The Village at least still had gripping sequences, Lady in the Water has only comparative
shots — and the careening sense of a lost auteur’s bike on a downhill “ghost
ride.”
treacherously thin, Lady in the Water
is an at-odds, slapdash collection of the literal and symbolic, a colorfully
unconventional work that comes off as simultaneously silly, indulgent and undernourished.
Scant passages of the film click and really engage you due to Shyamalan’s sheer
nervy aplomb — something never in short supply — but not so much as they were
probably originally intended. The connective tissue here is all flim-flam, something
Shyamalan himself probably knows because of the manner he so laboriously avoids
addressing basic questions within the narrative.
narrated by David Ogden Stiers (“Man does not listen well…”) gives way to stuttering
building superintendent Cleveland Heep (a game Paul Giamatti), who oversees the
Cove apartment complex of suburban Philadelphia. That
is a sad sack you can guess from the get-go, but Giamatti imbues in him a
certain wounded humanity that rises above the trite explanation of Shyamalan’s
script. Yes, names say a lot in Shyamalan’s world, so it’s unfortunate that the
object of
and protection for most of the rest of the movie is in fact named, in
bull’s-eye fashion, Story (Bryce Dallas Howard), a mythical “narf” who makes
her home under the complex’s dark swimming pool.
a sort of wolf-like beast with grass on its back that is no longer observing
the labyrinthine rules of engagement laid out by Young-Soon Choi (Cindy Cheung)
in her recounting of the epic bedtime tale relayed to her by her Korean mother
(June Kyoko Lu), Cleveland must aid Story in her quest to find her “vessel,” a
writer whose work will bring change, peace, prosperity, enlightenment and slim
thighs and washboard stomachs to all humankind. (Or something like that.) That
writer is… Vick Ran (Shyamalan, triple-dipping), a genial loafer who lives with
his sister Anna (Sarita Choudhury). Vick and Anna fall in lockstep with
quest, and soon help recruit from an eccentric assortment of fellow residents a
collection of coded explicators known as “the symbolist,” “the healer” and “the
guild” who will unlock their guest’s pathway to freedom. See, it’s all about
saving Story. Get it? If you don’t, it’s probably because you’re a mindless
lemming sell-out who needs
to you. Jeez. Stupid lemming.
chorus of critical boos you’re likely to hear — the lesser reasoned portion,
perhaps, but still part — will have to do with as much with the movie’s desperately
un-hip mode of storytelling as its actual tonal and narrative fumblings. The
film is not a thriller, but small portions of it are directed (and sound foleyed)
with such furious energy that one will be easily forgiven for a few jumps.
Still (and I don’t know if anyone ever actually pointed this
out to Shyamalan) but as driven as it is by fairytale motivations, Lady in the Water is far from whimsical.
In fact, it’s often downright leaden. First there’s all the exposition from
Young-Soon Choi. Shyamalan also goes the extra step of awkwardly cramming in
visual and dialogue references to his other films, including a line that’s a
nod to Unbreakable when
asks Story, apropos of nothing, “Do you get sick when you tell me things?” I
didn’t catch the Wide Awake and Praying with Anger homages, but
something tells me Shyamalan didn’t exclude them.
and covers of Bob Dylan tunes, Lady in
the Water wants very desperately to be both a tremendously plaintive and
capital-I important allegory, and yet Shyamalan clearly has only the most
threadbare story elements upon which to hang the movie, so he resorts to
cheaply ironic deconstruction — a form of hackery that suits neither him nor,
more importantly, the material. By winkingly acknowledging, say, rain and water
as a purification metaphor before indulging in the same tropes, or having Bob
Balaban’s joyless (but functionally necessary!) film critic decode a “horror
movie” moment as it unfolds before him, Shyamalan grinds the apparatus of his
moviemaking to a halt, pulling the audience further out of and away from the
story. The reason this is such an egregious slip is because you have a
moralizing story built around a complete lack of intra-narrative questioning; all
the characters blissfully fling themselves into the mission as it’s explained
to them. Undercutting this is then basically telling the audience, “You’re
stupid for buying this.”
casting himself as a writer whose thoughts change the course of humanity — maybe
another day, another blog posting — but suffice to say that I think Shyamalan
would really find a new creative freedom in tackling some straight-up genre
pieces as a director for hire. If that means putting away the laptop and
delaying humankind’s betterment through his own writing for a number of years,
so be it. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 108 mins.)