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.
The Tree of Life: written and directed by Terrence Malick; starring Brad Pitt (Mr. O'Brien), Jessica Chastain (Mrs. O'Brien), Sean Penn (Jack O'Brien), and Hunter McCracken (Young Jack) (2011): Seeing Terrence Malick's Oscar-nominated film in a theatre might have killed me -- or at least put me to sleep. But watched in four installments over about two weeks, it's a riveting meditation on life, death, and theodicy (aka The Problem of Evil). As with the Coen Brothers' jauntier but no less problematic A Serious Man, The Tree of Life takes many of its cues from the Book of Job, the section of the Bible most often discussed when discussion turns to the question of why an all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful God allows evil to exist in the world. The Book of Job also features the famous bar bet between Satan and God over Job's faith, along with a Satan who can appear to many skeptics as God's employee rather than God's adversary. It's the Old Testament, Jake.
In The Tree of Life, adult Sean Penn in the here-and-now muses on his childhood and the pointed difference between his loving mother and his demanding, somewhat tortured father during the 1950's and early 1960's. The movie isn't so much episodic as it is musical (and music, classical music, is a huge component of this film), as themes and variations and lietmotifs play out both visually and on the soundtrack.
It's a magnificent, tough movie, though much softer than Yahweh's reply to Job when Job cries out for an explanation (God sez "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?", a Divine reply which Stephen King once paraphrased as, "Shut up, fuckface, and take what I give you."
Malick, ambitious and visually oriented, actually shows us God's reply rather than simply restating it, in a lengthy sequence that races through the beginnings of the universe all the way up to the development of life on Earth and beyond. This sequence would be splendid on a big screen. Really, this sequence would make a great 'Introduction to Scientific Cosmology' movie. And later on, we see the Earth end, burned to death by the dying, expanding sun. It's a hell of a movie, and startlingly humane. Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain -- as the mother and father -- do outstanding work, as does the child actor playing Sean Penn's character. Highly recommended.
