GODS AND MONSTERS

 Del Toro's Frankenstein electrifies

 

It's easy to see why filmmaker Guillermo del Toro calls Frankenstein his dream project. Of course, the auteur behind Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water would have a special affinity for Mary Shelley’s seminal horror story, which Del Toro brings to the screen with all the lavish, soulful grotesquerie for which he is so renowned. No matter how many of the previous 2.8 billion adaptations you’ve seen, Del Toro retells the tale with electrifying urgency, and haunting pathos.

 

Of all the other version out there, Del Toro's sticks closer than most to the tone and narrative of Shelley's novel. It begins and ends in the frozen waste of the North Pole, to which Creator and Creature have hunted each other. There is no Igor in Frankenstein's lab. And the Creature cobbled together from spare body parts is not reduced to monosyllabic grunts; he learns to articulate his rage and despair.

 

 Oscar Isaacs plays Victor Frankenstein with imperious intellect and frenzied zeal. Del Toro likes to shoot his close-ups at weird angles — chin jutting out, eyes wild, mop of black curls streaming behind — to illustrate the idea of scientific questing run amok. Jacob Elordi is absolutely terrific as the Creature, jolted to unnatural life in a lightning storm, through no fault of his own, then abandoned to work out the complexities of existence by himself.

 

In these early scenes, he beautifully expresses the absorbing curiosity, the awed sense of wonder, and capacity for sudden delight, of an infant. (Despite the fact that Elordi must be about eight feet tall, which makes his performance even more affecting.)

 

But like so many thoughtless new parents, Frankenstein has no idea what to do with his newborn. The act of creation itself was the exciting part, not dealing with the consequences. His initial delight soon turns to irritation with the Creature he keeps chained up, unclothed, below stairs. He neglects to teach him language (the only word the Creature knows is "Victor"), then berates him for his inability to communicate. Soon enough, the runaway Creature learns language and decency from a kindly old blind man who befriends him. But it ends badly, of course, when the old man's family returns.

 

Indeed, while a fugitive in the world, a stolen cloak concealing his stitched-together face, the Creature establishes cooperation and fraternity with the wildlife he encounters, like a foraging deer, and the rat colonies with whom he shares his hiding places. It's only through his encounters with humans that he learns cruelty and violence.

 

(Trigger warning: a couple of scenes of animal death are integral to the plot, but not for the tender-hearted.)

 

Shelley's novel is subtitled The Modern Prometheus, and this is how Victor sees himself, stealing the gift of life from the gods, mostly to prove himself their equal. When he brings an early working prototype — head, torso, arms — to display at a medical college, the doctors and students watch in horrified fascination as he temporarily reanimates the thing with an electrical charge. Tellingly, when Victor abruptly switches off the life force, he takes no notice of the creature's pitiful death rattle.

 

These questions of Creator and Creature, father and son, and humanity and its opposite, are explored as their paths continue to cross, leading eventually to their last, fateful encounter in the frozen north. Early on, while still imprisoned under the lab, the Creature meets, Elizabeth (Mia Goth), fiancée to Victor's brother. Far from horrified, she sees them as kindred spirits, their undervalued wit and worth buried beneath their facades — in her case, her porcelain beauty, which guarantees she will never be taken seriously in the world of men. 

 

Later, the Creature confronts Victor with the demand that he build him a mate, like himself, with the eloquent declaration, "I cannot die. And I cannot live alone." The Creature's immortality is not found in Shelley's book, it's completely Del Toro's invention. And while I confess, I must have missed the movie's scientific explanation for why this is so, it enhances the tragedy of the Creature's solitary and eternal otherness.

 

 Meanwhile, these tantalizing themes play out within the extraordinary, immersive production design by Tamara Deverell. A circle of life motif recurs in a giant stone bas-relief rondel that looks like a Greek tragedy mask with Medusa curls, overlooking the lab, an enormous round, mullioned window, and a huge, circular bronze drain in the middle of the floor. Amid the steampunk assortment of pots, beakers, winches, pulleys, and cogs in the lab, the patchwork figure is hoisted up on a cross like the Vitruvian Man, awaiting the spark of life.

