DIRECTOR:
Guillermo del Toro LEAD CAST: Sally Hawkins, Octavia Spencer, Richard
Jenkins, Michael Shannon, Michael Stuhlbarg, Doug Jones SCREENWRITERS: Guillermo del Toro, Vanessa
Taylor PRODUCERS: J. Miles Dale, Guillermo del Toro EDITOR: Sidney
Wolinsky MUSICAL DIRECTOR: Alexander Desplat GENRE: Fantasy, Drama
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Dan Laustsen DISTRIBUTOR: Fox Searchlight Pictures
LOCATION: Ontario, Canada RUNNING TIME: 123 minutes
Technical assessment: 4.5
Moral assessment: 3
CINEMA rating: V14
MTRCB rating: R-13
Imagine
tale as old as time Beauty and the Beast. Only that the beauty, Elisa
Esposito (Sally Hawkins), is mute and is not stunningly beautiful. The fish
monster (Doug Jones) never transforms into a handsome prince. The setting is the
60s with America and Russia in a race for global domination. Colonel Richard
Strickland (Michael Shannon) captures the amphibious creature, calls it the
Asset, and wants him cut open for research. Elisa is a cleaner in this secret
government research facility, and in the most lyrical and romantic way,
connects with the Asset, through music and eggs, because though mute, she is
not deaf, and her boiled eggs become the monster’s favorite dish. She rescues
the Asset with the help of coworker Zelda (Octavia Spencer), next-door neighbor
Giles (Richard Jenkins), and a surprising ally Dr Hoffstetler (Michael
Stuhlbard) who is actually a Soviet spy.
The Shape of
Water is
a love story with political undertones. Director Guillermo del Toro of the
much-loved Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) assembles an alliance of all
that the bigotry in Colonel Strickland hates: Elisa is mute, Zelda is black,
Giles is gay, and Hoffstetler is a migrant. They’re all marginalized and
lonely, and they set free another lonely creature, the captive monster. Del
Toro, who also made the screenplay together with Game of Thrones writer
Vanessa Taylor, says he made the story simple so he could make the characters
complex. Hawkins’ Elisa benefits the most from this approach. Her face speaks a
range of emotions: disgust, rage, tenderness, amusement. She loves, she cannot
speak, and for director del Toro who wins a Golden Globe for this film, that’s
what love means: love renders us speechless. If the theme and acting don’t
mesmerize you, the visuals will. Can anything be more graceful than water, or
people in water, and the music (another Golden Globe winner) that flows
smoothly with every motion and emotion in the story. We note that The Shape of Water takes time to
digest. In the cinema, it’s best appreciated for its visuals and acting. It has
adult content, with nudity, some gore, and cusswords, as called for in the
story. It’s on hindsight that the message dawns on you, sticks to you, and you
are magnetized.
The
story happens in the turbulent 60s, when US President Kennedy is assassinated,
Martin Luther King leads the civil rights movement, there’s the Vietnam War,
and anyone who dissents is branded a communist. We don’t see these in the film.
Instead, we hear the voiceless Elisa and we see the marginalized Zelda, Giles,
and Hoffstetler saving the strange creature from death by vivisection. The film
is a political commentary with so much hope. Indeed, the film’s message of
social justice is a fulcrum to the Church’s uncompromising respect for life and
its condemnation of summary killings. Cardinal Tagle in his homily during the
mass in “Walk for Life” in Manila on February 24 said that life, however ugly
it may seem (like the Asset or disabled like Elisa), is a gift from God. We all
must protect that gift from the Colonel Stricklands of this world who seek to
extinguish life. It’s been three years since Pope Francis came to the
Philippines. Mercy and Compassion for the poor in the periphery, which
was the theme of that Papal Visit, rings ever loudly today. The
Shape of Water echoes that theme.
