(Sally
Hawkins)
Fans of Pan’s Labyrinth will love
writer-director Guillermo del Toro’s latest fantasy and Oscar favourite. (Review
by Patrick Compton - 9/10)
This is a work of art that is brimming with
cultural references, including monster movies, old musicals and fairy tales. It
is also a deeply human fantasy about love and the sense of wonder and joy that
accompanies its discovery.
My own cultural reference is the writer
Russell Hoban, specifically his novel Turtle
Diary in which two lonely, embittered strangers keep on meeting at the
London Zoo aquarium and eventually plot to liberate the captured sea turtles
they become obsessed with. I believe that Hoban, were he alive today, would
have loved this movie.
At one point, one of his characters, William
G, glumly pronounces on life: “Sometimes,” he says, “I think that this whole
thing, this whole business of a world that keeps waking itself up and bothering
to go on every day, is necessary only as a manifestation of the intolerable.
The intolerable is like H.G. Wells's invisible man, it has to put on clothes in
order to be seen. So it dresses itself up in a world. Possibly it looks in a
mirror but my imagination doesn't go that far.”
This is a movie which echoes William G’s
concerns, but just as his plan to free the turtles liberates him from his
misery, so the film enables a lonely cleaner to find love of the most
extraordinary kind.
The cleaner, played by the wonderful Sally
Hawkins whose magnetic, overwhelming presence holds this film together, is a
mute who works at a scientific facility in Baltimore during the height of the
Cold War (circa 1960). She lives alone, but enjoys the friendship of a fellow
cleaner, Zelda (Octavia Spencer), and her next-door neighbour, a gentle
bachelor, Giles (Richard Jenkins), who is an unsuccessful illustrator with an
apartment full of cats and a love for musicals which he watches relentlessly on
his TV.
One day, a strange thing happens at the
lab: a monster found in a South American river – note the 1954 movie Creature from the Black Lagoon – is
brought in. The creature has arms and legs, but no tail, a dark leathery skin
and what may be gills around his neck. It can breathe underwater and, less
happily, in air. Eliza becomes absorbed, and then besotted, bringing him boiled
eggs to eat and Glenn Miller to listen to. The fact that she cannot talk
somehow makes her magical communication with the creature all the more profound
and realistic.
But then the picture darkens. The creature,
agonised by his ill-treatment, bites off the fingers of the facility’s head of
security, the monstrous Strickland (Michael Shannon) and he is duly constrained
by an iron collar and chain. The American military plan to use the creature as
a weapon in the space race, which has heated up, and there’s a Cold War subplot
which involves a band of Russians and an initially sympathetic scientist who
has been “turned”.
How to understand this film? I’m not sure
it’s possible on one viewing. And I haven't even talked about the
black-and-white photography and the fascinating set design.
Del Torro has created a multi-genre movie –
a monster-musical-jailbreak-spy-romance – that is all his own. Somehow, though,
the director has turned what could have been a chaotic mess into a beautiful
confluence of all the streams that run into this aquatic creation, largely due,
I suspect, to Sally Hawkins’s extraordinary all-encompassing performance.
What is clear, however, is that Del Toro
has recognised the power of fantasy in all our lives, and how powerful a force
it is. I acknowledge that some will be left cold by this movie, but this review
is for those who quietly celebrate it as gold dust.
The
Shape of Water opened at Gateway Mall on January
19. – Patrick Compton
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