"The Shape of Water": The Things We Do For Love

"I've been dying to watch The Shape of Water," Doug says.  This is our first date, so I'm inclined to agree to anything, but really, what a dumb title!

"Water has no shape; it fills whatever vessel it is in."

"That's the point, silly!"

I see on the blue-ray cover that the thing was directed by Guillermo Del Toro.   His movies alway trick you with a bait-and-switch: you think you're getting a cute fantasy, but instead it's about people dying.

"So what's it about?  Elves being killed during the Spanish Civil War?"

"Close.  You'll see.  Anyway, there's a gay character."

I see that I have no choice.  Doug the film buff wants to see it, so it's either watch or not get invited to see him naked later.

Well, he's cute...

We sit cuddling on the couch.  He lowers the lights so I can't even escape by reading a magazine.

Openng: a gratuitous full-frontal nude shot of a woman taking a bath.  Disgusting!  Decreasing my interest in my date's bedroom.  And completely irrelevant to the plot.

The gratuitous nude girl, Elisa (Sally Hawkins), is mute, so she uses sign language. Not important to the plot.

Every day she she gets gratuitously nude, then boils three eggs and makes egg salad sandwiches, which she shares with her elderly invalid neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), who keeps a tv on at all times.  It shows only movie musicals from the 1930s.  No importance to the plot.

Everything is so washed out and drab and unpleasant to look at that I think we're in an awful dystopia like 1984, but  it's actually some apartments over a movie theater in Baltimore in 1962 or 1963*.  They can actually look down at the movies playing.  Not that any of them are important to the plot.

They got the dates all wrong: We see Mr. Ed (1961-66), The Story of Ruth (1960), and Mardi Gras (1958).

Every night she goes to work amid a crew of cleaning ladies in a top secret government installation run by incredible jerk scientists. Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon) keeps trying to have sex with the women.  This is before sexual harassment laws.

One day they bring in the Creature from the Black Lagoon (Doug Jones).  Elisa feeds it eggs and plays it some dance music, and soon discovers that it is sentient, male, and hot.

A Soviet spy (Michael Stuhlbarg) helps Elisa break the Creature out (who knew that the Soviets were the good guys during the Cold War).

Wait -- this should be the end of the movie.  The plot is resolved, right?  I ask Doug to put it on pause so I can go to the bathroom.  It's only half over!

In the last half of this endless 123 minutes, Elisa takes the Creature home and plunks him into the bathtub where she takes her gratuitous nudity,  planning to release him to the ocean on the day that the canal opens.  Um...there aren't any beaches in Baltimore?  

Meanwhile both the Americans and the Soviets are trying to find the Creature, so there's some Spy vs. Spy shenanigans.  And Elisa has fallen in love with the Creature.  They have sex twice (full female nudity, no Creature penis).

Not to worry, it all ends happily when Elisa develops gills and goes to live in the ocean with her beloved Creature.

Really?  I would think that to live in the ocean, you'd need more than gills.  It's cold down there, you can't swim around very well, and won't she eventually want to hang out with some other sentients?

Besides, the Creature is from the Amazon.  How is he going to handle the ecosystem of the North Atlantic?

Beefcake: None.

Interesting sets:  None.  Everything is washed out and drab.

I wasted two hours on this garbage, just to get invited into a guy's bed?

Gay characters:  Oh, I forgot.  Giles isn't an elderly invalid after all, he just acts like one.  He's actually a graphic artist who gets fired from a lot of jobs.  He makes a series of strange fumbling come-ons at the counter man (Morgan Kelly) at the local pie restaurant, who finally catches on and recoils in homophobic horror (not to worry, he's also racist, an all-around bigot).

Ok, an elderly gay man in the early 1960s should know how to determine if someone is gay before grabbing.

So Giles is one of these depressed, lonely gay guys who knows nothing about gay culture but happily facilitates the True Love of the heterosexuals.

My grade: F-.

All this for a penis?  Next time I'm just going on Grindr.