The Shape of Water (4/5 Stars)

“Unable to perceive the shape of You, I find You all around me. Your presence fills my eyes with Your love, It humbles my heart, for You are everywhere.”

Legend has it, writer-director Guillermo Del Toro read that the above poem somewhere, perhaps in an old Islamic text and forgot who said it first and could not find after looking. Then he wrote a movie around it.

“The Shape of Water” is a striking combination of movies, part “Creature from the Black Lagoon” part “Amelie”. It centers upon a single middle-aged woman named Elisa Esposito who happens to be a deaf-mute and works as a janitor in a top secret government in the midst of the cold water. The big bad American government, represented incarnate by a man named Richard Strickland, played by Michael Shannon at his most type-cast, has captured a fish-man from a river in the Amazon. The fish-man’s strange abilities, for breathing underwater and regenerating itself, persuade the government to perform experiments and/or pointlessly torture it. Elisa, played by a fine Sally Hawkins, falls in love with the fish-man.

Writing this after the fact, I can’t think of a logical reason why Elisa would fall in love with the fish-man other than their commonality of being outsiders (deaf people are outsiders, right?). But during the movie, I felt it. This has much to say about the style and direction of Del Toro and the masterful craftsmen he employs. Technically, the movie takes place in Washington D.C., but it feels like Paris at its most romantic. The color palette is brown and wet and green and warm. There is french accordion music playing in the background.

But mostly I believe the love story because I believe Sally Hawkins. I expect it is a tough role to pull off. She has to make us believe she finds the fish-man, played with extensive make-up by Doug Jones, attractive. She does so. She also has to be deaf and sign all of her lines. This she does also with a confidence that makes it seem like she is completely fluent in sign language. It is her greatest performance and her best opportunity for one since “Merry Happy”.

The romance is also helped by the sinister forces that aim to keep the lovers apart, and thus encourage the audience the root for the love as it stands against hate. Norah Ephron once remarked that there were two kinds of love stories, the Christian and the Jewish as she would put it. The conflict in the “Christian” type of story comes from without as in the case of “Romeo and Juliet” (whereas the conflict in the “Jewish” type comes from the imperfections of the lovers themselves). “The Shape of Water” stands directly in the “Christian” form of love story. It is almost taken for granted that the fish-man loves Sally Hawkins and the other way around. What drives the story is the evil Richard Strickland.

It may simply be my affection for the actor Michael Shannon, but I feel for Richard Strickland in this movie. Think about it. Every single character in this movie is an outsider but Richard Strickland. Sally Hawkins is deaf. Her friend and work colleague (played by Octavia Spencer) is black. Her neighbor (played by Richard Jenkins) is gay. The empathetic scientist who works at the lab (played by Michael Stuhlberg) is communist. The fish-man is a fish-man. Michael Shannon, the true-blue patriot who believes in positive thinking and 1950s conformism and commercialism, is all alone. Every other character who isn’t playing a bit role is an outsider.

Are minorities really minorities when they outnumber the supposed majority? Can a movie stand for non-conformity when the supposed conformist is the one character not conforming to the rest? Sure it can. This is America. Anyone can be whatever they want to be.

Fruitvale Station (5/5 Stars)

Death Comes for Oscar Grant

“There are a lot of kids out there that need help, who are getting a lot of negative reinforcement. Is there more that we can do to give them the sense that their country cares about them, and values them, and is willing to invest in them.”

- President Barack Obama

Events, unforeseeable yet strangely inevitable, have conspired to make Fruitvale Station, already great, into an important and timely film. It is appropriate as ‘Fruitvale Station’ concerns the unforeseeable and inevitable. It is about an extremely specific time and place: The Fruitvale Station of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in the wee hours of the New Year, 2008. We will never know what exactly happened to Trayvon Martin, his last moments only known by a single unreliable witness. But we do know what exactly happened to Oscar Grant. We know because of where and when it happened. It happened on the public platform of a BART station in front of a light rail train bound for Oakland full of passengers coming from watching the San Francisco New Year’s Eve fireworks and it being 2008, many of the cell phones the passengers carried had video cameras. The moments leading up to Oscar Grant’s death were chaotic. A fight broke out on the BART train. The train was stopped at the Fruitvale Station. BART police officers rounded up who they thought were the suspects young black men. The passengers felt the officers were being unnecessarily rough and so flip, flip, flip, all the camera phones came out and started recording through the open doors of the train. Amidst the surrounding ruckus, Oscar Grant gets up from where he had been ordered to sit and wait with his hands raised in a non-confrontational manner. Two of the officers forcefully put him to the ground, face first, and try to cuff him. Oscar won’t give them his hands. One of the officers puts his knee to Oscar’s neck to stop him from moving. The other officer takes out his gun and shoots Oscar point blank in the back. The train crowd reacts in horrific disbelief. Oscar yells out “You shot me. I have a 4-year-old daughter.” The train doors close and the it leaves the station. Oscar Grant bleeds to death on the cold concrete platform.

