The Shape of Water (2017)

THE SHAPE OF WATER  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Guillermo del Toro
    Sally Hawkins, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer,
    Michael Shannon, Michael Stuhlbarg, Doug Jones
This is where "The Creature From the Black Lagoon" meets "Beauty and the Beast". Or maybe "Cinderella and the Beast" would be more like it. Sally Hawkins plays Elisa Esposito, the Cinderella character, a mute janitor working in some sort of top-secret government research facility. Doug Jones plays the Beast, an amphibious, humanoid creature with fins and scales, caught and brought back from the Amazon and referred to by his captors as "the asset." The space race is on and the Soviets are interested in the creature, too. Meanwhile, the janitor develops an attachment to the creature, thanks to music, an open heart and a few dozen hard-boiled eggs. The story's set in the era of "Mr. Ed" and "Dobie Gillis", and the set design has the kind of decaying, steampunk look about it that you get in the films of Jeunet and Caro. It's not hard to know who to root for or against. Michael Shannon's security nazi, a pill-popping psycho armed with a surly demeanor and a cattle prod, couldn't be much more one-dimensional. But at its core, it's a fairy-tale love story, a sweet, wistful fantasy romance, and if Hawkins and Jones don't make you believe their unlikely coupling, they'll at least make you wish you could. It's also, at least incidentally, a movie lover's celebration of film. Elisa's apartment is directly above a cinema, where "The Story of Ruth" is playing on a double bill with Pat Boone in "Mardi Gras". And if you look closely, you can see film canisters lining the hallway outside her door. The television in the apartment across the hall is constantly tuned to 1940s musicals, and in what amounts to a fantasy within a fantasy, Elisa and the creature dance their way through their own black-and-white production number, a sequence that's transporting, partly because it's a rapturous piece of filmmaking, and partly because it's such a breathtaking risk. A final note (and this won't mean much unless you see the movie): Go ahead and try the hard-boiled eggs. Just steer clear of the key-lime pie.