It’s no secret among those who know me that I’m not a fan of M. Night Shyamalan’s body of work. I found the “twist” in The Sixth Sense to be utterly preposterous, I feel Unbreakable should have been called Unbearable, I found the “surprise” in Signs quite frankly to be just plain stupid, and why was The Village even made? I just don’t understand why people continue to give Shyamalan money to keep making movies that on the surface might seem pretty cool, but if the minutest bit of scrutiny is turned upon the stories themselves, the plots fall apart like a house of cards thrown into a wind tunnel. That being said, I went into Lady in the Water with as open a mind as possible, virtually undergoing self-hypnosis in order to do so.
And I enjoyed it.
To a degree.
Abraham Lincoln once said “You may deceive all the people part of the time, and part of the people all the time, but not all the people all the time.” Shyamalan once told an interviewer, “The idea is to always go for the thing that’s risky. I want to be courageous and original. And original means, you don’t know what ‘color’ movie you just saw.” After his last movie, The Village was savaged by film critics and mostly spurned by audiences, it seems the director has taken Honest Abe’s words to heart and abandoned his own previous contentions. In Lady in the Water, there actually is NO twist ending, and everything lain out is EXACTLY what it seems. By making a mostly conventional movie, Shyamalan has partly succeeded in a non-conventional way.
The movie focuses on Cleveland Heep(Paul Giamatti), a building superintendent and basically decent guy, who is perplexed because it seems during the evenings, someone has been swimming in the pool of the building he tends. While trying to spot the person one evening, poor Cleveland slips on the wet poolside, bashes his head and rolls over into the pool unconscious, where it seems he will meet an ignoble end. He does awaken in his own apartment howev-er, to find a half-naked, extremely pale girl curled up into a ball, duti-fully watching over him—his savior. Her name is Story, and as events unfold Cleveland is made aware that she is a mythical crea-ture called a Narf. Narfs live in what is called The Blue World(water), and it is Story’s duty to find a specific human and awaken something great within him—something which will play out into a grand destiny for humankind, saving our species from ultimate annihilation.
Story’s story isn’t without dangers, of course. She is being hunt-ed by a ravenous creature called a Scrunt, which is intent for some vague reason never fully explained, on preventing her mission from being fulfilled. The Scrunt wants to kill her before she can succeed and be carried home on the wings of a giant eagle. It might very well succeed, unless Story’s own protectors—humans as well as other-worldly creatures called Tartunics—can keep her safe until she finds her chosen human and performs his awakening.
If all this sounds vaguely simplistic, keep in mind that Lady in the Water is based upon a bedtime story(ha-ha) which Shyamalan made up on the fly to tell his daughter as he tucked her in one night. With that revelation bared, is it any wonder Disney—the very epitome of family friendliness—chose not to continue funding the movie? The tale has become legendary, how no less than six Dis-ney execs flew to Shyamalan’s hometown of Wayne, PA to sit down with him and say “We don’t get it. We don’t understand what this script is about.” Shyamalan is said to have left the meeting in tears, although supposedly he has reached some rapprochement with Disney. However it was ultimately Warner Brothers which released the film.
Although Giamatti does solid work throughout Lady, one does grow annoyed at his facial ticks and stuttering(the result of a per-sonal tragedy which befell Heep’s family some years earlier). The rest of the characters, both primary and secondary, aren’t really people so much as seemingly half-sketched caricatures or approxi-mations of people. It’s as if Shyamalan was writing and thought, “Okay, I need a healer character here…I’ll make her an old lady who takes in stray animals. Hmmm, what about a Guild? Oh, that’s it—a bunch of guys who sit around blabbing about seemingly inconse-quential stuff when we first see them, but it’ll all make sense later! Yeah, that’s the ticket!” In spite of my earlier critique of his work, I’ll admit that Shyamalan is strongest when crafting dialogue between two or three characters, particularly if they’re his leads…but he needs to stay away from larger pieces requiring more than that in a room at any given time.
Few of the actors seem to fully grasp onto their roles or even understand them, with the exceptions of Giamatti and Bryce Dallas Howard(director Ron Howard’s daughter, also featured in M. Night’s The Village) who plays Story—but is given nearly nothing to do except look pale and spout mildly cryptic judgments. Jeffrey Wright gives a fine, controlled and understated performance as Mr. Dury, a man obsessed with solving crossword puzzles. It’s nice to see him break out into another role, after playing the standard Latino gang leader in John Singleton’s Shaft. The shockingly beautiful Sarita Choudhury gamely and entertainingly plays Anna Ran, sister of the One To Be Awakened by Story. Every time Choudhury is on screen, it’s a pleasure to behold her talent.
