Shape of Water an odd twist to a classic story

Michael Shannon and Sally Hawkins in The Shape of Water. Image courtesy Fox Searchlight.

 

In less capable hands, The Shape of Water could come dangerously close to being unwatchable. A blend of four genres telling an utterly bizarre love story with many grotesque details, the movie lives right along a number of thin lines that would tip it into being completely unwatchable, a pretentious art house movie that fails to blend the works of Davids Cronenberg and Lynch. Director Guillermo del Toro, who wrote the movie with Vanessa Taylor, is brilliant enough to use the oddity of his premise as a means of telling a basic love story between two fragile beings. What results is one of the sweetest, most charming love stories of the past decade.

There has always been something strangely benign about the supernatural beings that lurk just outside the real world in del Toro's movies. Ghosts are tragic creatures whose intents are benevolent to heroes and malevolent to the villains, and mythological gods provide aid and assistance for the protagonist's quest toward self discovery. The Shape of Water inserts the supernatural being into the center of the story, having a strange merman creature (played by Doug Jones) start an odd relationship with mute cleaner Elisa (Sally Hawkins). Elisa and the creature grow more and more in love and who receive aid from gay copy artist Giles (Richard Jenkins), Elisa's very reliable and understanding friend Zelda (Octavia Spencer), and Michael Stuhlbarg's mysterious scientist Dr. Robert Hoffstetler, as they fend off the very dangerous Strickland (a typically intense Michael Shannon). The cross between the fantastical and the normal is much more direct in this movie than some of del Toro's older, non-action movie titles, but the concept of a surprisingly ordinary abnormal supernatural presence fits with his modus operandi. Yet even those other movies come nowhere close to being quite as brazenly weird as The Shape of Water. It remains difficult to reconcile the romance between Elisa and the merman given the physiological differences and just how intimate their love becomes. It's not entirely unusual for a movie to create an emotional bond that toes the line at a physical relationship, but The Shape of Water goes right over that line and shows how close their relationship has become.

Their relationship might not be the strangest part of The Shape of Water. What's really disconcerting, aside the unfortunate fate of an unlucky cat, is the multitude of genres thrown together for this film. The Shape of Water is a fantastical love story, with elements of a Cold War spy movie and an era piece that digs under the artificial happiness of the early 1960s. As characters, Zelda and Giles could fit in just as well, if not better, in supporting roles in a romantic comedy, there to support the female lead as she pines for the dreamy captain of the high school swim team. Del Toro and Taylor even toss in elements of musicals, including a lovely and heartbreaking musical number that shines through Elisa's imagination.

None of it is overly distracting though because The Shape of Water's attention is focused on the relationship between Elisa and the merman. It's a beautiful romance, told quietly through kind acts and courageous feats. Everything between Elisa and the merman is driven by love and devotion, an unspoken romance that never strays into being sappy or saccharine. Every tender look, every embrace is earned because of how well Hawkins and Jones connect their characters. The other elements are there to elevate the romance, adding the necessary complications to move the story forward while adding a dreamy, nostalgia-tinged element to the film.

Nothing about tale told by The Shape of Water is overly complicated. To quote another movie about a woman and a beast falling in love, this is a tale as old as time about two beings who are exactly right for each other despite the circumstances around them. What's different is the lens used by del Toro and Taylor to tell this tale, to provide their unique take at how far true love can stretch physical impossibilities. Del Toro and Taylor have taken a banal plot and turned it into an indelible, beautiful love story about two incomplete beings completing each other and finding love in an otherwise hopeless place.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 123 minutes

Genre: Drama

Ask Away
Target audience: Romantics with a sense of the macabre, so anyone who likes Guillermo del Toro movies.

Take the whole family?: No for several reasons.

Theater or Netflix?: This would make for a pretty interesting date night event.

Academy Award odds?: I hope this gets a Best Picture nomination, although it wouldn't be too surprising if this was snubbed because of how weird it is. At the least Sally Hawkins deserves a nomination for her quiet brilliance.

Watch this as well?: Guillermo del Toro's backlog is unique and often excellent, highlighted by The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth. The Shape of Water also has hints of Pedro Almodóvar, so check out the very fun but slightly supernatural Volver.

Gifted's sweetness can't mask plot, character flaws

Mckenna Grace and Chris Evans in Gifted. Image courtesy Fox Searchlight.

