Lady in the Water

by Bill Henry on Jul.21, 2006, under Bill Henry's Movie Reviews

Lady in the Water
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Emerging into theatres nationwide beginning 7/21/2006

It is the too rare, but most-treasured movie experience to be as completely surprised to same degree that I was by M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. And I do not just mean the brilliant surprise ending. The entire film was terrific with a near perfect script and direction far beyond the one movie of his released previously, Wide Awake. In one of the few cases where box office matched quality, the movie was a huge hit and made Shyamalan the golden boy at Walt Disney. The follow-up, Unbreakable, was undeniably solid if maybe a bit too conscious of trying to duplicate too much of The Sixth Sense. Unfortunately, the declination followed with the filmmaker delivering decreasing results with Signs and The Village.

Would that one could report a rebound in M. Night’s abilities with his latest, Lady in the Water, but for the first time writer-director Shyamalan has delivered an inconsequential, borderline unwatchable movie. The Lady in question (Bryce Dallas Howard, daughter of Ron and blind ingÃ©nue in The Village) is a sea nymph who leaves “the blue world” and shows up in an apartment complex pool tended by property manager/super Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti). She has come to bring hope to the residents, but needs their help to return to her world. But a nasty beastie called a “scragg” (think a poorly lit, maltempered wolf made of crabgrass) wants to stop her and Heep has to figure out all the various arcane rules of the game (with dash little help from the Lady, Story). He pursues one resident to tell him the legend as she remembers it from her childhood and then tries to fill in the various parts in the story with the other tenants. Why does he do all this? Apparently, he read it in the script.

The movie is not plot heavy, it is detail heavy. And to push this leaden wait along, the audience has to be told in the most belabored fashion imaginable come. It seems that a filmmaker often compared to Alfred Hitchcock is unaware that it is actually better to show moviegoers rather than to explain things endlessly to them. The recitation of plot minutia takes up a huge chunk of the movie. Perhaps not to the same degree as Bryce’s daddy’s The Da Vinci Code, but far too close for comfort.

The whole effect of what must have been (according to a book excerpt reported in Entertainment Weekly) a truly daunting screenplay had Disney analyzing his diminishing box office returns and reluctantly agreeing to the funding, but in such an unenthusiastic manner that M. left Diz and Night fell on Warner Brothers. It turns out that MNS demands love as well as your money.

M has certainly given the cognoscenti plenty to argue about, but to what end. Sure folks can fall al over themselves debating the deliberately murky shallows (amazing that for all the talk, just as much goes unexplained). One question might be, why hire a great cinematographer as Chris Doyle and have the colors so cold and drab and so many scenes so badly lit?

To great glee a character introduced as a film and literary critic (played by Bob Balaban) is introduced, used as the object of a bit of humor, and then savaged in the concluding act. Maybe I missed it, but I do not recall Shyamalan being quite so humorless when the critics who have found his recent stuff so lacking were praising The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. Maybe in his next movie he can feature a foul-tempered, idiosyncratic director whose great triumph seems a distant memory and now seems incapable of telling a simple story. I, however, still have enough faith in Night’s eventual return. Maybe now that he has shucked the chains of Mouseschwitz and taken up residence at Time-Warner, they can give him a shot at the Harry Potter finale.