It took me awhile before I got around to seeing M. Night Shyamaan’s much-disparaged Lady in the Water. Virtually everyone I know who’d seen the film warned me against a viewing. The flick even managed to pick up two ignominious “Razzie” Awards (the opposite of the Oscars, to put it kindly), both of which went to M. Night as “worst director” and “worst supporting actor” of 2006. But how could I not check out the latest from the director of Signs or the underrated masterpiece, Unbreakable?
So see it I did, and (to quote P.G. Wodehouse) I’m not disgruntled, but I’m far from gruntled. Lady in the Water is silly, incoherent, unsatisfying, self-indulgent…and thoroughly watchable. Even entertaining. Because Shyamalan’s movies are distinctively his own, and he believes in his own vision. The man’s self-faith borders on lunacy, but the predominantly bland, marketing-driven world of modern movies could use a few more eccentric visionaries.
Belief is a major theme of Shyamalan’s movies. The question of faith is central to most of his plotlines, as well as its ancillary: the question of each person’s purpose in life. Shyamalan’s self-envisioned purpose is clear: he sees himself as an old-school storyteller. They’re a dying breed, to be sure, and the man who considers himself an heir to Hitchcock and Spielberg earns some slack, in mind, but he can only stretch my goodwill so far.
The movie’s about a likable shlub named Cleveland Heep (who else but the wonderful Paul Giamatti?) whose daily routine as an apartment complex superintendent is interrupted when he fishes a narf out of the swimming pool. A narf? Yes, a narf: an ethereal Bryce Dallas Howard plays the Madame Narf, “Story.” Story? Yes, Story. She needs to get home to “the Blue World,” but there’s a Big Bad Scrunt that wants to eat her. A scrunt? Yes, a scrunt. And we haven’t even touched on the tartutics.
Funny names aside, the plot of Lady in the Water manages to be both simple and convoluted, as if M. Night decided to turn an earworm jingle into a grand opera. M. Night’s previous movie, The Village, had echoes of Little Red Riding Hood, and as a storyteller he is understandably fascinated by the universal pull of mythology—but even as fairy tales go, Lady in the Water is a load of hooey. To give you one example, the plot hinges on a child being able to read secret codes on the covers of cereal boxes. Suddenly, “I see dead people,” seems the height of plausibility. And in case you’re wondering, Lady in the Water did indeed begin its misbegotten life as a bedtime story M. Night Shyamalan told to his kids.
That touching tidbit aside, this movie was probably the wrong venue for M. Night to proclaim his genius as a Man of Letters. In a woefully misguided decision, M. Night cast himself in the film as a writer whose words will change the world. Story prophecies of a “great orator” who will one day read his (I mean his character’s) book, and “your book will be the seeds of many of his great thoughts.” Most viewers will consider this offensively hubristic. And so it is, but it’s also strangely endearing. Shyamalan actually wants to change the world. When Cleveland is asked by a hermitic tenant whether he believes mankind is worth saving, he answers “Yes” without batting an eyelash. And in a scene that will either elicit tears or groans from the audience, Cleveland holds a dangerously ill Story in his arms as he prays to his dead wife and child—“I miss your faces. They remind me of God. I’m so lost without you guys.” In an age of tired cynicism and easy skepticism, I appreciate a filmmaker who dares to invest his stories with an almost desperate spirituality. (For the record: Shyamalan is not bad in the part of the writer/genius/prophet—he’s soft-spoken, oddly charming—but like the movie itself, it was just a bad idea to begin with.)
And yet I like the guy, and I can’t help but like his movies. Lady in the Water is so un-cynical, it’s virtually begging for snide remarks. Shyamalan didn’t help himself by trading in his trademark tight storytelling for something sloppy and ill-conceived. M. Night’s follies are on a grand scale—here he aims to make a modern myth and falls precipitously short—but he’s trying, God bless him. The old saying goes: Aim for the stars, land on the barnyard roof. And you know what? The view from the barnyard roof’s not always so shabby.
USCCB rating: A-II—adults and adolescents. (PG-13)