As for the Awakened One…sadly, Shyamalan decides to extend his habit of Hithcockian cameos in his own movies into an actual full role in this one. He plays Vick Ran, a struggling author with a severe case of writer’s block, whose awakening by Story reveals that his words will one day touch the heart of a future U.S. president who will begin the process of leading the world into a golden age of peace. If Shyamalan’s writing couldn’t pierce my heart, I doubt it’ll do a crap-load of good to any future Clintons, Bushes or Damiens. It is the height of arrogance and self-idolization for Shyamalan to not only cast himself as one of the primaries, but to make his character’s works so important to the ultimate outcome of Story’s quest. Lady in the Water truly is Shyamalan’s most personal work to date on sev-eral levels, and not all of them good. Placing himself in scene after scene not only serves as a type of on-screen mental masturbation for the director, it also breaks the viewer completely out of the tale in each instance.
The immediate tale is flimsy enough to begin with, and Shyama-lan has always been a writer of convenience: Giamatti’s character must believe Story’s claims in order to keep the plot advancing, and so he does—with absolutely no cynicism, skepticism or underlying personal red flags telling him “this chick might not be on the up-and-up”. He too easily brings others in on the conspiracy, and they fall for Story’s tale with just enough “disagreement” to add about four seconds of “will they/won’t they help” tension before they almost collectively shrug and agree to get on with things. Although Heep is the only one in the building to actually see a Scrunt, the other char-acters intrinsically believe him because the writer/director says they must…and what the hey, Heep’s a nice guy anyway, so why would he be pulling our leg about this, right?
There is also one particularly petty, mean moment in the film as well. It’s well-known that Shyamalan has a disdain for certain critics who have spoken ill of his films in the past. Bob Balaban plays Harry Farber(named after one such critic) who in the movie is of course a film critic, and the ONLY CHARACTER KILLED BY THE SCRUNT. (Hey, maybe M. Night will put a character named Bance Lerry in his next film and have him killed. I could use the 15 minutes!) This is a type of childishness which one would hope a director of his influence would be able to rise above, but apparently not.
Aside from such pettiness and self-absorbance, I did enjoy the film to a certain degree and was able to take it at face value for what it is: a loosely stitched together patchwork of stringy threads which make up a tapestry that wouldn’t fetch $5 on Ebay. While Shyama-lan’s regular composer, James Newton Howard, serves him well—the score is at once moody, sad, evocative and touching on many levels—the creature design leaves a lot to be desired. While it’s true that from Cavemen to Vikings to Stephen King had to use referen-ces people would understand to some point when describing mytho-logical creatures(folks around the campfire had to know said crea-tures “had antlers like a deer” rather than “it had two great big floopsie-floos!”), the Scrunt looks too much like a hyena. The Tar-tunics look too much like monkeys. Also, as far as biological logic goes in storytelling, why is it that Story herself comes from the Blue World, but her animal enemies and protectors both come from land? And the revelation of who her true Guardian turns out to be—the only human capable of staring down a Scrunt and effectively hypno-tizing it in order to keep it from attacking—is so damned laughable and preposterous, I’m amazed Shyamalan’s film didn’t get shut down a second time before production was completed.
I hope that Shyamalan will consider his next tale more carefully, and then reconsider it once more before committing it to film. While Lady in the Water does have some heart and asks us to believe in the magical possibilities of what might be going on right in our own backyard at night, it only manages to stir the child within us enough from its slumber, so that it looks about confused and disoriented a moment, before rolling over with a shrug to go back to sleep. Next time M. Night, please keep your bedtime stories in the confines of your own home.
Official Archives of LanceReviews...
Lady in the Water
(Or: Bedtime stories which didn't need to be told)
A bedtime story for some...a nightmare for film critics.
"It's okay, Bryce...Opie's coming to pick you up."
"Hey, Paul...a bunch of us are gonna check the want ads and see if any real directors like Peter Jackson are hiring. Wanna come?"
M. Night readies the camera to catch every shot of him metaphorically spanking off.
"Stay away from our careers, M. Night! Back, I say!"
"Yeah, I know...after being in this movie, I'm gonna need some therapy, too."
