of any of this. There’s a whimsicality to the film(Eliza’s dancing, the old music, the set design, Eliza’s daily routine montages) which makes the experience of watching it rather Amelie-esque. As a result, I found myself wondering if this was real magical realism, or just the imaginative, quirky, not-really-magical kind so common in movies from the early 00s. But she DOES call when the rains will arrive; she DOES fill a whole bathroom, implausibly, with water in an apartment with rickety walls, flyapart doors, and floors that you can see light through. At the same time(quite literally :p), AM displays truly magical abilities, establishing miracles are possible in this world, and in doing so suggesting yet another connection between Eliza and him. There’s one particular fantasy sequence where the movie suddenly becomes one of Eliza’s dancing musicals for a moment, a part I found kind of jarring and didn’t really like until writing about the film, just now, made sense of it :p :p This isn’t done in such a way that you feel wrong drawing your own conclusions before the end, but the reality of the magic and the unreality of Eliza’s fantasies are kept in such a (non-stressful)tension that it truly remains up in the air until the very end(and even the end is somewhat ambiguous).
Rather than being an interspecies romance, I saw this as a modern child-theft fairy-tale in reverse; a story NOT about the human-child taken by a Witch or the Fairies, but of the “changeling” left-behind(though in this film I’d say there was more of a “separated” or “taken” feel) and their recovery. The typical taken child is forced into a life of drudgery, is insulted and mistreated, denied emotional fulfillment and acknowledgement, finds a way to fulfill these needs with small, similarly oppressed allies, and finally finds her way home through her own pluck and wisdom, the immeasurable help of the seemingly powerless, and sometimes the love of a mysterious male hero of her own age, and from her own world. Eliza walks this same path, but rather than being taken back to the world of humanity, she is taken from it back to the waters she was found in. Eliza not only attains equal acknowledgement and romantic fulfillment in AM, she is “brought home” by him; quite literally healed of the injuries -emotional, social and physical- her forced sojourn among the humans caused her[1]. There are a thousand ways she could have come to be “lost” among the humans, but that she is “found” through her journey with AM and brought to a place and belonging she recognizes as “home” was, to me at least, unmistakable.
And it is equally unmistakable, given the central position of Companionship and Connection, why the villain is who he is, and why that person is considered the true “monster” by it. Strickland(as wonderfully named as he is played by Michael Shannon) is a man who has built his life around rejecting others, and any attempt at real connection they make. He is the classic “1950s Man”: obsessed with Male Will and emotionally dead by choice through its application; valuing only those relationships which can advance his career or ego; taking pleasure only in the practice and display of power, and the ability of that to humiliate others. Strickland is a man who can never truly be home because he rejects the idea of home, of belonging, of ever being so “weak” as to care for or need another person. And this emotional deadness -which the movie aptly shows is a choice, done by his own hand(there’s even a scene of him reading The Power of Positive Thinking which is not only a wonderful skewering of the character’s type and his era, but also of the US’s current president; Donald grew up in the church of the vile conman who wrote that book)- is just as aptly shown to be his REAL weakness and true undoing. He never suspects that Eliza and Zelda, mere “piss-wipers”, could have had anything to do with AM’s escape, instead chasing the fantasy of a Soviet Strike-Team; he focuses so much on his career and gratification, and is so willfully oblivious to his own body(scarfing his pain-pills just as greedily as his candy), that he doesn’t notice that two of his fingers -recently bitten off by AM and surgically reattached- are going gangrenous. The audience sitting in the theater watches them redden, turn purple, turn black, but he doesn’t take notice until almost the end of the film. There’s a particularly symbolic scene involving them where he tears the fingers off solely for effect, for no better purpose than to frighten and intimidate, driving home absolutely how self-destructive, and ultimately disdainful of self and life, this man and his inhumane philosophy are.
TSoW was also a rather religious movie, thematically, which surprised me since none of the reviews and reactions to it that I’ve read brought this up. The Bible is a thin but strong line within this film; the Old Testament textually, and the New more in theme and by reference. The story of Sampson and Delilah is brought up twice at important moments. The film closes on a reference(I’m pretty sure) to the Song of Songs(though maybe it’s Psalms). Strickland’s hatred of AM is driven by the conviction that humans are made in god’s image and AM is not, making him an “affront”(to what Strickland doesn’t say, but I would argue to himself, which is the only “god” Strickland cares about). The obvious idolatry of this, the transformation of the human form into the divine(and the philosophical relation of that thinking to Olympian philosophies, it should be said), is totally missed by Strickland, as it tends to be by Christians; the movie is openly disdainful of his position. AM can heal injury, rise from the dead, and(possibly, depending on how you read the ending) resurrect others; actions clearly analogous to Joshua’s miracles. Strickland sneeringly mentions that the humans who lived with AM “worshiped him as some kind of god”, as evidenced by their leaving such “divine sacrifices” as… food to eat, and plants and stones that he found beautiful near the lagoon they pulled him from. I found myself wondering if he felt beatified by being invited to a neighbor’s weekend grillup. At the end of the film, seeing AM rise from the dead, Strickland, in horror, says “you really ARE a God!” right before AM kills him, which ought to tell us how serious his earlier professions to Christianity truly were. AM never claims to be god, of course, or even A god, and neither do any of those who help him ever see anything other than a being who can think, understand, and feel just as well as they do. It’s a notable point: the only “Pious” people in the film -the only ones who make a point of publicizing their faith and god and identifying themselves through it- are all the bad guys; quibbling over profanity as they carry out the most profane actions. The protagonists never bring religion and god up, until Giles’ narration at the end.
They are, I suppose, content to merely live a message of love, and to journey to, and in, and with love, rather than shouting their profession from the street-corners.
OK: that’s a pretty religiojudgemental way to end this, especially for an atheist, but it was just too good a line for me to resist X| Hope this review was entertaining/edifying ^u^ ^u^
[1]Two other potentially constructive analogies/critical avenues: 1)Tarzan. Eliza is stranded in Civilization by accident as a baby, grows within that strange world, mastering its ways as best her unsuited abilities allow her, then “saved” from it, and brought back to the “wild” of the Sea by one of her kind also brought there by his own tragedy. 2) The Little Mermaid. Eliza grows up, voiceless on land, denied love; one day she finds a Prince from the Sea on Land, taken there against his will; she decides to befriend him, and he returns her acknowledgement; she discovers a plot against his life and, out of friendship, saves him; a romance blossoms from this; in the end, she is “redeemed” and healed, body and soul, when he returns her to the ocean where she belongs.
