The Shape of Water review

Mexican born filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro is fascinated by the idea that people are often drawn to what initially scares them, usually only because they fundamentally misunderstand themselves and the greater context of their own fears. As such, his films--both indie darlings like “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Devil’s Backbone,” as well as studio blockbusters like “Pacific Rim” and “Hellboy"--are chock full of interesting and intricately designed monsters. As a visual artist and a storyteller Del Toro loves his monsters and for him, they always represent a complex emotional truth about the nature of humanity. With his latest film, “The Shape of Water,” the balance between his directorial compassion and his genre obsessions is blended delicately into a contemporary “Beauty and Beast” style narrative, with a central focus on diversity, tolerance, and equality.

The story is set in the cold-war 1960s at the height of the red scare. Sally Hawkins plays Elisa Esposito, a mute janitor who cleans a secret government science compound. Things get interesting when an amphibious humanoid merman is captured from his underwater home in South America and brought into the facility to be studied. Some of the scientists wish to keep him alive to understand his capability to learn, and others, like the stone-faced, military-minded Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), plan to dissect the creature to develop new science to use against their Russian enemies. Hawkins secret friendship and eventual romance with the amphibious man leads to a rescue effort that involves co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer), the sympathetic Dr. Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg), and her graphic designer neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins).

Given the time period this movie is set and the basic structure of the plot, it would have been easy to allow a story of this kind of coast of genre expectations alone. What makes the film stand out from being yet another high-concept take on “E.T” or “Free Willy” is Del Toro’s willingness to dig deep into a psychology of his characters and their worldview. The film's theme of what it is to be ostracized as a minority dominates and naturalizes the fantasy.  Hawkins’ character is mute, Spencer is black, and they both work as women in a government-industry dominated by white men. Likewise, Jenkins plays a closeted gay man, and it’s the unified ‘other-ness’ of this grouping of minorities that is manifested through the struggle of this abused and imprisoned merman. As we see the civil rights struggle in the background of this story, it becomes all the more evident that the creature's rescue becomes their rescue. 

The central love story between Elisa and this mysterious being, played with wonderful physicality by Doug Jones, takes risks and goes beyond the usual slow build to acceptance and eventual affection. Hawkins’ wordless performance strips away the possibility for coyness or coded language when it comes to all of her emotions and as the story progresses their love is expressed both emotionally and physically. This, along with Guillermo’s biting sense of humor, and the occasional jolts of visceral violence may alienate some audience members, but even if this is too weird for you to swallow, it’s difficult to deny the movie’s bold commitment to its premise.

Everyone already knows that Del Toro is Hollywood's current king of creature design and art direction. “The Shape of Water” is no exception. However, by putting his focus on one central creature, instead of a smorgasbord of weird looking monsters we are usually treated to in one of his previous films, he is able to dig deeper into the wider human world his characters inhabit. The 60s sets are well lit and creatively designed and the “Creature From The Black Lagoon” inspired look of Jones’ costume is textured and utterly believable, but it's Del Toro’s capacity to empathize with these characters and ground this world into an emotional reality that elevates this movie beyond its fairytale tropes and trappings.

Grade: A

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2017

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Nocturnal Animals review

With his second feature “Nocturnal Animals, fashion designer Tom Ford tackles the very things that inspires great art and how the different people in our lives leave impressions that help form our creative responses. This is a lofty theme and with his adaptation of Austin Wright’s novel “Tony and Susan” Ford compares and contrasts two different genres and two different styles of visual filmmaking to comment on the formation the art and storytelling itself.

Amy Adams plays Susan Marrow, an icy and disconnected art curator who’s married to a traveling trophy husband named Hutton (Armie Hammer).  While Hutton is away on a clumsily obvious secret trip with his mistress, Susan receives a manuscript for a novel written by her ex-husband Tony Hastings (Jake Gyllenhaal). The book comes with a note about how the how the story was inspired by their turbulent history. The film then visualizes the contents of Tony’s book, in where Gyllenhaal also plays the main character of Tony’s Novel Edward Scheffeild. Edward is an easily frightened man who loses his wife and daughter to a gang of drunk rednecks after being forced off a West-Texas road after a car chase in the middle of the night. He seeks to punish these men with a rogue desert detective named Bobby Andels (Michael Shannon), a man of few words who no longer fears losing his job or his life to do the right thing.

