THE SHAPE OF WATER - Day 8 - BFI London Film Festival 2017

It's always scary walking into a film by one of your favourite directors, with a great cast and an intriguing premise - your most anticipated film of the Festival in fact! - scared that your high expectations will be disappointed. And this in particular in a year of mediocre films - few duds, few highs, just a lot of ok films.  Well, I am pleased to report that Giullermo Del Toro's THE SHAPE OF WATER is an absolute delight - an adult fairy tale that doesn't gloss over the darkness in life, but reinterprets it as a magical fable of love conquering loneliness and prejudice.

Sally Hawkins (FUNNY HA HA) stars as Elisa, a mute cleaner who works at a mysterious government facility in 1960s Baltimore.  She has two good friends  - the first is her neighbour - a washed-up advertising draughtsman (Richard Jenkins) - and the second is her fellow cleaner (Octavia Spencer - THE HELP). Elisa's life changes when she meets a merman (Doug Jones), who is being held captive at the government facility.  His fate is in the hands of a racist, sexually harassing torturer (Michael Shannon) who wants the merman dissected.  But this offends the scientific mind of Michael Stuhlbarg's researcher. He teams up with Elisa to attempt to liberate the merman from the small-minded nasties cornering him. 

There's so much to love about this film it's hard to know where to begin. First and foremost we have the stunning visual imagination of GDT - creating a kind of hyper 1960s America with a deep green visual palette, a delight in vintage cinemas and interiors as well as the oppressive bourgeois perfection of 1960s American suburban life, as well as steampunky mechanical widgets filling the laboratory. The use of colour is just perfection.  And then I love how GDT mixes a kind of romantic sensuous love affair with explicit scenes showing Elisa masturbating or a pet coming to a bad end.  This is truly adult fantasy.  And of course, we have the beautiful allegory of the prejudice the merman faces with the civil rights unrest we see on TV and the harassment Elisa faces in the workplace.  Complementing all of GDT's unique vision and execution, we have a wonderfully romantic from Alexandre Desplat, and a movie whose love of movies influences everything from plot points to scene settings to the way in which the main character views herself.

Of course, few movies are perfect and there are a couple of things that I would have altered in THE SHAPE OF WATER. I would have changed the one dream-like reverie - the movie felt fantastic enough as it was without this jarring shift in tone.  And secondly, I'm starting to get a bit frustrated by the typecasting of Michael Shannon as sexually messed up government man (viz BOARDWALK EMPIRE) and Octavia Spencer as sassy black woman who gets to smack her lips and offer folksy wisdom to the lead white actress. It's getting really old and lazy. She needs to be offered and to accept better more varied parts or she risks being written off as a modern day Hattie McDaniel.

THE SHAPE OF WATER has a running time of 119 minutes and is rated R in the USA and 15 in the UK for strong language, violence, sex and nudity. The film played Venice, Telluride, Toronto, Sitges and London. It opens in the UK on Dec 4th, in the USA, Canada and Mexico on Dec 8th, in Brazil on Jan 11th, in France on Jan 17th, in Australia on Jan 25th, in Spain on Jan 26th, in New Zealand and Portugal on Feb 1st, in Switzerland and Netherlands on Feb 15th, in Ireland on Feb 15th and in Argentina and Denmark on Feb 22nd. 

FRUITVALE STATION

Oh dear. The poor women next to me was in floods of tears and actually apologised for crying to me when the lights went up.  This may well be a peculiar trait of the English: apologising for a visceral emotional reaction.  I rather gather that this has been the response of the majority of viewers of FRUITVALE STATION - the critically acclaimed debut feature from writer-director Ryan Coogler. He has evidently made a deeply-felt earnest and politically charged film, and audiences are responding in kind.  After all, who can't feel sorry for a charming, fallible, but loving son, boyfriend and father who, through no fault of his own, ends up getting shot by a policeman at the metro station that gives this film its title.  The real Oscar Grant didn't deserve to die.  But he also deserves a better film than this piece of emotionally manipulative hagiography.

Ryan Coogler's conceit is to give us the man on the day before he died, enlightening only with a flashback to his time in prison and his beef with a fellow prisoner.  We see Oscar as a loving if occasionally unfaithful boyfriend, raising his daughter Tatiana responsibly, and supported by a loving extended family. It's certainly a far cry from the cliche of young black men raised by single mothers, ditching their multiple baby-mamas and up to no good.  To be sure, he's done time, and he has a cowardice when admitting to his family and friends that he's lost his job, but deep down we know Oscar is a great guy.  Why? Because he helps a pregnant woman take a leak and cradles a dying dog.  The problem is that this is a whitewash. The incident with the dog just didn't happen, and other factors we should have known about aren't mentioned.  Most crucially, the way the movie wraps up leads the audience strongly to believe that Oscar was deliberately shot by a racist cop, when the truth could be that it was just an honest mistake. Who knows?  The point is that the film doesn't admit of an alternative narrative and in doing so becomes trite propaganda.

