From Sacheen Littlefeather’s rejection speech in 1973, to the #OscarsSoWhite campaign, to tweeting Donald Trump during the ceremony, the Academy Awards have been politically charged for ages. This year was no exception, as movies like Get Out and Call Me By Your Name scored 4 nominations (and both were Best Picture contenders). I have no problem with that; in fact, I really wanted one of those two movies to win Best Picture. These two films provided brilliant, unfiltered social commentary that I believed deserved the highest accolade Hollywood has to offer.
But that didn’t happen. The Shape of Water won. So, let’s talk about it.
The Shape of Water starts out with a voice over (“Ding!” goes the CinemaSins counter) and an amazing underwater shot of our main character Elisa’s bedroom. The green, black, and grey color palette immediately invoke images of the Cold War to me, the era in which this movie takes place. I loved it. Honestly, my favorite part of the whole movie happened right at that start.
The movie makes it painfully clear that Elisa’s life revolves around water. She masturbates in her bathtub. She has gill-like cuts on her necks. It does make it slightly less jarring when we meet her love interest, the fish man (There is only one fish man for me, personally, but to each their own).
What I found jarring was the movie’s split-in-two nature. The first half was great, but the second half felt off. The pacing was strange, the plots diverged too much for me to really follow any of them intently, and the ending felt obvious.
What was great was the cinematography and the actor’s performances (Michael Shannon and Octavia Spencer were amazing!). What wasn’t great was the rest. The budding romance was rushed into a montage scene, the setting was oddly underdeveloped in some ways (what’s Elisa’s story, then? How’d she get the job at the facility? What was her childhood like? And who really was her boss?), and the climax/ending was predictable.
Enough about that: what was primarily jarring was the weird snippets of political commentary. To elaborate: Elisa’s good friend (a character whose name I do not remember) is a gay man, and when he makes advances towards a cute clerk at a restaurant, the clerk reacts poorly and tells the good friend that that kind of behavior isn’t accepted. Then, a couple walks into the restaurant, and the clerk kicks them out for being black. So, right in my face was this clear message of hypocrisy: Look at this double standard! Look at how this clerk rejects homosexuality as being evil, but the clerk is so evil himself! A movie like Get Out was more subtle in its depiction of privilege and injustice (like when Rose’s father tells Chris he would have voted for Obama three times, or when the white family talks about their love for Tiger Woods). The message was clear and yet so seamlessly subtle. It wasn’t like that in The Shape of Water.
Earlier, I mentioned how the Oscars are always politically charged. This film is politically charged for the sake of being politically charged. It’s like those speeches that rich, elitist actors make condemning our present but not doing anything to change the future (ahem, DiCaprio and Streep). Get Out makes someone think. The Shape of Water just says it out loud.
While watching this movie, I found myself thinking of Ex Machina (The idea of an outsider being trapped under the control of an evil mastermind is a shared characteristic of both). They are wildly different movies, but what also stands them apart is that I really like Ex Machina. Really REALLY like Ex Machina. I don’t like The Shape of Water.
The Shape of Water is a lot like an ex-boyfriend. It was good at the time, but I don’t want to see it again.