Nothing But the Best: "The Shape of Water" (2017)

Scene from The Shape of Water

Welcome to the series Nothing But the Best in which I chronicle all of the Academy Award Best Picture winners as they celebrate their anniversaries. Instead of going in chronological order, this series will be presented on each film's anniversary and will feature personal opinions as well as facts regarding its legacy and behind the scenes information. The goal is to create an in depth essay for each film while looking not only how the medium progressed, but how the film is integral to pop culture. In some cases, it will be easy. Others not so much. Without further ado, let's start the show.

"The Shape of Water" and the Three Forms of Loneliness

Scene from The Shape of Water

*Note: Spoilers for The Shape of Water

It is a moment that comes between two phases of Eliza (Sally Hawkins) and Amphibian Man's (Doug Jones) relationship. They have escaped the lab and are in their last passionate moments together before Amphibian Man returns to the sea, possibly without the requited love of Eliza. She is mute, only ever able to communicate through a mix of sign language, eggs, and Benny Goodman records. Yet it's in a fantasy moment that she gets her only spoken lines of the film. As the scene trades a dumpy apartment with a leaky room for a black-and-white set out of a musical set, she sings "You'll never know how much I love you." It's a moment where repression breaks through, and moves the subtle themes of the film to the forefront. The Shape of Water is more than a film about loving someone different, it's about understanding loneliness when you don't have love readily available. It's may be a story that's been trivialized as the "woman who loves a fish" story, but it's so much more. It's a look at how loneliness can be used for good as well as bad. 

Review: "The Shape of Water" Romanticizes Horror with Tenderness and Awe

Scene from The Shape of Water

Monsters are scary. It's a simple rule of life that all narrative forms have accepted as true. So why are we fascinated by them then? In director Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water, he updates the classic fairy tale structure in order to answer that question, using Amphibian Man (Doug Jones) as an allegory for interracial love. He presupposes that monsters are misunderstood, choosing to borrow an ethos dating back to James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein. With lavish productions and an amazing performance by Sally Hawkins as Eliza, del Toro has created a film that not only humanizes monster movies, but finds the tender heart and longing that make them not too different from you or I. It's a powerful film, and one that should appeal to fans of monster movies that do more than horrify. This one sympathizes so perfectly that it becomes less of a horror movie and more of a supernatural Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. It may be simple at heart, but it only adds to the profundity of its text.