Flat, I guess

We were pretty psyched to watch The Shape of Water (2017), but I wasn’t sure I was quite in the mood. Bear with me here - I wasn’t so much in the mood for a heavy fraught Guillermo del Toro movie. I felt more like watching something more quirky and whimsical, like a Wes Anderson movie. Actually, I got it.

We first meet Sally Hawkins, waking up. She seems to have a very regular schedule, putting eggs on to boil, setting a timer, getting in the bath and masturbating until the timer goes off. When she brings egg and toast to her neighbor in the next apartment, we realize that she is mute, communicating with him using sign language. Her neighbor is Richard Jenkins, an older illustrator whose little affectations and love of old musicals codes him as gay.

She leaves her apartment, which turns out to be above a movie theater, and takes the bus to her job. She works as a night cleaning lady at a government installation, along with Octavia Spencer. So Hawkins is not wealthy, and her job is not easy or glamorous, but she seems content. She has friends and a life. Then she discovers what secret the installation holds - a Gill Man.

Now, this is all set in the Fifties, during the height of the Cold War. So the guy who is running the program, Michael Shannon, gets to be a total dick to "the coloreds", "the help", and pretty much everybody in the name of America. His plan is to vivisect the monster and see if it will help with the Space Program, because... His chief scientist, Michael Stuhlbarg, is actually a Soviet double agent - who has also been ordered to kill the monster.

Meanwhile, Hawkins has been forming a bond with the Gill Man (Doug Jones, in costume), and decides to break him out.

I guess I'm being a little facetious when I call this movie whimsical. Compared to the crushing horror and despair of some of del Toro's films, it is somewhat justified. The Gill Man (they don't call him this in the movie) only commits one horrible act, and it's a misunderstanding that is quickly forgiven. The Fifties setting makes it nostalgic in a funny way, even though that decade wasn't great for the marginalized.

And that isn't glossed over - the main protagonists are a disabled woman, a black woman, a Communist, and a gay man - and a monster, of course. The antagonists are bigots. But this is far from a social message film. It's mood is mostly meditative, light at times, and above all, hopeful. It was just what I wanted.

In conclusion, afterwards I felt like watching Paul T. Anderson make a Coen Brothers movie, so I watched Inherent Vice again.