There isn't that much about Gifted worth remembering after its 101 minutes are over. It has a few good enough ideas in there, endearing performances and a couple of moments that can invoke involuntary weeping on occasion. But the final act is bitter, and the additional time to reflect reveals some notable plot holes and a thoroughly unremarkable final product. It's an enjoyable enough movie in the moment, but one that leaves viewers empty at the end.

That isn’t to say Gifted is truly bad. It is admittedly a pretty likable film starring very likable actors putting in tremendously charming performances. There's a great rapport between stars Chris Evans and Mckenna Grace, their performances as a low-key uncle and precocious niece balancing each other and forging a pretty great fictional relationship. The film also has Jenny Slate putting in a remarkably restrained performance as Grace's first-grade teacher, and Octavia Spencer is around to be Octavia Spencer and win over the audience with her pitch-perfect Octavia Spencer-ing. They contribute greatly to the much appreciated genial vibe the movie aims for in its first two acts. Even the drama over what to do with Grace's brilliance builds, director Marc Webb and screenwriter Tom Flynn avoid throwing in over-the-top screaming or additional theatrical moments to keep things grounded. The arrival of Evans' mother (Lindsay Duncan), who shows up to move Grace to Boston for more formal education, doesn’t result in forced drama either. The conversations between her and Evans remain civil enough and sometimes regretful about a broken past.

It's during the first 70-minutes or so that Gifted offers up an interesting philosophical question concerning the cost of genius. Grace's intelligence is at the center of the movie's drama, with Evans' wish for his niece to have a normal life fighting against Duncan's pursuit of her granddaughter's mathematical potential. Both sides make fair points about whether or not genius owes anything to society. A child should be allowed to be a kid, but having a brilliant child go through a regular school day is counterproductive to their needs and their greater potential. The debate itself is interesting and is handled with respect for both arguments and in a generally civil manner.

The problems arise when any additional thought is put into how a situation like this should be handled in real life. Gifted shifts its focus to an either/or proposition, with the girl either attending public school or going to an elite program and evolving into a computer. It takes until the very end of the movie for Webb and Flynn to admit that a third option, challenging the girl with collegiate courses part-time and send her to school to achieve the necessary socialization, both exists and makes the most sense. The belated realization of that course of action makes Evans' character, a former associate professor, look like kind of an idiot or at least a jerk, considering he was willing and eager to offer zero intellectual rigor for his niece. Childhood is designed to be challenging; revoking that aspect of it wholesale is bad parenting, and a point the filmmakers keep largely hushed even as the level of brilliance Grace's character exhibits increases every ten minutes.

Yet the worst characterization is granted to Duncan. Initially portrayed as someone willing to be moderately reasonable and have some compassion for her children is painted at the end as an absolute monster willing to ruin her granddaughter's life and let a beloved orange one-eyed cat die because the cat is an inconvenience. Aside from providing Evans a rare literal save the cat moment, it strips Duncan's character of her humanity and turns her into a cartoon villain nearly ghoulish in her pursuit of intellectual glory. Why the dark turn needed to exist is unclear considering Gifted went out of its way to avoid painting any one character as evil.

It's at this point when the flaws Gifted got away with for so long come to the forefront. The little clichés it used to carry the plot forward become clear, as do the less than stellar ways actresses like Slate and Spencer are utilized, wasting a fair amount of talent in the process. Gifted gets a lot of mileage from the performances by Evans and Grace, along with the presence of the one-eyed cat, but it doesn't do enough to support their efforts and presence. Charm can at least make a movie watchable, but it can't do much more than that without a well-told story and a strong final act.

Review: Three out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 101 minutes

Genre: Drama
 

Ask Away

Target audience: People who are interested in watching geniuses wrestle with their standards.

Take the whole family?: The PG-13 rating seems fair for the minor adult content and, mostly, the lack of interest anyone younger than that would have for it.

Theater or Netflix?: Wait for it to stream.

Does Chris Evans work as an everyman?: He does shine in one of the rare human roles he's gotten. Evans has a low-key charm that works for movies like this, sort of like Kevin Costner but with personality. If he does eventually leave the Marvel Cinematic Universe he hopefully finds a home of sorts in romantic comedies and mild dramas.

Watch this as well?: Director Marc Webb is responsible for one of my favorite romantic comedies from the last decade, (500) Days of Summer, which shares the underlying geniality as Gifted but is a more interesting and innovative movie.

