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.

Godzilla (2/5 Stars)

Godzilla is rated PG-13. Whole cities are wiped out so two enormous bugs can be prevented from having sex.

- A.O. Scott

“Godzilla” is about a big fat lizard that fights two giant sized moths. The cities that are destroyed are Honolulu, Las Vegas, and San Francisco. You see, a long time ago the US Government dropped a big nuclear bomb on this big fat lizard thing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and such was the arrogance of mankind that we believed that to be the end of the story. But no, two cocoons with two large moths survived and in the present day release havoc upon the world. The two moths are the bad guys in the story. If they like totally have sex with each other they could make lots of babies, presumably more giant moths. Godzilla is the good guy in the story. He lives on the bottom of the sea (that’s why we never found him) and surfaces to kill the moths and save humanity. Why he would want to do this is not explained. Actually nothing is explained. All you should know is that this whole thing is due to the arrogance of mankind. For Pete’s sake people, stop being so arrogant.

Godzilla is really big, like the size of a skyscraper and like when he fights amongst skyscrapers they like get knocked down. Godzilla’s like Crash-Bam-Boom and the skyscraper is all like Kablooie! To the fans of Godzilla this might be enough of a reason to go see the movie. To everybody else I hope it is not enough. For instance, this movie should draw comparisons to last year’s “Pacific Rim,” a superior movie about big monsters who battle each other had several features conspicuously absent here. The first would be a sense of style. Guillermo Del Toro directed “Pacific Rim” and his brilliant artistry saturates the entire movie. Compare the night battle in Hong Kong with its brightly lit modern skyscrapers with the lumbering slugfest in San Francisco with all of its lights conveniently blown out by an electromagnetic pulse. Also the monsters and robots had distinctive personalities in “Pacific Rim,” whereas in “Godzilla” they are essentially the 3D IMAX version of those cardboard/rubber suits from the original 1950s movie. Secondly, “Pacific Rim” had a sense of humor. It cast the gifted comedian Charlie Day from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” as an excitable scientist. “Godzilla” has no jokes in it at all and is completely bereft of funny people. Given that this is a movie about big things destroying cities, that is a major oversight. Third, and this is just a general thing, but haven’t we got to the point where movies can’t simply get bigger with bigger things destroying even bigger things. I mean ‘Avatar’ had a pretty simplistic plot but it also happened to be a gobsmackingly new visual kind of experience. ‘Godzilla’ won’t ever have that same type of novelty no matter how big the lizard is now or in some future version. This is not the first time I’ve seen skyscrapers knocked down by something big in a movie. There are several of those scenarios every year. That’s all I have to say about this movie.

I would like to a take a moment now and explore the idiocy of movie ratings in what is becoming an annual tradition at this blog (The Absymal State of Movie Ratings, The Avengers, War Horse, Iron Man 2). “Godzilla” is rated PG-13. As is pointed out above, whole cities are wiped out. These cities are populated with people. They are generally in the background running away but sometimes they are right in the middle of the action or in one particularly unsettling shot looking through the windows of their office buildings at the big monsters fighting outside. The astute observer can infer that when Godzilla knocks down a building, we have just witnessed the deaths of several thousand people at the very least. Sometimes it is even more obvious. There is a scene on the golden gate bridge that shows many vehicles with people inside falling into the ocean when the bridge is broken up by a giant bug. In another scene an airport tram is broken up and at least ten people fall to their deaths outside of the hole in the side. Given the overwhelming presence of death in this movie, why is it not Rated R? The reason is because there is no gore. This is especially noticeable when dead people are carted away from collapsed buildings largely intact. Looking at them you would think they all died of heart attacks. As for all the poor souls in the office buildings, to placate the censors, their dead bodies are not shown at all.

Human life is cheap in “Godzilla,” but that does not stop the movie from manipulating the very humanity it so plainly disregards. The result is a few absurd scenes where some lives are arbitrarily assigned more value than others. Take the scene on the Golden Gate Bridge where our hero’s son is on a school bus in the middle of the bridge when Godzilla strikes. The bus driver disregards all the authorities and takes liberties with the traffic rules brazenly passing all the other cars that will soon meet their fate on the bottom of the ocean. Do we not care about anybody else but this one kid in this one bus? When that kid survives, in a way that unnecessarily endangers all the other people on the bridge, are we supposed to feel relief?

