Del
Toro, Guillermo (Dir.), “The Shape of Water”, Bull Productions/Double Dare You/Fox Searchlight, 2017.
Here’s
a question: say you’re on the production team of Universal’s “Dark Universe”
project, wrestling with the critical non-acclaim of its first turkey – the Tom
Cruise-led ‘un-make’ of “The Mummy” –
when an Oscar-winning independent director films a re-boot of “Creature From The Black Lagoon” that’s
far better than anything your team could come up with and which is completely
outside of your ambit – what do you do? Well, since Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” is already on-track
for Academy Awards success, I guess all you can reasonably do is wring your hands, quietly shelve the whole “Dark
Universe” mess and hope that no-one remembers what you were up to.
Del
Toro has been a little off track of late. “Crimson
Peak” – while visually stunning – was a disorganised mess, and the TV
series “The Strain” was more than a little patchy. Even “Pacific Rim” had
some troubles. I put a lot of this down to the frustrations of being involved
with the whole “Hobbit” fiasco, which
must have been distracting at best. Now, however, it’s clear that time away
from these lesser vehicles has given del Toro a chance to re-set and to focus
on what he does best.
There
are a lot of parallels between this film and “Pan’s Labyrinth” – an ingénue
encountering fantastic elements in the face of a repressive regime. In this
story, a mute cleaner at a Top Secret research facility in the 1960s discovers
a ‘fish man’ being studied there and decides to release it before it is killed
and anatomised. This contest of pure and determined innocence against dark and
vested forces is a hallmark of del Toro’s best films, notably “Cronos” and “Pan’s Labyrinth”. The setting allows for much playfulness in terms
of design and the wonderful soundtrack, but it isn’t a random or whimsical
choice: the 60s was a period of gloss and glamour, but it was also a time of conformity
and repression where socially unacceptable elements were swept violently
beneath a Hugo Gernsback-styled veneer. In this tale, the baddies are the ones
with slick hair-dos, shiny cars and magazine-curated homes and families. In
this sense, del Toro is commenting quite a bit about the world of today.
Many
of the traditional del Toro touches appear throughout this film. Shoes – and shoebrushes
– are a feature, as are cats; there is a signature colour throughout (green
this time); and a distressing hand injury takes centre stage (hearkening back
to “Pan’s Labyrinth” once more). And
the ubiquitous Doug Jones is here as well. In fact, knowing that he was going
to be playing the creature in this film, I had a few qualms going in:
Many
actors, over time, develop a unique ‘tool-kit’ of tics and flourishes that
cover most situations in which they find themselves. For this reason, I can’t
watch Meryl Streep anymore. In the course of her career, she seems to have become
a caricature of herself on screen, where once, in her earliest film
appearances, she was daring and kinetic. Robert de Niro also has this effect on
me. Doug Jones, no matter how many layers of latex he’s covered with, is almost
always recognisable. I was worried that this role would be another Abe Sapien
re-hash from “Hell-Boy”, but I was
more than pleasantly surprised. As “the Asset” in this movie, he plays it
low-key, abandoning all of the quirky C3-PO head jerks and shoulder twitches,
and focuses not only on portraying his character, but also the
interconnectedness of the two lovers at the heart of the story. I was very
impressed.
But
it’s not just the main characters who get all of the attention. Like most of
del Toro’s films, each character on screen gets moments to shine, no matter how
small their contribution. Here, the second-string and background characters are
as luminous as the leads. The bitchy queue-jumper hating Yolanda is great; the
lugubrious theatre owner downstairs who thinks ‘Mardi Gras’ is spelt ‘Mardi Grass’;
the incompetent Russian spy ‘nyetwork’: they all serve the story brilliantly.
It’s part of what makes a del Toro film a rich and varied tapestry.
If
I have a beef with this film at all, it’s to do with the language. Here, I’m
talking about the four-letter word kind of language, rather than the prevailing
idiom. There are some scenes here, of such finely-constructed beauty, that get
trampled by an overuse of the F-word, and also some scenes of menace and threat
that lose energy by being verbalised with the same excess. They’re called “F-bombs”
for a reason – they’re loud, distracting and destructive. Less is more.
Before
I conclude, I have to take a moment to mention the soundtrack. There are few
films that I go to where the music is not just some background orchestral thing
that underscores the action. “The
Illusionist”, the soundtrack of which was written by Philip Glass, almost
overtook the visuals in that film – it was the first movie, I think, where I
shut my eyes and listened rather than
watched. This film was similar. The soundtrack is circuitous and almost tangential,
coming out of various 60s pastiche moments and doing its job wonderfully as
well as subtly. It’s noticeable but not demanding of your attention; it serves
the movie while being utterly unique, rich and captivating.
If
you’ve never seen “Creature From The
Black Lagoon”, you should really try to before seeing this film. Of the
Universal monsters series, it’s one of my favourites simply because the visuals
– especially the underwater sequences – strive to rise above the B-movie
cheesiness of the concept and attain something greater. I think that is what has
inspired del Toro here – the notion that a piece of genre storytelling can talk
to wider and higher concepts than its ostensible basis would intimate. Watch both of these films before the "Dark Universe" puts its grubby mitts all over the concept - you can't go wrong.
Four-and-a-half
Tentacled Horrors from me.
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