An enchanted fable from Guillermo del Toro, a scary fairy tale (or ‘scaly’ fairy tale) about a captive man-like sea creature held at a top-secret research facility who finds an unlikely soul-mate in mute female staff janitor Sally Hawkins. Made with wit, delicacy & phenomenal attention to period detail (late ‘50s/early ‘60s), del Toro defaults into typical overloading* with overwrought sets & fussy camera work; thematically, too, piling his plate with commie conspiracies, a gay angle, a dollop of racial prejudice (and what monster pic isn’t already a race allegory?), even absurd Double-Features (THE STORY OF RUTH/’60 and MARDI GRAS/’59?). But he mostly gets away with it, likely 'helped' by a very tight budget. (What the man does with 20 mill!) The cast, from Sally Hawkins’ sympathetic maintenance worker & Doug Jones’ ultra-lean amphibian-man to Michael Stuhlbarg’s conflicted scientist/spy & Michael Shannon’s sadistic keeper could hardly be bettered. And del Toro paces the drama & lays out action scenes with a master's touch. Perhaps he shies too much from traditional suspense, preferring to lay on emotion & some unexpectedly frank romance. But at its best, which is most of the time, this is a sui generis wonder.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: A FOX SearchLight release, so lots of Betty Grable & Alice Faye from old FOX movies inserted as musical clips. (They own the rights.) Weird to hear Faye’s signature tune, ‘You’ll Never Know,’ sung & danced on a knock-off RKO/Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers Art Deco ‘Big White Set,’ the one originally used for Irving Berlin’s ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance.’
DOUBLE-BILL: *Del Toro without the excess can be found in THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE/’01.
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