Presumably the point of movie ratings is to protect children or whatever from what I wonder. Whatever the reason, the effect of the MPAA ratings is the proliferation of ignorance concerning the nature of violence. Imagine if you took just PG-13 blockbusters as your basis for looking at the world. You would think that you could outrun fireballs, dodge a hail of machine gun bullets behind a car, and never be hit by falling debris from buildings or shrapnel from explosions. Is that a moral way to teach kids about violence, specifically gun violence? To only allow violence that has no physical consequences and shield them from every instance of violence that shows what it can actually do to the human body seems to me to be a rather immoral thing to do. Consider the Rated R movie, “127 Hours.” It concerns the true story about a hiker whose arm gets pinned underneath a large rock. In order to escape and save his life he has to cut off his arm, the process of which the movie shows in full detail. It is gory as should be expected from a realistic version of what happened. But is it immoral? It is an act of violence depicted truthfully perpetrated to save a life. What part of that is immoral? How? The movie would have gotten a PG-13 rating if it had not shown any blood during that scene or at least made it look like the amputation didn’t hurt. But shouldn’t an amputation look like it hurts? Shouldn’t there be blood? 

The truth is that movie ratings are not concerned with morality. They are concerned with the presence of blood on the screen. In any case, that is why ‘127 Hours’ which cares deeply about human life is rated R and Godzilla which treats human life as casually as spilt milk is PG-13. Will somebody please think of the children?!?!?

Okay, that’s enough. I will keep quiet about this for another year. 

Happy-go-Lucky (4/5 Stars) 01/09/09

What would I give just to see one scene in which Poppy, the happy=go-lucky star in this movie played by Sally Hawkins, meets Clint Eastwood's character, Kowalski, from Gran Torino. I'm sure the sparks would fly in all directions. 
Poppy is an extremely cheerful person. I've only met two or three people like her in my lifetime. They always seem to be in a good move. So much so that you start to wonder whether its all an act. This movie delves deeply into that suspicion and comes out the other end convincing us that yes indeed this sort of person can exist in a three dimensional way. The idea in this film is to surround poor happy Poppy with the most unhappy repugnant people I have seen in a movie in a long time. The worst of which is a driving instructor so acidic that he comes very close to overshadowing Poppy's optimism and cheeriness. The exchanges between them are really a great battle of personalities and it is fascinating to watch them go at it. Will Poppy make the driving instructor nicer or will the driving instructor push Poppy into being mean? I will not ruin it whether Poppy wins, loses, or draws a truce but it does all erupt in a climax that had me leaning back in my seat stunned. 
Sally Hawkins has been getting Oscar buzz for this role and it is completely called for in this role. She has created one of the most likable characters of the year, certainly in the last ten years, and maybe ever. I wanted to hug her already right after the first scene. And very rarely have I ever wanted a happy ending for a person so much than I did in this movie. She's just so darn good. 
There is this one scene in the movie that especially caught my eye and that's when Poppy, for no real reason, sees a homeless man and starts talking to him. The guy is out of his wits and is mumbling the same words over and over. Most people would be freaked out or pretend not to notice. They would walk on the other side of the street probably. But Poppy stays with the dude and talks to him. After a while their eyes connect the guy mutters "y'know?" Poppy very empathetically says she does and he walks away. There are sometimes scenes in what seems to be an ordinary movie that make me realize I'm in the middle of watching something special. Like for instance the scene in 'Groundhog Day' when Bill Murray tells Andi Macdowell that he is a god and spills the beans about killing himself several times. Or Jack Black's acapella rock monologue in 'School of Rock.' or in 'Tropic Thunder' when Ben Stiller accidentally kills a panda. This is one of those scenes. It comes out of nowhere but makes perfect sense and elevates the entire movie to a different level. 
If I have one complaint about this movie its that it ended a little too soon. I could have used a little more dialogue or maybe just even a little more Poppy. Have her riding a new bike over the end credits. That could have book-ended the piece and given me a little more time to say goodbye.