Lady in the Water

by John

With Lady in the Water, M. Night Shyamalan joins the ranks of talented filmmakers who occasionally take a completely wrong turn without looking back. In other words, the writer-director has created his very first unqualified failure.

After an animated prologue provides the film with some unnecessary, heavy-handed backstory, we are introduced to Cleveland Heep (Paul Giammati), the mild-mannered superintendant of an apartment complex. When he discovers Story (Bryce Dallas Howard), a sea nymph who resides in the apartment swimming pool, Cleveland takes it upon himself to solve the puzzle of her mission. If only the story was that clear and simple. In order to help Story, Cleveland must piece together bits of an obviously made-up Korean fable from two of his tenants, a mother and her annoying teenager daughter whose accent is ridiculous. Instead of simply telling the fable in one sitting, the mother only reveals a few segments of it at a time because of some hang-up she has with strangers, resolved only if the stranger literally acts like a child, which Clevelad is eventually forced to do.  This particular subplot is a weakly disguised device to draw the story out to feature film length, and the mere fact that one of Cleveland's own tenants actually knows of the story told in the prologue is another concept that is much too convenient.

Anyway, back to the woefully ill-conceived premise. Story, as it turns out, is called a narf. Her mission is to meet eyes with an unpublished writer so that he's inspired to finish writing a book that, in turn, will inspire a child to become a great leader later in life. Cleveland must figure out which one of his tenants is this important literary genius. Oddly enough, the writer is played by none other than Shyamalan himself. This regrettable casting choice is somewhat akin to the idea of Steven Spielberg casting himself as Oskar Schindler in Schindler's List . Needless to say, Shyamalan's mostly blank performance leaves much to be desired and helps to further undermine the film.

After the writer gets his inspiration, Cleveland must make sure that Story returns safely to her world, or her visit would somehow be pointless. To do this, Cleveland must go on another tenant easter-egg hunt, this time to find out which of his tenants fulfill certain functions that will protect the narf against a wolf-like creature called a scrunt. Normally, this wouldn't even be necessary, but because Story is revealed to be a special narf, called a madame narf, and the scunt is a special scrunt, called a rogue scrunt, finding all these people must unfortunately be done. When the madame narf is rescued by a giant eagle called the great eatlon, a trio of creatures known collectively as the tartutic will be allowed to jump down from nearby trees and beat up the scrunt for breaking the laws that forbid him to hunt Story. Amazingly, all the tenants buy into this insane tale with minimal hesitation, if any. Shyamalan apparently expected the same reaction from the moviegoing public as well, but in devising a story that often seems to be the very definition of unconvincing, he has doomed his newest film to disaster.

Admittedly, it's not as if warning signs for the problems in Lady haven't cropped up in Shyamalan's films before. Initially, he was able to justify pulling the wool over our eyes in his best two films, The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. In these two movies, the emotional, character-based progression of the storyline was brought to satisfying closure before he revealed the plot twist. In Signs, an assortment of self-fulfilling prophecies ingrained into the premise contributed to a decidedly staged feel, but with his entertaining emphasis on suspense and humor the film managed to work. In The Village, however, his more wayward impulses began taking a toll: several twists revealed during the course of the film served his theme but severely detracted from the power of the story. Even so, the poetry of the performances and characterizations, as well as some effective suspense scenes, partially made up for the structural flaws that undermined the film.

Not so in Lady in the Water. The traps Shyamalan laid for himself here are just too crippling. Never before has he been so concerned with slavishly obeying his Theme of Massive Significance — already used to good effect in Unbreakable and to a slightly lesser extent in Signs — that he blinds himself to the very fundamentals of storytelling. The result is a flimsy, rambling, arbitrarily constructed narrative that is made all the more tedious and laughable by an overly self-important tone. Compounding these problems is that his trademark suspense and emotional characterizations are all noticeably malnourished in this film. We are given glimpses of various characters living in an apartment complex, but none of them develop beyond brief sketches or caricatures. Even Cleveland reveals himself in unfocused fits and starts. His final emotional outburst is completely unearned.

The quick scenes of suspense that involve the scrunt stalking people are barely enough to provide any kind of sustained satisfaction. And although there are some moments of humor to be enjoyed, there is not enough of the self-referential variety sorely needed for this kind of movie. Even if it didn't take itself so seriously, however, no amount of laughs could excuse such an incoherent storyline. Short on the suspense, emotion, and character development he has used to great effect in most of his previous films, it's clear that this isn't a case of Lady failing to live up to its potential — it never had any potential to begin with. That the writer of such a sublime, mature film as Unbreakable was unable to detect the colossal mistakes he made in writing Lady in the Water is simply bewildering. The only unqualified shred of praise this film could receive is for Paul Giamatti's wholly engrossing and believable performance. Giamatti shows what a truly gifted actor can do when trapped in a fiasco of a movie, so much so that it is enough to provide temporary relief from the discomfort of watching a story fall apart with every scene.

Shyamalan's theme is that we all have a purpose in life, and our path to discovering it is guided by hope, faith, love, and compassion for others, as well as for yourself. It's a beautiful statement, but any message is only as effective as the story it should serve. To watch Shyamalan's statement get garbled in such a misguided film as Lady in the Water is a decidedly uninspiring experience.