![]() ![]() (At one point, when he’s talking about God with Zelda, Strickland suggests that “He looks like me - maybe even you. ![]() ![]() Starting with Giles and Elisa’s work friend Zelda (Octavia Spencer), and continuing through Shannon’s depiction of masculinity at its most malevolent and toxic, the message of “The Shape of Water” comes through too loud and too clear, as Elisa and her band of outsiders suffer under the yoke of homophobia, racism, intimidation and self-righteous intolerance. But if the world that del Toro builds reflects his usual attention to surprise and detail, the characters that populate it too often feel rote, crammed into roles whose metaphorical meaning too often feels simplistic and bluntly at odds with the rest of the film’s subtlety. Chances are high that the people in that diner thought they had never seen anyone like Jones before in their lives. Filmed in aqueous greens and blues, its period design dripping with kitschy nostalgia and retro-futurism, “The Shape of Water” takes its cues from Golden Age Hollywood, including musicals, Bible epics and 1950s creature features, as well as the sleekly optimistic advertising imagery of the early 1960s: Elisa’s best friend and next-door neighbor, Giles (Richard Jenkins), is a commercial artist working on a campaign for Jell-O, the shaky symbolic repository for the time period’s most uncertain hopes and anxieties. At 6 feet 3 inches tall and 140 pounds, Jones slender, sinewy frame and narrow, angular face make him look almost otherworldly kind of like a living special effect. ![]()
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