Hidden Figures' interesting story lost to feel good tropes

Janelle Monae, Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer in Hidden Figures. Image courtesy 20th Century Fox.

I feel like a broken record when discussing films like Hidden Figures that take really great real-life stories and turn them into underwhelming feel good movies. There's always the potential for a terrific film right beneath the surface that gets mangled by sappy narrative choices that often add a hyper level of IMPORTANCE to the proceedings. The story is never considered strong enough by filmmakers to stand on its own; they have to add bits and pieces to the sides to create some monster designed to give viewers good vibes and a slight sense of onanistic superiority when compared with the jerks holding down the heroes on screen.

What is frustrating is the potential for what could be given the topic films like Hidden Figures covers. This film hits on the role African-American women played in developing America's space program in the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on the achievements of NASA mathematicians Katherine Johnson (played by Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe). The subject is fresh territory complete with fun information about space and featuring brilliant women whose contributions were minimized because of rampant racism and sexism. This is also the damning thing about movies like Hidden Figures: They are necessary to tell an unheard story to a broad audience and offer credit to people who have long deserved it. A documentary, though a much better route for conveying the information, simply would not garner the mass audience a fictionalized version starring Henson, Spencer and Monáe would.

Necessary does not directly result in a good film, no matter the subject matter and the stars (the aforementioned leads along with Kevin Costner, Kirsten Dunst, Jim Parsons and Mahershala Ali) attached to it. Hidden Figures is hindered by the same mistakes other feel good movies sustain to cater to a mass audience. This movie is heavy handed with the lessons it wants to impart and the methods it does so, screaming its themes of equality and persistence to the high heavens and showing the racial inequality of Virginia circa 1961 in a finger-wagging, pedantic fashion. Characters in the film’s world speak less in dialogue and more in grand speeches, lecturing others (and, by extension, the audience) amid quotidian exchanges to, once again, prove some grand important point to people who already agree with it. The few moments when Katherine, Dorothy and Mary engage in some normal banter or get drunk on whiskey and dance around comes as more than a relief for the viewer than they should.

The underlying issue though is the exchange of historical importance for audience catharsis, as if the needs of the audience matters more than the story being told. Hidden Figures succumbs to this by inserting a few crowd pleasing moments in meant to make the film more palatable and far less honest to the story and era. Inserting a couple of fantastic falsities, for example Costner's composite character destroying a racial restroom sign, obfuscate the real tidbits like how John Glenn personally requested Katherine Johnson to double check key calculations before he went into orbit. The downside to melding fiction and fact is the fiction more often than not comes out on top, leaving the facts to drown.

At least Hidden Figures is a competent entry into the feel good genre. Henson and Spencer both excel at their respective roles and Monáe holds her own despite a squiffy southern accent; the aforementioned scenes when the three of them are shooting the breeze or trying to hook up Henson's Johnson with Ali's charming Col. Jim Johnson are rather sweet. And the film is at its best when it depicts the three working at NASA, whether by writing complex equations on a chalkboard or figuring out how a complex IBM machine works. It's rare for any film to show brilliance used in a logical and pragmatic fashion, so actually seeing the genius of these women applied is sort of fun to watch come to life. It's really difficult to not root for Hidden Figures to succeed because all of the elements for a very good to great movie are right there; it's the desire to use them to their full capacity that's missing.

Review: Three out of Five Stars 

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 127 minutes

Genre: Historical

Ask Away

Target audience: Viewers looking for something historical that will make them feel better about themselves.

Take the whole family?: There's nothing overly violent or gratuitous about this one, but it won't be overly interesting to kids. Keep it to around age 8 if you want to use it as an intro to a history lesson.

Theater or Netflix?: Probably best to wait for this to stream to you.

Oscar odds?: It wouldn't be overly surprising if this landed as a Best Picture nominee – a couple of tracking sites have it either just in or on the cusp of the top 10 – and Octavia Spencer will probably get a well-deserved nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. The best shot at a win would be in Original Song, but it might still lose out to a tune from La La Land or Moana.

Watch this as well?: The Tuskegee Airmen is a hidden gem that highlights the contributions of the eponymous African-American pilots during World War II that is worth a watch if you can find it.

'Allegiant' makes no sense

Theo James and Shailene Woodley are set to kiss at an inopportune moment in "Allegiant." Image courtesy Lionsgate.

