Lady in the Water (2006)

DVD, Seattle, WA

September 11, 2007

*** / ****

Writer, director, producer, and now full-blown actor (at least in his own pictures) M. Night Shyamalan has finally gone off the deep end. With the enormous success of his The Sixth Sense in 1999, he has arrogantly turned up the twist-o-meter red herring machine in each of his subsequent films. Sometimes succeeding (Unbreakable was very well done) and other times falling flat on his face (The Village was an insulting rip-off), Shyamalan’s films have always elicited strong reactions. With his newest, Lady in the Water, Shyamalan takes a stab at myth-making turning a children’s story he created and regaled to his children into a cinematic thriller. And like his other films, whether loved or hated, this film is certain to receive its share of both rotten tomatoes and laurels, depending on who is doing the bestowing.

The plot of Lady in the Water involves a stuttering maintenance man Cleveland (Paul Giamatti), and the Philadelphia apartment building he superintends. After discovering a young girl in the building’s pool (Bryce Dallas Howard) Cleveland quickly and conveniently learns of an ancient Eastern fairy tale involving nymphs, narfs, scrunts, healers, guilds, and other silly sounding fantasy vernacular that is directly related to his new-found nymph girl. Enthralled by the tale and bent on saving his charge from the evil wolf-dogs hiding in the bushes (literally!), Cleveland goes on an apartment-wide talent search to discover the missing pieces needed to safely return the girl to her own world. With the people he assumes are correct failing at their respective tasks, Cleveland stutters his way from depressed handy man to hero-for-a-day as the music swells and the rain falls in buckets on the schlubby superman. A dramatic story for sure, now if only his life were changed for the better after the experience then we’d have something to really talk about. Unfortunately, and quite clumsily, the movie fails to think on that particular level and instead merely gives us entertaining fantasy without anything to fully sink our brains into.

Claustrophobic in its cinematography, outrageously absurd in Shyamalan playing an aspiring writer whose work will someday change the world in dramatic fashion, and down right silly as a fairy tale brought to life in the real world, Lady in the Water fights off easy criticism as this very entertaining film nonetheless sucks you in. Red herrings fly as certain characters seem to represent certain things until of course, they do not and something else pushes us in a false direction (this is still Shyamalan after-all!). A mangy ending, mostly show with a throwaway line about the bigger picture is the film’s worst plot point. But still, because the film takes itself so deadly serious and the acting is so very good I found myself enthralled through the final frame. With the clever addition of a book/movie critic character (the excellent Bob Balaban) who grumpily expounds on the movie’s own plot points and twists as they happen, the movie’s self-awareness actually works wherein most films it would surely fall flat. Balaban is so good, so funny, and so inevitably right in the way he interprets just about every situation in the movie, you get the feeling that when he gets his just desserts it isn’t he who truly deserves them. That particular end could more fittingly serve everyone else, the truly arrogant, stupid prognosticators who mucked the whole thing up rather than the dry, logical critic who was on the money with everything he said.

Most films require a good bad guy and at first blush Balaban’s character surely fits that role. However, look more deeply into the bad guy role, probably the only place one could look deeply in this film, and like the best of the cinematic baddies Balaban is someone we love to hate rather than merely hate. One further step in and the conclusion to our hate becomes even more obvious: it is Shyamalan’s save-the-world writer who becomes the easiest to dislike and who is, ironically, the real bad guy in this film. If that arrogant sunuvabitch didn’t require a nymph to risk her life just so he could see her and be inspired to write his world-changing essay none of this funny business would have gone down in the first place.

A Jesus figure in the making or just some clever dude pulling the wool over our eyes once again with his cinematic hocus-pocus? Well, Shyamalan ain’t no Jesus, that’s for sure, but he is original, clever, and a unique presence in modern cinema whose films I always look forward to checking out. Just stay behind the camera next time, big guy, and your arrogant cinematic statements won’t elicit the instant hate they rightfully deserve. No matter, Lady in the Water is a fine film and excellent entertainment.