 

Frankenstein runs for a whopping two hours and forty minutes, and there's never a dull moment, in terms of things to look at, thoughts to ponder, and sheer, cinematic bravura. And it never runs out of steam, right up to the last, enormously moving confrontation between Victor and his creation, and the gorgeous and devastating final frame.

 

(This movie deserves to be seen on the big screen, of course, but if you do watch it on Netflix, you have the option of hitting pause to drink in all the details!)

OSCAR SHAPES UP

Frances McDormand, 3 Billboards: blackly comic

Mavericks to duke it out at 90th Academy Awards

After the OscarSoWhite hashtag movement a couple of years ago, the Motion Picture Academy's demographics have altered.

With membership now opened up to a younger, more diverse crowd of film pros, you might expect this year's nominees to feature a few plucky mavericks vs. the mainstream favorites.

But — surprise! Almost none of the nominees qualify as "mainstream," including the two top contenders: Guillermo del Toro's eerie, romantic fantasy, The Shape of Water, and Martin McDonagh's blackly comic morality play Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

Guillermo del Toro in the (Best) Director seat

While the predictive winners in all four acting categories are pretty much set in stone (results have been uniform throughout the awards season), there's still plenty of room to stir up trouble!

Here's what I think will happen:

BEST PICTURE Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri Usually, if you subtract the four (out of nine) nominees whose directors didn't get a nomination in their category, that narrows the field to five serious contenders.

But even though McDonagh wasn't nominated for directing Three Billboards, it's already won a Golden Globe for Drama, and the Screen Actors Guild Ensemble award. The Shape of Water is my favorite movie of the year, but I think it will rack up its Oscars elsewhere.

Gerwig directed herself and star Saoirse Ronan to Oscar nominations

Or it could be that The Shape Of Water has just gotten so much buzzier even since those early awards were issued to Three Billboards that it might just bubble up to the top here, as well.

The Post was a favorite going into the season, with its timely tale of crusading journalists standing up for the truth, but here, the lack of a nomination for director Steven Spielberg suggests it's run out of steam since then.

Less likely (but not impossible) upsets might by Greta Gerwig's smart, beloved indie comedy, Lady Bird, or Jordan Peele's darkly subversive racial-politics horror movie Get Out (Gerwig and Peele both scored directing nominations).

Jordan Peele directs star Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out

BEST DIRECTOR  Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water He's already won every award there is in this category — in compensation for Three Billboards walking off with most of the Best Picture prizes — but mostly because Del Toro's irrepressible, iconoclastic personality infuses every frame of this rapturous movie.

Gerwig won a Golden Globe in the comedy category, and Peele earned a Best First Feature nod from the Directors Guild on America (although Del Toro won Best Director from the DGA). So anything is possible.

BEST ACTRESS Frances McDormand, Three Billboards  Bet the rent; name an award in this category, and she's already won it. And deservedly so.

BEST ACTOR Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour Another shoo-in, like all four favored acting nominees. Besides, there has to be some kind of recognition for a guy who started out playing Sid Vicious tackling the role of Winston Churchill.

Rockwell, McDormand, 3 Billboards: Winners

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS Allison Janney, I, Tonya  She doesn't just "disappear" into the role of Tonya Harding's cold, heartless mom; Janney plays her in a trance-like state of viperish perversity.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards He's got all the buzz, as the hot-headed deputy dragged kicking and screaming to a kind of redemption. I thought his co-star, Woody Harrelson (also nominated) was just as good in this category.

But I'd have liked to see a shout-out for Doug Jones in The Shape of Water. A longtime Del Toro co-conspirator (he played Fauno/Pan in Pan's Labyrinth, and was recently seen as the impossibly elongated alien First Officer Saru in Star Trek: Discovery), Jones' poignant Amphibian Man romancing Sally Hawkins gives the movie its heart and soul.

Doug Jones, Amphibian Man: Romantic

OTHER Here's where those new Academy members may prevail with an Original Screenplay award to Peele for Get Out, beating out Del Toro and McDonagh (Although the latter has scored some pre-Oscar awards for Three Billboards). Veteran director James Ivory looks poised to win the Adapted Screenplay award for Call Me By Your Name.