 The film opens on an audience-testing slow-motion sequence where morbidly obese elderly women are shown dancing seductively to the movie’s melodramatic stringed score. This title sequence lingers on close-ups of sagging body parts before revealing these women are part of art exhibition curated by Adam’s dispossessed character. The mix between the grotesque the gorgeous permeates Ford’s every narrative and aesthetic choice here. The framing device about Susan rediscovering her young and complicated passion with the struggling writer of her post-college years is couched in the story to represent the ‘real-world.’ Yet the painfully stilted dialogue, the intentionally cold and bloodless performances within these scenes and the careful framing of Ford’s modern-art Los Angeles set-design presents a less relatable world than what is represented in the scenes depicting Tony’s pulpy and hyper-violent western/thriller manuscript.

With this strange juxtaposition, Ford tries to make the argument that success and wealth stifles creative expression by cutting the artists away from humanity, and in doing so, he proves his own point by constructing a film that is stifled by battling creative agendas. The two stories are supposed to be symbiotic and analogous but the movie lacks the necessary connective tissue to develop either story past their highly-stylized surfaces. Though pulpy and overly-treaded genre territory, the Coen Brothers-esq manuscript segments are far more engaging and impactful than the sterile soap-opera framing plot, which resembles the high-art sleaze of the 60s and 70s Italian filmmakers, as filtered through the steely cynicism of “Dead Ringers” era David Cronenberg. The two styles constantly trip over each other as the film cuts between them and their intended symbolic relationship reveals a disappointingly shallow connection.

“Nocturnal Animals” is filled with a lot of style and the structure of the story attacks character-motivations and themes in a challenging and indirect way. This is a laudable storytelling approach, but it fails to meet those challenges in a way that doesn’t seem overly self-conscious and ill-considered by the director. Gyllenhaal gives two great performances and Michael Shannon does what he’s made a career of doing and gives the best performance in a problematic movie.  Adams is almost denied an emotional reality so that she can act as a vessel by which the movie’s (unintentional?) misogyny is accounted for.  What makes the film all the more frustrating is that its ambitions are the cause of its own failure.

Grade: C

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2016

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Midnight Special review

Jeff Nichols is a filmmaker whose work often reflects the lives of working class Middle-Americans. He’s also interested in contrasting the realistic, and often hard world of U.S. laborers within the genre trappings of their own populist cinema. In the case of “Midnight Special,” a title that suggest a certain type of boilerplate, pulp storytelling, Nichols has captured the uncanny sense of otherworldly danger and childlike wonder that Amblin-era Steven Spielberg branded in the late 1970s and early 80s, but does so while retaining his own sense of minimalist thriller direction.

The film begins with Michael Shannon and Joel Edgerton as two men who’re armed and on the run from the police with a child named Alton (Jaiden Leiberher), who’s stowed away in the back of their pickup, reading comic books with a flashlight under a sheet. Shannon plays the boy’s biological father who has captured Alton from an unusual foster home situation, ran by a religious zealot/cult-leader who believes the child in question is part of a holy prophecy. This might not the most outrageous theory, as the government has their own interests in Alton because his psychic ramblings have been linked to important U.S. intelligence, making him and his father suspects of treason. Shannon believes that that they have to take Alton to a set mysterious coordinates before the boy’s strange, and dangerous abilities weaken him to point of certain death.

Like Spielberg’s 1977 classic “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”—of which, alongside “E.T.”, this owes much of its structure and aesthetic—Nichols’ allows this science-fiction thriller to reveal itself slowly, working from its realistic exterior to its fantastic core as the story blossoms, uncovering more popcorn-bait with every piece of new information the script lays out. The stakes are immediately apparent which drives the story forward. A seductively dark sense of mystery shrouds the picture, taking place on the deserted desert roads of twilight Texas. Though Nichols’ employs more special-effects here than in his previous films, they are used sparingly and usually to good effect. In one scene we are shown what looks to be meteorites falling from the sky, first as small twinkling lights in the distance and then huge fireballs that violently and convincingly annihilates the rural gas station our characters are stopped at. We later find out this was a satellite that Alton managed to telekinetically crash through our atmosphere.

Scenes like this are captivating in an uneasy way and provides gravitas to the movie’s pulpier elements. That’s why it’s all the more disappointing when the director shows us too much his hand and robs us of the film’s mounting tension by delving further into its sci-fi world-building, with an ending that registers far sillier than the concealed intrigue teased before that point.

Despite its clanging and on-the-nose conclusion “Midnight Special” is a compelling dark fantasy, full of eerie set-ups, an economically written screenplay and a host of great performances, including Adam Driver as a curious NSA agent who’s in over his head. Nichols again proves himself to be an exciting talent who fully understands the unconscious effect classic Hollywood genre filmmaking has had on lives of rural America.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/April-2016

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