Fill out this form to email this article to a friend
Film review
Send her back to the pool
M. Night Shyamalan's latest, Lady in the Water, isn't much of a myth. In fact, this "bedtime story" is all wet.
By SEAN DALY
Published July 20, 2006
At the long, laborious end of Lady in the Water, M. Night Shyamalan's bloated "bedtime story" about magical beasties invading a Philadelphia apartment complex, a pompous film critic comes face-to-face with a ravenous hellhound. It's a curiously mean scene in a movie that preaches peace among nations, and there's no doubt whom the writer-director sides with in the beast-on-beast battle. Just call the critic-munching a pre-emptive strike. It's almost as if Shyamalan, the promising young filmmaker responsible for such tension-building tutorials as The Sixth Sense and Signs, knows that reviewers are going to savage his latest thriller, and well they should. Not only has the 35-year-old director misplaced his gift for deft camera trickery - gone are those slow pans that teased the mind's eye - but he has lost his feel for narrative momentum as well. By far his greatest sin is suddenly, and inexplicably, becoming so literal-minded. Shyamalan has been called the next Spielberg primarily for his ability to mask the surreal in the real, the mundane in the magical. At his best, he's a visual impressionist. The Sixth Sense wasn't really a ghost story - it was a thoughtful coming-of-age tale. Signs wasn't really a sci-fi flick - it was a studied examination about losing faith.But as far as I can tell, Lady in the Water is really about a mythical sea "narf" named Story (Bryce Dallas Howard, from Shyamalan's other stinkeroo, The Village) who floats up in the pool at a modern-day housing complex called the Cove, a blue-collar edifice containing all manner of gloomy tenants. Shyamalan's rare smart move is containing all the action within the creepy Cove, a sort of concrete purgatory for lost souls. Linking all the losers is stuttering building superintendent Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), a pragmatic loner who, in the film's first scene, mutters, "There's no such thing as creatures." Heep's a heartsick nonbeliever, you see - at least until the second scene, when our hero totally believes the creepy wet chick on his couch who claims she has journeyed from "the Blue World" to save civilization. Ugh. It took Bruce Willis the entirety of Shyamalan's awesome Unbreakable to realize he was a superhero. Heep, on the other hand, is the quickest learner in the Shyamalan canon. "Hey, why aren't I stuttering anymore!" he shouts after a few minutes with Story. Please. Because "all beings have a purpose," Story will eventually need help from all the tenants - the crossword puzzle fan, the crazy cat lady, the brooding writer played by Shyamalan - to help her save humanity and return home. This includes slaying the "scrunt" (basically a werewolf with a perm); summoning the "tartutics" (monkey people who live in trees); and sailing away on the "great eatlon" (yeah, I'm lost, too). If you find all that fantastical claptrap confusing, I have bad news for you: Shyamalan has his characters repeat exposition over and over, but the constant updates of gnomish gobbledygook make the whole endeavor akin to dating a Dungeons & Dragons geek. Why does the scrunt want to kill the narf? Why do the tartutics want to kill the scrunt? And how is it that Story arrives by water but can only leave by flight? Sigh. Poor Giamatti: The sad-eyed Academy Award nominee doesn't have time to act. Same goes for Howard and Jeffrey Wright, who plays the crossword dude. They're all too busy trying to keep up with the spiraling mythmaking, which continues to add layer after incomprehensible layer until the very last minute. Somehow, Story's return to Blue World ultimately hinges on a young child deciphering code - are you ready? - on the back of a Cap'n Crunch box. What a soggy debacle. Shyamalan tries to smooth over the plot confusion via all manner of special effects (which he has never had much use for in the past), and some of the critters admittedly look kind of cool. But that reliance on computer razzmatazz is ultimately a sign of weakness. It's also a great show of disrespect for his audience, whose smarts the director has always valued. That's too bad. Sure, Shyamalan despises critics, but he might as well have had his hellhound attack a cineplex as well.
[Last modified July 19, 2006, 10:52:39]
Share your thoughts on this story
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
|
News
Fifty years ago, they were screwed-up kids sent to the Florida School for Boys to be straightened out. But now they are screwed-up men, scarred by the whippings they endured. Read the story and see a video and portrait gallery.
Print
Email story
Comment
Email editor