EveryBestPicture.com revisits this Oscar Best Picture winner
First off, I should come clean and declare my undying love for almost everything that Guillermo del Toro, the director, does. I also hold a belief that Sally Hawkins can do no wrong. Would it help if I hereby half-heartedly swear that I will not allow this bias to affect this piece?
The Shape of Water is set in an artificial early 1960s which has been so well constructed that initially the experience is reminiscent of watching Edward Scissorhands, in which there was a similar use of americana. But here no one is pretending they live in a perfect world, in fact quite the opposite: every character is unhappy with their existence and would like change. The homes are in need of repairs, cluttered and dark. With few exceptions, exteriors are always a grey or night-time cityscape. The use of swearing in a setting so often used to imply wholesomeness is unsurprisingly jarring, and rams home that this is no idyll. Opening in an underwater dream sequence and never dropping a sometimes overbearing blue, green and turquoise theme, this undersea effect is tied together very early on and never quite leaves you. Bizarrely, I only recently pulled a horrific, mismatched, avocado bathroom suite from the same period out of my home- the colours and preponderance of tiles in every scene kept taking me back to that experience. Odd, but it inadvertently highlighted to me just how many rooms were tiled in this film... a nod, no doubt, to how each of the two main characters worlds reflected one another. This is made express a little later in a speech from Elisa on how the river god sees her for who she is, not what she is. So far so good. A beautifully constructed backdrop, finely crafted to highlight subplot and themes that are hinted at early and later exposed fully. Characters from minorities lead (which we have all been clamouring for) whose ethnicity / minority status is incidental rather than integral to their reason for being in the film. An immersive (pun intended) overall experience. So why do I come away from this film feeling hugely let down? The Shape of Water was nominated for the best screenplay Oscar, but this stamp of approval baffles me. The plot was fairly standard- Mute cleaner in military facility meets mistreated prisoner (who happens to be an amazonian river god), they fall in love, she finds out that the malevolent authorities want to vivisect him in order to better understand his anatomy, she helps him escape with the help of a work colleague and her neighbour. Nothing more complex than that. Fine. There are supernova sized holes in this reality which make it difficult to follow the logic of the film. The problem is not that fantastical things are happening in a fantasy film: the problem is that in order for a fantasy film to work you have to believe in the world created. Whether sci-fi, superhero or other there has to be an explanation for the rules that it has itself established to be broken. Also, you have to be able to relate to a character's decisions and reactions. Elisa reveals to Zelda that she is having sex with the creature they freed the night before with a smirk and a glance. How Zelda interpreted that glance as "I had sex with the fish man" I don't know. But, they had to keep the plot moving and so that's the way the scene played out. In such a meticulously constructed reality (visually) we are confronted with such leaps of logic in the story that our connection with the characters is loosened, and long before the end I no longer cared to see how they reached their clearly pre-ordained fate. No amount of sense would stop it getting there. The purpose of this blog is largely to revisit older movies and ask 'how does this film look to a contemporary audience?'. For instance is it politically or socially justifiable to have stereotypes if a 1930's western is REALLY good, despite them? Is this even possible? Sadly, and perhaps surprisingly, the 2018 addition to the list of best picture winners has some glaring issues which cannot be ignored: The minority characters are a male gay artist (played by a straight white male) and a hispanic cleaner (played by a white English woman). This troubles me. Why did the cleaner have to be hispanic? If she had to be hispanic, why choose a white English woman to play her? There was a huge fuss recently about the new Hellboy film in which a white actor (Ed Skrein) turned down a key role when he was alerted to the original comic material which depicted his character as an asian dude. He was naturally commended for doing so. How is Sally Hawkins playing Elisa Esposito any different? This, and having the stereotypes of a hispanic and African-American cleaners reinforcing the idea that this is where 'these people' belong on the big screen was uncomfortable. Del Toro co-wrote the script for the film, why not just either change her background or cast a hispanic actress? Really, the fundamental flaws lie in the writing of the characters. When it is written into the script that the level of reaction from a jaded cleaner on hearing that her best mate is having interspecies sex with a hitherto unknown humanoid species is "Oh, how exactly did that happen? Did he have a wiener?", and the delivery is on a par with the reaction someone might give on hearing their tinder date likes messy food play, there is something seriously wrong. I can't relate. If it were set in a galaxy far far away it would make sense. But we were told this was earth, nineteen sixty something... Some speak of how this film has beautifully interwoven references to previous films while I spoke of a message laden aesthetic created for a glutton of subtext, but in the end I struggled to get past the unrealistic responses to situations the characters found themselves in just to keep the plot moving towards its inevitable conclusion. Motivations and actions must be justifiable and here they were not. I could not help feeling that if they had paid as much attention to ensuring the characters actions made sense as they did to the films aesthetic then we would have had another masterpiece. |
Previous ReviewsComing soon:Archives
February 2019
Categories
All
AuthorPablo Griffiths is a man with a passion for many things. He has recently taken an interest in writing about film, and himself in the third person. |