Some other way to prove

The Shape of Water

Crit

It's official: as I suspected I would, I regret that this didn't come to town a week later so that it could have been my Christmas Day movie, for which it would have been practically perfect. (If you're asking "Why didn't you just wait a week to go?" I wonder how you even happened onto this blog, since you obviously don't know me.)

Anyway, I want to get that "practically perfect" out of the way first, because the issue that irked me is a pretty big deal, but I don't want it to be the thing I leave you with. Zelda (Octavia Spencer) jokes with Elisa (the transcendent Sally Hawkins at her very most transcendent) throughout the film about her shiftless husband, which is a tired trope regardless of race, though not necessarily toxic, given the distancing of a potentially unreliable reporter, but when we finally meet Lou (Deney Forrest), in a brief but critical sequence, he proves to be not only stereotypically shiftless but also cowardly, both physically and morally--about the worst advertisement for African-American masculinity you could make of the only African-American male with more than a single line in the film. And I can't really see why it's necessary.

An ugly scar on the neck of a film that otherwise works on every level: as a retro monster pic, as a Cold War adventure, as a plea (notwithstanding the treatment of Lou) for tolerance and commonality (but with a sly shot at Stuckey's-style commercially manufactured homogeneity), and especially as a romance. Hawkins has a history of playing characters who fall for the wrong man; maybe the problem all along was that she was falling for the wrong species. Loving the blessedly unnamed "amphibian man" from the South American rain forest (Doug Jones, whom Guillermo del Toro has been hiding in prosthetics for his whole career, but who finally gets to dance this time!) brings a joy into her face unlike any I've seen, and it's joy that's a joy to see.

And finally: Richard Jenkins. Do I need to say any more?

Trailers

• The Post--Do you need to ask? Only if you're that guy who wandered into the blog without knowing me.
• A Quiet Place--This, though, looks like a pretty rote horror film, though the cast is great, including Millicent Simmonds, the most wondrous wonder of Wonderstruck.