Stratton reviews: Del Toro’s The Shape of Water; Spielberg’s The Post

In his latest foray into romantic fantasy Guillermo del Toro delves into the Cold War, sci-fi, musicals and film noir.

Sally Hawkins and the creature (played by Doug Jones) in The Shape of Water.

For his latest foray into romantic fantasy, The Shape of Water, Mexican ­director Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Crimson Peak) delves into not only a now-distant America of Cold War paranoia but also into Hollywood’s much-loved genre cinema — science fiction, musicals, film noir.

It’s a heady mixture, but del Toro and his screenwriting collaborator Vanessa Taylor succeed beyond all expectations in blending disparate themes and characters into one blissfully romantic and entirely satisfying whole. On paper it may sound indigestible, but on screen it’s pure magic and it was the deserving winner of both the Golden Lion in Venice and the Golden Globe best director awards.

The year is 1962, the place is Baltimore and the protagonist is Elisa (Britain’s sublime Sally Hawkins), who has been orphaned since birth and who is unable speak, though she can hear perfectly well. Elisa lives alone in an apartment above a cinema screening sparsely attended CinemaScope double bills and though lonely she’s not without friends.

Giles (Richard Jenkins), her upstairs neighbour, is one; he’s a closeted gay man who quietly yearns for the server (Morgan Kelly) at the local diner. Giles is a talented illustrator who worked in the advertising industry until the work dried up, presumably because of his sexuality. Giles narrates the film, and the opening narration — spoken over a background of images of the flooded apartment — is that of a fairytale that happened a long time ago during the reign of a fair prince. Giles loves to watch old musicals on television, and Elisa is thrilled to watch Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson performing a tap dance routine.

Elisa works alongside the friendly, talkative Zelda (Octavia Spencer) as a cleaner at OCCAM, a top-secret government laboratory overseen by the hardline boss of security, ­Strickland (Michael Shannon). There is something large and mysterious contained in a water tank in the lab, something I would normally not reveal except that the film’s absurdly over-­informative trailer has already given away most of its secrets. In a clear nod to one of the seminal sci-fi films, Jack Arnold’s Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), the tank contains a “gillman” discovered in a remote part of the ­Amazon and transported to this facility by ­scientists in the hope and expectation that this “asset” will give America some kind of advantage over the Soviet Union — the capacity of its lungs may be of help in the current space race.

Michael Stuhlbarg, so good as the father in Call Me By Your Name, is excellent here, too, as Dr Hoffstetler, one of the leading project scientists, but also a man with a secret.

The creature, given its vaguely human form by Doug Jones, the actor who was in del Toro’s Hellboy films, is savage — it/he has already ­bitten off two of Strickland’s fingers — but when Elisa secretly encounters it/him there’s an instant connection. Neither can talk but both can somehow communicate, and they share a love for music — one of the film’s most unexpected and utterly beguiling sequences involves the Oscar-winning Harry Warren and Mack Gordon ballad You’ll Never Know, as sung by Alice Faye in Hello, Frisco, Hello (1943).

The Shape of Water is, indeed, a fairytale — a very romantic, very eclectic, very grown up and strangely beautiful fairytale. It looks superb, with wonderful production design by Paul Denham Austerberry and photography by Dan Laustsen, and it sounds great, too, thanks to one of composer Alexandre Desplat’s best scores. Most important are the touchingly real human characters — the vulnerable Elisa, the repressed Giles, even the monstrous Strickland.

This is a vauntingly inventive film, and an absolute charmer.

That a free press is a vital factor in the democratic process is a given, and Steven Spielberg’s new film, The Post, reminds us of just how important media independence really is, especially now. The film is a sort of prequel to All the President’s Men (directed by Alan Pakula in 1976), in which Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein ferreted out the truth behind the Watergate break-in — and Spielberg’s film ends with that very break-in.

In The Post the veteran director explores the decision by Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) to publish the so-called Pentagon Papers, a top secret, massively long and detailed US State Department ­document commissioned by secretary of state Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood) on the history of America’s involvement in Vietnam. The report has been copied and purloined by State Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys).

The editorial team in The Post, directed by Steven Spielberg.

Graham, who inherited the family-run newspaper after the suicide of her husband, is in an extraordinarily difficult position. On the one hand her editor, Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks), is urging her to publish or be damned, even though The New York Times, which also received the material from Ellsberg, has been slapped with an injunction by the attorney-general and Graham and Bradlee face prison sentences if they publish the documents. So why publish? Because the papers reveal that five American presidents — Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and now Nixon — lied to congress and to the people about American involvement in an increasingly unpopular war.

But Graham, a Washington socialite, is on close friendly terms with McNamara, just as Bradlee was a drinking pal of John F. ­Kennedy. Besides, at this very moment The Post is in the process of a public offering and the price of the shares will define the paper’s immediate future and its ability to hire the journalists who would write exactly this kind of story.

As scripted by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer, this is riveting stuff; and even though it’s set in what for many might seem the distant past, the themes are probably even more relevant today than they were in the 1970s, given that this is the era of “fake news” and the Trump presidency.

Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep is Katharine Graham.

Spielberg’s thesis is that a free press that is openly and clearly nonpartisan and not beholden to the White House or the government is of vital importance.

He is also very good at depicting the way a newspaper such as The Post used to work. Bradlee keeps a close eye on his friendly rival, The New York Times, observing that one of its key reporters has not had a story published in some time and therefore is probably working on something secret and big. He sends one of his junior reporters to New York to walk into the Times offices of to see what he can discover.

And once the decision to publish is taken — against the advice of The Post’s in-house lawyers — Spielberg delights in depicting the way in which the paper works: the frantic journalists writing to a deadline, the setting of the type, the printing, folding, and delivering of a newspaper that would shed a light on a secretive and vindictive administration.

The Post is the kind of film that used to be far more common in the past when Hollywood treated its audience as grown-ups to an extent that seems hopelessly idealistic today. It’s to Spielberg’s credit that he wanted to tell this story, and that he and his formidable cast tell it so very well.

The Shape of Water (MA15+)

4.5 stars

National release from Thursday

The Post (M)

4 stars

National release