Who didn’t love Ron Howard’s Splash back in 1984? Tom Hanks falls in the ocean and nearly drowns but is rescued by the beautiful mermaid Daryl Hannah. She follows him to New York, and they have a romantic idyll until she’s captured by the authorities. “Nobody said love’s perfect,” says Tom’s brother, played by John Candy. Tom has a hard time with the interspecies-mating issue—“I don’t expect it to be perfect, but for God’s sake, it’s usually human!”—but eventually he saves Daryl and returns her to the waters of New York Harbor—then jumps in and follows her to an underwater city.
Now it’s 2018, and we have a Splash for our times. It’s called The Shape of Water. It’s not a romantic comedy. It’s a romantic melodrama with political overtones and progressive attitudes. It may well win the Oscar for Best Picture in a couple of weeks, which would make it perhaps the most peculiar victor in that category in . . . well, ever.
In this reverse-gender Splash, we begin with a merman already in government custody in 1962 Baltimore. A mute cleaning lady at the facility befriends the merman and eventually spirits him to her apartment, which she turns into a virtual bathtub so that she can have sex with him. Unlike Daryl Hannah, he has a fish face. Unlike a fish, he apparently has working humanoid genitalia.
The merman had been captured by a government agent somewhere in South America. He is working to keep the merman from being captured or killed by Soviet agents. But he would also like to kill the merman himself for some reason that is never really specified except that he is an American government agent and therefore evil by default. The G-man has a nice wife and two cute kids but he doesn’t like Baltimore and seems inclined to take out his negative feelings about Charm City on the merman.
There’s a scientist on the G-man’s staff. Turns out he’s a deep-cover Soviet agent. So of course he’s a good guy, and he joins up with the mute’s team of social outcasts—a garrulous African-American woman with whom she works and a gay illustrator who lives down the hall—to get the merman down to the Inner Harbor. Outcasts of all sorts come together to confront the cruelty of The Man.
The Shape of Water was cowritten and directed by Guillermo del Toro, a fascinating Mexican filmmaker who is obsessed with monsters and makes both art-house pictures like Pan’s Labyrinth (which won three Oscars in 2007) and big-budget potboilers like Hellboy and Pacific Rim about them. Del Toro is a phenomenally accomplished director, and the movie is staggeringly gorgeous to look at.
Even more important, it’s gorgeous to listen to. The swoony and enchanting musical score by Alexandre Desplat is among the finest ever written and perhaps the film’s crucial element; a less effective or more ominous score would tilt The Shape of Water into horror or thriller territory and expose its more pedestrian and ludicrous elements. Del Toro knows what he’s after here: He’s made a romantic comedy without the comedy, a monster movie without a monster, a Cold War story without the ideology. A veteran comedy director of my acquaintance asked me if I’d seen it and then said in a tone of self-denigration, “I see what he can do and then I think, what’s the point, you know?”
I so understand what he means—and yet, the first and the last thing there is to say about this movie is, simply, what the hell. The plot is involving in the sense that since you’ve never been told a fairy tale about a mute and a merman getting it on in 1962 Baltimore while being pursued by Soviet and American spies, you don’t really know what’s going to happen. But when what happens finally does happen, it doesn’t really seem all that surprising. I’m not sorry I saw it but I don’t really know what I saw and I didn’t really care.
And the thing is, I did care about Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah in Splash, which got one lousy Oscar nomination instead of 13, like The Shape of Water did.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic.
