Film: Lady In The Water

M. Night Shyamalan is the most original, in­teresting, and visionary filmmaker in Hollywood. He’s also the only Hollywood filmmaker who consistently shows a real respect for religious belief in his work. “I believe in believing,” he’s stated, rather em­phatically, and his films reveal a sin­cere faith in a higher realm, transcen­dence, and providence. Those films have been phenomenally successful, grossing more than two billion dollars combined, all produced by Disney. But, more recently, Shyamalan’s career has taken a turn for the worse.

When his last film, The Village (2004), became his least successful ef­fort to date, Shyamalan, undaunted, opted to try something different and much more personal. He began script­ing Lady in the Water, based on a fairy tale that he’d originally concocted to entertain his two young daughters at bedtime. When Disney expressed a number of concerns about the story (al­though still promising a $60-million budget and creative freedom), Shya­malan, dismayed by the studio’s lack of faith, broke with Disney and took the film to Warner Brothers.

Then things got worse. For some reason, the normally private Shyama­lan decided to give Michael Bamberg­er, an editor at Sports Illustrated, unprece­dented access to write The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyama­lan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale. That book, which vilified the Disney executives while portraying Shyamalan as a misunderstood artist, was released on July 20, the day before the film opened. “The upshot,” as Janet Maslin described it in the New York Times, is an “unintentionally riotous puff book,” which has left the film world end­lessly discussing Shyamalan’s “ego,” “arrogance,” and “self-importance.” Even the director has begun to doubt himself, wondering recently in USA Today, “Maybe I’ve had a disconnect with people.”

Unfortunately, the Disney ex­ecutives were right. Shyamalan’s new film, Lady in the Water, although mildly entertaining, is a self-conscious story about storytelling that doesn’t tell a very engaging tale. Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) is a lonely, likeable superintendent who works at the Cove, an apartment complex in Phila­delphia. One night, Heep discovers a sea nymph (Bryce Dallas Howard) in the Cove’s swimming pool. He even­tually learns that the nymph, whose name is Story, has come from the “Blue World” to inspire an author to write an important book that will dramati­cally change the world for the better (since our world, in contrast to the underwater world, is a fallen and war­like place). Since Story isn’t allowed to tell Heep the facts about her world, he manages to deduce them from an old fairy tale told to him in incre­ments by an elderly Korean resident at the complex. Once the sea nymph (a “narf”) completes her mission, the real danger begins because a “scrunt,” a vicious werewolf-like creature, is lurking outside to prevent her from re­turning home. Thus Heep, along with the other residents of the Cove, must find a way to help Story return safely to the Blue World.

Unfortunately, all the disjunctive exposition about narfs, scrunts, and other creatures is tiresome and pre­tentiously self-reflexive. One of the Cove’s residents, Mr. Farber (Bob Bala­ban), is a self-important book and film critic who occasionally explains how the story should be proceeding, a de­vice used in the horror-comedy Scream (1996). But neither the film’s back- story nor its narrative explanations are very interesting, and Shyamalan, who wrote numerous drafts of the script, eventually concluded that it’s “a very irrationally personal movie—but “ir­rationality” is never a very effective means to engage an audience.

Most surprisingly, this story­about-a-story has no twist at the end, which has become one of Shyamalan’s trademarks since his masterful plot turn at the conclusion of The Sixth Sense. In Lady in the Water, a film that is so ob­sessed with storytelling, it seems per­fectly reasonable to expect that some­thing surprising or at least interesting will happen at the end of the film, but it doesn’t, and everything falls flat. As we know from real life, bedtime stories don’t have to be that good. The kids are already drowsy, and elements such as plotting and character develop­ment, which are so crucial to the suc­cess of a narrative film, are simply not that important.

Despite these problems, Lady in the Water, like all of Shyamalan’s films, is beautifully shot (by cinematographer Christopher Doyle), has a nice moody style, some good humor (maybe a bit too much), and some good scares. Its main character, Heep, finds personal redemption through generosity and courage_; thus the film, in a very gener­al way, is about faith: faith in the story, faith in oneself. As one of the residents claims, “It’s time to prove some stories are real!” But this particular story, af­ter all, is nothing more than a fairy tale. Lady in the Water, once hyped as “Shyamalan’s E.T,” also makes other religious references in much the same manner. A man is “saved,” there’s a healing, and there’s even a raising of the dead, yet the film lacks the sub­stance of Shyamalan’s previous films because all these notions lack any reli­gious specificity.

Faith has been a long-running theme in Shyamalan’s movies, clearly influenced by his Hindu background and his Catholic grammar-school edu­cation. His first Hollywood feature, Wide Awake (1998), is a pleasant but rather routine comedy about a fifth- grader who, worried about the fate of his deceased Catholic grandfather, begins a “search for God.” The film, a box-office failure, was quite unexcep­tional, except in its respect for Ca­tholicism and religious belief.

Then came The Sixth Sense (1999), a masterfully moody and exquisitely crafted story that grossed $650 mil­lion worldwide and was clearly a creative paradigm for the Catholic doctrine of purgatory. The main char­acters meet in a Catholic church_; the young boy who “sees dead people” quotes Psalm 129 and uses Catholic iconography to ward off the threat­ening dead. The Sixth Sense, one of the best and most provocative films of the last decade, was unabashedly concerned with the afterlife, expia­tion, and redemption.

Shyamalan’s subsequent films, all interesting but less effective than The Sixth Sense, pressed forward with moral themes. In Unbreakable (2000), Bruce Willis portrays an ordinary man who learns that he has extraordinary pow­ers and that, like a comic-book super­hero, he must use them to protect the innocent. Signs (2002), despite its aliens and crop circles, is really a film about providence, faith, and redemp­tion. The overt spiritual journey of the film’s central character, a former Episcopalian minister (played by Mel Gibson) who has lost his faith, alien­ated many secular critics like Stephen Holden of the New York Times who, rather hysterically, decried the direc­tor as a “spiritual huckster.” Maybe these unpleasant attacks resulted in the peculiar lack of religion in The Vil­lage (2004), which portrays an isolated community that seems rather Amish- like, yet oddly religion-free. Never­theless, the film, like Shyamalan’s previous movies, still praises the tradi­tional virtues of community, courage, and kindness.

Then Shyamalan decided to make his fairy tale—fully aware that it was risky and a very “personal” vi­sion. As Shyamalan recently admit­ted, “Maybe what would really help is a complete disaster. Something that would clean the slate.” But Lady in the Water is not a “complete” disaster, and every important director should be al­lowed to experiment. Let us hope that Shyamalan’s recent experiences won’t discourage him from striving to make more eccentric films of subtlety and substance like The Sixth Sense.