Okay. So what if we were to approach this film as fiction and ignore any attempt at veracity, how does it work as pure drama? The opening shot of found footage showing a young man brutally treated on a metro platform is powerful and throws us into the action.  The opening scenes of the movie give us a character sketch of his relationship with his girlfriend that is deft and interesting. But then, as he roams around for the day getting ready for his mother's birthday party the movie loses pace and interest. We are marking time, hungry for character development.  The set piece confrontation at the metro station is brilliantly tense and horrific, if one can draw oneself back into the film, but just as you think "this is a tremendous movie" it descends into hackneyed E.R. territory and then into its politically simplistic ending.  So, a movie that doesn't quite cohere - that doesn't quite convince - hanging on the shoulders of a masterful set piece. A tremendous waste.

FRUITVALE STATION has a running time of 87 minutes and has been rated R in the USA and is rated 15 for strong language, violence, and injury detail.

FRUITVALE STATION played Sundance 2013 where it won both the Best Drama and Audience Award and Cannes where it won the Un Certain Regard - Avenir award. It also won the Independent Spirit Best First Feature Award. It opened last year in the USA, Singapore, Greece and Turkey and opened earlier this year in France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, South Korea, Portugal, Brazil, Italy, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Germany. It opens in the UK and Ireland on June 6th.

THE HELP - the Driving Miss Daisy de nos jours

Tate Taylor, director of the anonymous 2008 comedy PRETTY UGLY PEOPLE, somehow managed to get the studios to allow to write and direct THE HELP, a soupy drama based on the best-selling novel by Kathryn Stockett. Not having read Stockett's novel chronicling the travails in 1960s racist Mississippi, I don't know whether the emotional manipulation and superficial politics come from her of from the director.  Either way, the resulting movie looks handsome, and made me shed a tear in the final reel, but has all the genuine engagement with the issues of DRIVING MISS DAISY.  It's a bland feelgood movie about a topic that should make us angry and agitated.  It's a movie in which the main African American character's son is lynched and yet we come out feeling warm and fluffy.  Double plus not good.

The film makes the mistake of telling the stories of these African-American maids through the lens of a perky white wannabe journalist - Skeeter (Emma Stone) - a move that immediately tells us we're in a world where a harsh tale has to be made palatable for a mainstream audience.  Ironic, also, in a movie that makes such a big deal about going right to the source.  Skeeter serves as the vessel through which the maids will dish the dirt and get their story published.  The movie is scrupulous in telling us that Skeeter is sharing the royalties with her informants - but while she gets a cool job in New York out of it - they are at risk of being sacked, imprisoned or lynched. The risks and rewards are clearly completely asymmetric, but the film doesn't embrace and mine that fact - it would mess up the fluffy finale.

Worse still, there is no subtlety in the characterisation - no shades of grey. You're either a good-hearted liberal white (Skeeter, her shamed and reformed mother, Jessica Chastain's character Celia), or a nasty racist white (Bryce Dallas Howard's Hilly and her acolytes).  And as for the African-American women they are largely painted in tones of full-on heroism, with even the thief seen as a martyr to a mean mistress.   As for the subject matter, awful, horrible petty racism is seen on screen, but racial violence is referred to rather than shown.  Ditto the subject matter of domestic abuse.  And I couldn't help feeling insulted that the subject of vengeance against racism was reduced to a scatological joke. 

All this isn't to say that the production isn't handsome - with lush on location lensing from DP Stephen Goldblatt (JULIE & JULIA) and wonderful period costumes.  And the female cast is good quality and does the best with the narrowly written characters they are given.  In particular, it was a joy to finally see Jessica Chastain able to round out a character - rather than just being a virtuous icon, as in THE TREE OF LIFE and CORIOLANUS.  

But this movie, so hyped, so likely to win awards, is not a good movie. It's politics are dicey - it's reluctance to truly grasp the profundity of what it's tackling frustrating - it's emotional manipulation dishonest.  I have no time for it.  

THE HELP was released in the autumn in the US, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong and Sweden. It was released in October in Portugal, Finland, Norway, Lithuania, Singapore, France, Ireland, the UK and Spain. It was released in November in Spain, Hungary, Poland, Malta, Estonia, Denmark, Greece, Kuwait and India.  It opens on December 8th in Germany; on December 28th in Belgium; on Dcember 29th in the Netherlands; on January 20th in Italy; on February 3rd in Bulgaria and on February 6th in Brazil.  THE HELP is likely to be feted during awards season judging by the studio campaign and early indications from the New York Film Critics Circle and the Hollywood Film Festival.