The Shape of Water (2017): written by Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor; directed by Guillermo del Toro; starring Sally Hawkins (Elisa), Michael Shannon (Strickland), Richard Jenkins (Giles), Octavia Spencer (Zelda), Michael Stuhlbarg (Hoffstetler), David Hewlett (Fleming), Nigel Bennett (Russkie), and Doug Jones (Creature from the Black Lagoon):
Guillermo del Toro is in a groove here he hasn't been in since Pan's Labyrinth, combining genres and stirring up emotional attachment in service to a gloriously melodramatic story handled with delicacy and sold through terrific performances by the entire cast.
It probably helps to have seen The Creature From the Black Lagoon and Revenge of the Creature. But it's not necessary. The film hits some surprising notes as it plays with a comment made in del Toro's last movie that was metafictionally about that movie -- in Crimson Peak, we're told that this is not a ghost story but rather a story with a ghost in it. Similarly, The Shape of Water is not a monster movie but rather a movie with a monster in it. Who the monster really is... well, that's part of the story too.
Sally Hawkins is wonderful as the protagonist, mute because of an old throat injury, feeling excluded by the world of Baltimore 1962 except for her best friends Richard Jenkins and Octavia Spencer. Hawkins' Elisa is a night-shift cleaning woman at a US military experimental facility, as is Spencer's character. Jenkins is Elisa's room-mate and confidante, a gay man trapped in a very ungay world and a painter whose career has stalled out due to alcoholism and changing tastes.
Then along comes Jones, Doug Jones, the go-to actor for soulful monsters and super freaks, this time out playing an amphibious biped captured in the Amazon and much, much more than he appears to be. Jones is terrific, too. Michael Stuhlbarg is also excellent as a scientist with his own secret agenda. Michael Shannon is scary and warped as the sadistic neat freak charged by the military with learning the Creature's secrets.
It all runs beautifully and, unusually for del Toro, without any stretches in which one longs for an editor to curb del Toro's tendency to extending a movie 10-15 minutes beyond its optimum length. You've seen elements of this story in everything from Beauty and the Beast to del Toro's Hellboy movies. It's the style and the little bits and the performances that make this one special in and of itself. Highly recommended.
Nocturnal Animals (2016): adapted by Tom Ford from the novel by Austin Wright; directed by Tom Ford; starring Amy Adams (Susan Morrow), Jake Gyllenhaal (Edward Sheffield/ Tony Hastings), Michael Shannon (Bobby Andes), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Ray Marcus), and Armie Hammer (Hutton Morrow): Fashion designer Tom Ford previously directed the Colin-Firth-starring A Single Man several years ago. That film prepares one in absolutely no way for the weird magnificence that is Nocturnal Animals.
In the past, we watch the characters played by Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal meet, get married, and fall apart. In the present, Amy Adams works as one of the directors of a very high-end, pretentious Manhattan art gallery. And in the novel that Jake Gyllenhaal sends Adams, a man's family is abducted by hooting rednecks along a lonely stretch of desert highway. Gyllenhaal also plays the protagonist in scenes from that novel as imagined by Adams while she reads it.
Production design and cinematography separate the three strands of the narrative, beautifully (or grungily) dividing the dirty world of the novel from the naturalistic scenes from the past and the high-contrast colours of the artificial present. Adams and her cohorts at the gallery wear often hilarious outfits. A meeting of the gallery's directors, shot against stark white backgrounds, looks like what might have happened had Stanley Kubrick shot a talking-head ad for Chanel in the late 1980's.
Gyllenhaal and Adams are terrific, as is Michael Shannon as the vengeful cop of the novel. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is unrecognizable, and terrific, as the monstrous leader of the murderous thugs. He's got a scene on a toilet that's... startling. So, too, the opening few minutes of the movie, which depict a very... startling gallery installation.
This is an accomplished, witty, horrifying movie. I hope Ford doesn't wait 8 more years before doing another. He's already a better director than the vast majority of directors out there with many more films on their CVs. Highly recommended.