Expect Blade Runner 2049 to score gold for Cinematography, while Phantom Thread wins in the Costume department. (Although, for a movie about the fashion industry, I found the clothes as lackluster as everything else in Phantom Thread.)

Meanwhile, The Shape of Water should swim to victory for its atmospheric sea-green Production Design, and its expressive Original Score by Alexandre Desplat.

(The 90th Annual Academy Awards will be broadcast Sunday, March 4, at 5pm on ABC.)

OF BEASTS AND BEAUTIES

There's a funny moment in the sci-fi movie, Mimic, an early work by Guillermo del Toro: some creepy guy is trying to put the moves on the character played by Mira Sorvino, who is so not interested.

"I like to stick to my own species," she cracks.

Evidently, Del Toro has altered his own position on this point since then, judging from the rapturous love story at the heart of his beguiling new movie, The Shape of Water.

In this romantic pairing, the heroine is a mousy, spinsterish woman scrubbing floors at a secret government facility, and the hero is a man-sized amphibian, complete with gills, fish scales, and webbed digits.

Okay, what couple doesn't have their issues? But in the name of diversity, tolerance, and the right to fall in love with whoever you choose, their relationship blossoms into one the year's most poignant love stories.

Which got me thinking about the age-old Beauty and the Beast trope and how it continues to be updated through the generations.

Thoughts already much on my mind during the writing of my own B&B-inspired novel, Beast: A Tale of Love and Revenge. (Coming in July to a bookstore near you!)

After a few centuries on the old wives tale circuit, the story was first set down in print in the 18th Century, as an instructive tale for young ladies about to be married off by their families to scary older men. The point was to train timorous young brides to see beyond the ferocious-seeming exterior to the humanity within.

But the tale is always ripe for alternative interpretations and debate, around a few central questions: What constitutes beauty and beastliness? Does physical beauty make one beautiful? Does a a beastly face make one a monster, even if one has a human heart?

Does one have to be considered beautiful to be worthy of love?

Del Toro's heroine is not considered a beauty, and she's further marginalized by her inability to speak. Despite his monstrous appearance, the beast character here demonstrates empathy, intelligence, and compassion. The only real monsters in the story are human.

Julia Adams meets The Creature: blood-curdling

Linda Hamilton, Ron Perlman: Romantic

In pop fiction (the fairy tales of today), we've come a long way since the monstrous "Gill-Man" in The Creature From the Black Lagoon (to whom Del Toro pays such loving homage). Back then, the ferociousness of this "monster" elicited from co-star Julia Adams one of the juiciest, most blood-curdling screams in the history of movies.

We've seen the lion-faced Vincent as romantic hero in the old Beauty and the Beast TV series. We've seen a generation of sexy vampires and werewolves, to whom their human prey all too eagerly succumb. Del Toro intuits the time may be right for an unapologetic sort of "beast" who doesn't have to be revealed as a (yawn) handsome prince to earn his happy ending.

And here's the best part (SPOILER ALERT) — in Del Toro's movie, they find a way to be together. A lovely, poetic way.

Because, really, who doesn't root for the Beast to end up with the woman he's wooed and won?

RAPTURE OF THE DEEP

Offbeat love story simmers in bewitching Shape of Water

It would be glib to say The Shape of Water is like Beauty and the Beast meets The Creature From the Black Lagoon. It would be accurate, but it doesn't suggest the profound emotional pull and dramatic resonance of this bewitching new movie from Guillermo del Toro.

The master craftsman behind the amazing Pan's Labyrinth, Del Toro's career has taken some oddball turns since then, but he's back in top form with this evocative modern fairy-tale.

Co-scripted by Del Toro and Vanessa Taylor, the story begins at a secret government facility in Baltimore, ca 1962 — at the height of the Spy-vs-Spy tensions of the Cold War. Elisa (Sally Hawkins), and her friend, Zelda (Octavia Spencer), are maids, cleaning up the research labs.

An orphan, whose damaged vocal cords render her unable to speak, Elisa lives an orderly, solitary life in an apartment above a once-grand movie theater. Her only other friend, Giles (Richard Jenkins), down the hall, is a lonely, middle-aged gay artist whose magazine illustrations are going out of style.

