Guillermo del Toro’s Take On Gill-Man In Love

Now playing at more multiplexes than art houses in my area:

THE SHAPE OF WATER

(Dir. Guillermo del Toro, 2017)

When Guillermo del Toro turned down the chance to remake (or reboot) the CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON for Universal’s “Dark Universe” series he definitely made the right decision.

And that’s not just because the pending franchise has gotten off to a very shaky start with last summer’s THE MUMMY flop, and is in danger of being scrapped altogether, but because there’s no way he would’ve been able to build upon the concept to make such a beautifully bizarre love story thriller as THE SHAPE OF WATER under a big studio banner.

Del Toro, co-writing with Vanessa Taylor, infringes on no copyrights here, as the amphibian man here is never referred to as “Gill-man,” but it uses the basics as obvious jumping off points for the premise of “what if the creature got the girl?”

Set in 1962 Baltimore, the film is told from the point of view of Sally Hawkins as Elisa, a mute cleaning lady who works the night shift at a secret government laboratory. We get a look into Elisa’s lonely world up front as we see her eat pie with her neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), a depressed, closeted artist who loves watching old musicals on TV. Elisa and Giles live in rundown apartments above a movie palace theater, so del Toro works in his love for cinema there too.

At Elisa’s work, where she converses in sign language with her co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer, again playing the help), she learns that a aquatic creature is being held in a huge metal water tank at the facility, and that it’s being tortured by Colonel Richard Strickland (a deliciously creepy Michael Shannon) who captured it in South America.

Elisa makes friends with the amphibian man (played by actor / contortionist Doug Jones) by feeding it hard boiled eggs, and teaching him how to sign, and a romance forms. When she finds out that they’re going to dissect him, over protest by scientist Robert Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg), she plots to help him escape.

The escape sequence, among other elements, gave me flashbacks to Ron Howard’s 1984 rom com SPLASH, which had Tom Hanks falling for Daryl Hannah as a mermaid who he rescues from a secret lab, but that did nothing to hinder the spell this film so sweetly casts.

Back at Elisa’s apartment where the fish guy mostly stays in a bathtub filled with salt and some chemicals that Hoffstetler gave her, they consummate their relationship. While the movie contains much grotesque imagery concerning such things as Strickland’s bitten off fingers, and a cat being eaten, the love scenes are as tasteful and touching as scenes between amphibians and humans can possibly be.

You just may need to suspend disbelief considering such premises like that by putting towels under the door you can fill the bathroom of a crumbling apartment completely to the ceiling with water, but if you can do that you’re in for some visual treats courtesy of cinematographer Dan Laustsen.

Without speaking, Hawkins puts in a wonderfully communicative performance that shows fluid chemistry with Jones’ creature, and has a great moment standing up to Shannon’s evil Strickland.

She is a large part of what makes the small, dark off-kilter fantasy THE SHAPE OF WATER del Toro’s most emotionally affecting work yet.

Maybe this means that more established filmmakers should turn down franchise work to go off on their own to make movies inspired by concepts they wouldn’t be allowed to do in those big studio entries. I mean, it sure worked for del Toro.

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HIDDEN FIGURES: A Cornball Crowd Pleaser That Is Inspirationally On Point

Now playing everywhere:


HIDDEN FIGURES (Dir. Theodore Melfi, 2016)

There are times in this film, currently the #1 movie at the box office (take that, ROGUE ONE!), that young moviegoers may feel like the filmmakers are comically stretching reality way too thin to make a point.

Like in the scenes that show mathematician Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) having to walk, and sometimes run, a half mile across the campus of Virginia’s Langley Research Center, to the “colored” ladies room several times a day during her long shifts.

But, as folks who know history will attest, this was the era of “separate but equal” segregation, and their framing of Ms. Johnson’s predicament is apt as it symbolizes how rough it was for many African Americans in the workplace.

There are other times when it seems that director/writer Theodore Melfi’s (ST. VINCENT) movie takes some liberties with some major moments as when astronaut John Glenn (Glenn Powell, portrayed as much as a dreamboat as possible) tells the team of engineers that he’ll be “good to go” on the launch of the rocket that officially put a man in space for the first time if they “get the girl to check the numbers” – referring to the aforementioned Ms. Johnson.

But according to transcripts of the event, that actually happened, and this film portrays it perfectly. There’s just no way around that being a feel-good, empowering moment in which we see how important the contributions of black women like Johnson, and her colleagues - Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) – were to NASA, back when the space program mattered the most.

That would be the ‘60s, when the U.S. was in a space race with Russia to being the first to put a man on the moon. The story focuses most on Henson’s Johnson as she adjusts to being assigned to the Space Task Group headed by group director Al Harrison (Kevin Costner). Costner’s Harrison is a stern by-the-book boss who doesn’t appears to have a racist bone in his body, but Johnson’s co-workers, especially NASA engineer Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons) all give her disgusted looks (it should be noted that Stafford didn’t exist; he’s an amalgam).

Things get worse when Johnson finds that her all-white office mates have labeled a small empty coffee pot “colored” for her.

Henson’s Johnson also gets a love interest in the form of Mahershala Ali, who’s really been making a name for himself lately in such worthy projects as Luke Cage and MOONLIGHT. Here Ali, as a smooth-talking military man, gets to join the movie’s male contingent in having to learn that the times are indeed a-changin,’ and they should never underestimate any woman’s abilities.

Meanwhile, Spencer’s overworked Vaughan, told repeatedly by her boss Vivian Mitchell (Kristen Dunst) that she won’t be getting a promotion, learns the programming language needed to program the new IBM computer which leads to her being made NASA’s first black supervisor.

The third lead, Mary Jackson as played by musician/model Monáe in her first starring role in a major motion picture, may not get the lion’s share of screen-time, but makes the sassy best of her storyline involving sweet talking a judge into letting her take classes at an all-white school so that she can get a degree in Engineering and become NASA’s first black female engineer.

Many critics have called HIDDEN FIGURES: “THE HELP meets THE RIGHT STUFF,” and, yeah, that’s valid. There is certainly a lot of cheesy, made-for-TV-style packaging surrounding this unapologetically inspirational history lesson, but at no times does that diminish the film’s earnest tone and heartfelt spirit.

Henson, best known as Cookie Lyon on the Fox series Empire, owns her role as the central protagonist as she holds her own with Costner, who’s right at home here as he’s been in a bunch of movies set during this era, and Parsons, whose character is like a racist Sheldon Cooper without any snarky one-liners.

Spencer gets the film’s maybe funniest and most on point moment in a bathroom scene where has a supremely cutting comeback to Dunst as her superior. I won’t spoil it, but will say it really riled up the audience at the advance screening I attended.

It’s a big cornball crowd-pleaser for sure, but HIDDEN FIGURES earns its place as a piece of primo entertainment with an important message. That being, if, as a people, we can overcome assholish, bigoted oppression, we can reach the stars.

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