First time director Ryan Coogler uses the actual cell phone footage as a prologue to the movie. In a way he has to because the incident and how it happened is so utterly unthinkable that without real life evidence, it would be almost impossible to believe that it could have occurred the way it did. It also works incredibly well as a dramatic setup, an omen of foreboding like ‘The Ides of March’ that haunts the rest of the story which shows the last day of Oscar Grant, played perfectly by Michael B. Jordan, as he celebrates his mother’s birthday, picks his daughter up from school, looks for employment, and makes New Year’s resolutions. The incident at Fruitvale Station sparked a politicized debate about race and police brutality and spawned peaceful protests and violent riots in Oakland. But unlike a movie like Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing,” this movie does not dwell on greater societal topics. What Coogler focuses on and what the movie makes especially clear is why the fate of Oscar Grant was especially sad on a personal level. And “Fruitvale Station” is without a doubt one of the saddest movies I have ever seen. Like “Leaving Las Vegas” and “Shutter Island” sad. Ultimately we are presented with a complex portrait of a young man who had a mother and daughter that he loved and who loved him, who had a girlfriend he wanted to marry if he only had the money, who was hardened by streets and prison, who had plans to grow and hopes for the future, and who died suddenly in a freakish act unfinished, so sadly incomplete. What our President hinted at in his remarks on the Trayvon Martin case is that policy changes may not be the only important thing here. Perhaps what we need is simply a greater sense of empathy for people like Oscar Grant. That we should stop expecting nothing but the worst in the behavior and ultimate fate of young black men and start insisting and expecting that they be involved in our society in a socially productive way. There is a particularly great shot in ‘Fruitvale Station’ that takes place at Oscar Grant’s mother’s birthday party. The food is ready and the family enters the living room in order to eat. But the camera stays in the kitchen and merely peers at the family praying before eating from a distance. It lingers here for a confusing amount of time. That is until you realize that the director Ryan Coogler is keeping the camera in the kitchen in order to frame the praying family with the refrigerator right by the door. The refrigerator is covered from top to bottom with pictures of the family Grant. That is what this movie is about. It is not about police brutality. It is about a family praying together in a house that has a refrigerator covered with memories of love.     

Oscar Grant is played by Michael B. Jordan. I did not recognize Michael at first no doubt because he has grown nearly a foot and has had the bright taken out of his eyes since I last saw him. But it is indeed him. Oscar Grant is played by the same actor who portrayed Wallace from “The Wire,” another child killed in a supremely unjust fashion. Both are the type of roles that make a strong imprint on one’s movie consciousness. His performance here is especially acute and given that you know how it ends, has a visceral worryingly portentous edge to it. Michael B. Jordan infuses the character with a dramatically susceptible personality given what environment he is in at the time. There is a telling scene told in a flashback in the year 2007 when his mother, played perfectly as well by Octavia Spencer, is visiting him in prison. He has one personality when speaking to his mother about her life and his daughter. And then a fellow prisoner comes by and calls him a ‘Snitch.’ In a flash, Oscar gets up from the table and engages in a verbal fight full of macho threats. And you’re looking at this and thinking ‘calm down man someday you might escalate some shit and get killed.’ Oscar is only 22 years old.

But that Oscar was young and prone to temper flare-ups does not make it his fault that he was killed. And this movie does not especially concern itself with attaching a deep meaning to the act of killing. The reason hinted at in a post-movie epitaph states that the officer thought he was grabbing and shooting his taser. A jury convicted him of nothing but ‘involuntary manslaughter.’ Weirdly this may have been because of the many cell phone videos. Given what they show it is completely crystal clear that there was no good reason as to why the officer shot Oscar in the back. Therefore it must have been a mistake, right? We can go in circles with this. Heck, this movie could be a great primer for a lesson in chaos theory where the watcher can take any little occurrence and be like “If only for this,” or “If only for that” ad infinitum. Maybe a butterfly in the Amazon rainforest flapped its wings and caused the shooting. If only Oscar had not stopped to help a woman pick out catfish in a supermarket that morning then- But what does it matter? Oscar Grant is dead.