Hawkins & Jones: Liquid Asset

One day, something strange is brought to the lab, accompanied by volatile government honcho, Strickland (Michael Shannon).

The staff is warned to keep their distance, but Elisa can't help peeking into the tank to find that what everyone refers to as "The Asset" is a man-sized, reptilian, aquatic creature with scales, webbed digits, and gills, captured from the jungles of South America — where "the natives consider him a god."

The scientists, however, are only interested in his dual breathing mechanisms (both water and air), which they plan to study for military purposes. But Elisa soon discovers he's a sentient being, able to communicate. It's agonizing enough whenever sadistic Strickland shows up with a cattle-prod to show "The Asset" who's boss. But when Elisa hears they plan to dissect him, she goes into action.

Hawkins & Jenkins: Allies for love

That's the plot, but Del Toro takes extraordinary time and care to develop Elisa's relationship with the "Amphibian Man." She brings him food and companionship; he learns her sign language (which no one else at the facility bothers to do), and responds to music she smuggles in to play for him.

In small deft strokes, theirs becomes one of the most compelling, fanciful, and satisfying love stories you'll see onscreen all year. As Elisa signs to Giles, "He doesn't see how I am incomplete." They recognize in each other something everyone else is missing.

Loud and clear: Elisa has a message for male authority

Hawkins is as marvelous as ever, full of smoldering fury at Strickland (the story's real "monster"), yet persuasively tender and giddy in love. But major kudos go to Doug Jones, as the creature. A frequent Del Toro collaborator, he's a skilled mime who specializes in otherworldly roles (he played the fearsome Fauno in Pan's Labyrinth, and Abe Sapien in the Hellboy movies).

The range of subtle sound effects by which the character communicates are brilliantly done, but it's Jones' soulful, expressive presence that gives the movie its heart.

Inspiration: the original "Amphibian Man"

And it's all done with make-up; you'd never feel so much humanity from a CGI effect.

Jenkins is also terrific as wry observer Giles; hopelessly crushed on the guy who serves pie at the diner, he becomes Elisa's staunchest ally. And Del Toro's sheer joy of filmmaking is contagious, from precision chase scenes, and glimpses of period TV shows like Mr. Ed and Dobie Gillis, cannily chosen to inform the story, to his gleeful homage to vintage Hollywood musicals in a nutty but irresistible fantasy dance routine shot in black-and-white, a la Fred and Ginger.

Cat lovers (like me) will find one incident distressing, but even that makes a valid point about letting what's wild stay wild. Overall, this offbeat love story could not be more timely, or effective.

It celebrates diversity with a "disabled" heroine, a woman of color, and a gay man teaming up to thwart the evil schemes of a government of monsters. It's about a woman who defies the perception that she is powerless against condescending male authority. It rebukes stark political and scientific agendas without compassion. And it stands up for the unalienable right to fall in love — period.

ANTICIPATION

Hey, film fans!

Remember that upcoming Guillermo del Toro movie, The Shape Of Water, I was fangirling all over a few posts back? No, I haven't seen it — it comes out December 8 — but the gender-bent Little Mermaid meets The Creature From the Black Lagoon, meets Beauty and the Beast vibe has me drooling in anticipation!

Maestro del Toro calls it a Cold War Fairy Tale!

Well, a new, expanded trailer has just been released. And, naturally, since we're all buds, I thought I'd share it with you.

And speaking of breathless anticipation, what's up with Game of Thrones?

Season 7 ended at the end of August.

But Season 8 — the FINAL SEASON! — isn't scheduled to be broadcast until (gah!) 2019!

Feeling blue? Who isn't?

But cheer up with this reel of on-set Game of Thrones bloopers!

You're welcome!

FISH TALE

So, this just crossed my virtual desk.

Normally, of course, I wait until I actually see a movie before I start raving about it. But I think this just shot to the top of my list of (potential) favorite movies of 2017!

(Despite stiff competition already from Franck and Their Finest.)

From the great Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth), behold the new trailer for The Shape of Water.

Looks to me like a gender-reversed Little Mermaid meets Creature From the Black Lagoon, with a little Beauty and the Beast tossed in, just to spice things up!

And you know how much I love a good mer-folk tale!

Opens Dec 8 on a big screen near you.

I am SO there!