Man overboard!With "Lady In The Water," M. Night Shyamalan's career trajectory sank to a new low. It’s been the general consensus for years that since "The Sixth Sense," the movies of M. Night Shyamalan have been increasingly greater disappointments. The question has been, with each new film, would the director return to the level of brilliance that made his first blockbuster such a memorable benchmark, and conversely, how much worse could an M. Night movie get? "Lady in the Water" answered those questions.
"Lady in the Water" is meant to be a depiction of how a myth or a fairy tale could intrude on everyday reality and change the lives of those caught up in it. Unfortunately the fairy tale tapestry at the heart of "Lady in the Water" is so poorly woven, so full of holes and frayed around the edges, that it plays out like a tattered mess. It feels like a story invented by an amateur comedian on the first night of a beginner’s improv class. Apparently, Shyamalan’s formerly supportive producers at Disney Studios felt the same way when they dragged their heels on the greenlighting of this project. Rather than accepting a negative critique, the director not only turned his back on Disney to be embraced by Warners, but he wrote a scathing book about how his vision was so narrow-mindedly unappreciated.
The problem with Shyamalan’s later works is his inability to recognize the point at which boredom or incredulity shatter a viewer’s suspension of disbelief, and both of those destructive features drench "Lady in the Water" like a suffocating wave. In addition, Shyamalan has finally given up his trademark “twist ending” and replaced it with what must have been intended as twists to its meandering plot. Unfortunately these twists play out like interruptions in a badly related story, like when a would-be raconteur peppers a tale with “oh, I forgot to mention…,” or “except for the fact that…” Rather than providing imaginative surprises, these endless complications and contradictions are eye-rolling rather than eye-popping.
Lady in the Water begins with a leaden recitation of a myth in which a race of prescient and wise sea-dwellers (called narfs) become alienated from Mankind. In our time, they seek to renew their benevolent influence by quickening a unique power to impart history-changing knowledge in one pre-ordained human. The narfs’ emissary is a girl named Story (Dallas Bryce Howard), who splashes around in the swimming pool of a middle-class apartment complex until she decides to save the life of the sad-sack manager / custodian, a world-weary man named Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti). Shyamalan laboriously dribbles out the complexities of narf legend through an irritatingly cranky Asian neighbor-lady who conveniently learned it as a bedtime story in her childhood.
M. Night has explained that the story told in Lady in the Water was indeed a bedtime story, one that he invented to tell his own children. The mistake Shyamalan made in creating his screenplay was to present this naive, awkward tale as anything more than a story improvised for children by a loving father. To have framed the tale in the style of The Princess Bride would have covered a multitude of sins.
The actors in Lady in the Water perform adequately in shallowly written roles, but special praise must be given to Paul Giamatti who makes Cleveland Heep a sympathetic and believable character, even when the script makes him do and say unbelievable things.
No doubt this bedtime story as told to the Shyamalan children served it's purpose in putting them to sleep. Unfortunately, it retains that power over movie audiences as well.