It’s clear the filmmakers behind “Allegiant,” the newest entry in the “Divergent” series, had a very specific audience in mind when they opted to make this film. The actors are very pretty, the dialogue is very simplistic, the plot is very straightforward, and the plot holes are big enough for a tank to drive through. So, perhaps but hopefully perhaps not, this film might work for the target audience, but anyone outside of that core demographic is in for a very bumpy ride.

“Allegiant” picks up right after the end of its predecessor “Insurgent,” which came out in 2015. The gate that separated Chicago from the rest of the world has opened, but new leader Evelyn (Naomi Watts, one of many people far too good for this film) prevents anyone from leaving. Instead, she hosts a series of trials to execute the enforcers who served under the previous regime. Not happy with how things are going, series protagonist/The Special Tris (Shailene Woodley) recruits her boyfriend Four (Theo James, aka diet Paul Walker) and a few friends from the other two films in the series (Miles Teller, Ansel Elgort and Zoë Kravitz) to see exactly what life is like on the other side of the fence and to see if the grass is indeed greener.

What they discover is a futuristic society (or one even more so than the future they exist in) headed by David (Jeff Daniels), a researcher who uses Chicago as a sort of experiment to see if humanity can rid itself of the defective character traits that define life in the Windy City. Woodley, as the chosen one, is the key to his research, and he recruits her to meet up with a special council to save the denizens of her home town. Things aren't exactly going swimmingly there though; Octavia Spencer's Johanna is waging a war against Watts for control of the city to restore the factions Woodley and friends fought to destroy, and things are getting out of hand fast. Daniels' David could be the last hope to prevent a civil war, or are his motives could be far more nefarious than Woodley suspects (yes, they are). Regardless, shenanigans encompassing ships, angst, memory erasing, kidnapping, more angst, flying hockey pucks, and a hint more angst for the young stars ensue. –

“Allegiant’s” flaws are legion. It’s generally poorly acted – the high profile names are not invested in this endeavor – and impressively hideous aesthetically with some god awful CGI, and even features dialogue that’s often redundant and definitely overly simplistic even for a film aimed at tweens. The hallmark though are the plot holes, the gaps in logic that keep cropping up because the team of writers enlisted to write this travesty don’t know what to do with their characters. To use an old Roger Ebert concept, the entirety of “Allegiant's” plot machinations is dependent on people acting dumb and, in several cases, against their own or anyone else's interest. Daniels' David, who (spoiler) becomes the film's big bad, can undermine the entire counter operation run by Woodley's Tris and her friends without leaving his office. Or, at least, he should be able to enact his master plan with the flip of a switch from his couch in his boxers while watching “RuPaul's Drag Race.” But he doesn't, and he never designs his grand experiment to be able to do enact his plan, because “Allegiant” makes little to no sense as a concept or as a film.

Yet, somehow, this is actually worse than “Insurgent.” At least that one had a solid grip on the relationship between Woodley's Tris and the appropriately handsome James, who work effectively as partners (admittedly a strength of the series). This time, for some reason, the writers have James' Four pull an Aidan and devolve into a misogynistic chazz to make Woodley’s Tris feel bad. There's also no good reason why the writers opt to make Watts' Evelyn as erratic as she is; it's as if they can't decide if they should make her Eleanor Iselin, Margaret Thatcher, Mussolini, or some strange hybrid of the three.

Little about “Allegiant” makes any sense. Even the full title listed at IMDB “The Divergent Series: Allegiant – Part 1” is undercut by the name of the next film in the franchise, “Ascendant,” meaning “Allegiant” doesn't technically have a part two. Sadly, there is still at least one more film left to go in this franchise, and if it follows the pattern set by the last two “Divergent” films, it's not going to end well for anyone.

Review: One and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 121 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: Fans of the book series and people interested in less well-developed “Hunger Games” knockoffs.

Take the whole family?: For a series targeted at tweens, there is a whole lot of shooting and murdering going on. In other words, not so much for the little ones.

Theater or Netflix?: Stay away if you can.

Is there anything to recommend about this movie?: Miles Teller is the series MVP, often serving as an audience surrogate to point out how stupid these films are. Something that always tickles me about these films is the use of banal first names to identify the villains. The series tries very hard to make their villains frightening, but names like David, Evelyn and Jeanine just aren’t intimidating.

Watch this instead?: “Gattaca” addressed all of the moral implications raised in “Allegiant” with a deft touch and a hint of creepiness that makes it worth seeking out.