The View From The Mountain

What can I say about my love for The Shape Of Water that hasn’t already been expressed in the glowing reviews that it has already received? It’s even been warmly embraced by the Oscar voters, who gave it the Best Picture Oscar of 2017. Guillermo del Toro’s wondrous fairy tale, about an unusual love story taking place at the height of the Cold War, is at times charming, warm and loving, and extremely weird. And it’s all good. The mesmerizing Sally Hawkins plays Elisa, a mute woman who works as a cleaning woman at a government facility. One day, a special item is brought into the facility, a strange fish-man (played by Doug Jones in a performance that’s just as challenging--and silent--as Hawkins’). This fish man comes with his own jailer, the man who caught him in South America, Richard Strickland, a hard-nosed martinet played by Michael Shannon, whose black-hearted performance feels just a little over the top at times. But this story is framed as a fairy tale that’s being told to us...