Lady in the Water (2006): D

A petulant assertion of its creator’s messianic greatness, M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water may not be quite as awful as 2004’s The Village, but this mind-bogglingly convoluted batch of children’s fable gobbledygook certainly qualifies as stunning narcissistic self-exposure from a filmmaker blind to his own escalating failings as a storyteller. In place of the trademark concluding twists that have defined his progressively unrewarding output, Shyamalan here replaces such gimmickry with sheer, unadulterated egomania. It’s a quantity in abundant supply, oozing from not only the director’s decision to cast himself as a writer whose prose has the potential to change the world (and who’s doomed to die a martyr for his ahead-of-their-time ideas), but also from his arrogant belief that carelessly tying together an un-fantastical fantasy narrative with elaborate rules and nonsensical terms like narf, scrunt and Heep – Oh My! – would somehow be enough to generate any genuine spiritual/humanist magic. To put it bluntly: It’s not.

The film’s tale is a tortuously involved affair involving a “narf” (i.e. a supernatural, fortune-telling sea nymph) named Story (a blankly translucent Bryce Dallas Howard) who shows up in the swimming pool of a Pennsylvania apartment complex called The Cove run by Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), a withdrawn stutterer who harbors a tragic secret. The narf – who is being hunted by ferocious grass-haired “scrunts” that are disobeying the laws set forth by the tree-dwelling “tartutics” (don’t ask) – has arrived to share a glance with Shyamalan’s Vick Ran and, in doing so, unclog his writer’s block so that he might pen his important pontifications, though a secondary objective involves inspiring the building’s alienated inhabitants to realize that every life has value, that strength comes from collective togetherness, and that there are cosmic forces greater than ourselves. It’s a parable full of hogwash, albeit hogwash that Shyamalan has sincere faith in, a fact made clear by the earnestness of his script, the lovingly gentle cinematography of Christopher Doyle (which largely eschews the director’s typical long tracking shots), and the care with which he treats Giamatti’s superbly sympathetic performance as the desperate-to-believe Heep.

Yet the gallons of laughable nonsense peddled by Lady in the Water is impossibly tough to swallow without gagging, beginning with its fundamentally suspense-free plot construction (in which Heep runs from apartment to apartment like an everyman Robert Langdon trying to crack the muddled myth’s code) and character development shortcuts (such as Cove residents buying the entire narf legend hook, line and sinker while barely batting an eye), to more exasperating missteps like giving his human protagonist an unremarked-upon ability to indefinitely hold his breath underwater, employing hoary Gremlins-style Asian stereotypes, and, finally, inflicting violent punishment against snobbish – and, more importantly, wrongheaded – film critic Mr. Farber (Bob Balaban), the last of which comes off as the unbecoming byproduct of the director’s insecurities. Shyamalan valiantly struggles to infuse his soggy saga’s final note of communal altruism with some transcendent enchantment. But with the director’s own self-importance hopelessly drowning out his characters’ noble selflessness, Lady in the Water becomes a case study of an increasingly defensive filmmaker falling off the auteurist deep end.

Comments

[Robert Humanick]

With this write-up only adding to the love-it or hate-it reaction the film is getting, at this point I can't wait to see it. Initially I was going to pass and wait for the DVD (I was only "meh" about The Village, appreciating its filmmaking elements while recognizing its complete emptiness), but at this point it intrigues me if only because it is actually guaranteed to elicit a reaction, unlike about half the movies I've seen this year.

[Nick]

What I find so frustrating about Shyamalan is that he really is a gifted director - there are few American filmmakers working today with his command of the widescreen frame, as well as his skill at cutting and pacing dialogue-heavy scenes (not to mention his gift for crafting atmosphere). But his storytelling skills have sunk so low, and his narcissism now seems so unbridled, that I find his work very difficult to tolerate.

That said, Giamatti is really quite good in the film.

[David]

All true... except the Village was much better than Lady in the Pool Filter. This one was borning, front to back. And Having M. Knight. Shamangalangalan play the part of a writer who's work is so profound that it would get him kill for daring to put pen to paper, plus change the entire world (in some unspecified way)... um.... is he like 12 or something suddenly? Someone needs to be hired to say "No, M. No."

[Robert Humanick]

Yeah, Giamatti would be reason enough for me to at least check this out on DVD. For now, I'll try to catch an early showing during the week sometime: if I watch it with an audience prone to laughter, any chance at an objective viewing will be out the window.

[josephgrossberg]

I think Giamatti has inherited Steve Buscemi's "ugly Italian who can act really well and therefore causes people to watch any movie he's in" mantle.

[Tom Peters]

I don't understand how anyone finds anything good in this movie, and I haven't said that about a movie in along, long time. The Village seems like a masterpiece in comparison. The dialogue is the worst part. If you hung out with a narcissistic hippie from the 60s, had them tell you an off-the-wall story while they were smoking dope, you would probably get a less egotiscal and painful experience then this excuse for a movie.