Soul-searching about his profession, estimable New York Times critic A.O. Scott recently wondered, "Are we out of touch with the audience? Why do we go sniffing after art where everyone else is looking for fun, and spoiling everybody's fun when it doesn't live up to our notion of art?"
"Lady in the Water" brought that rhetorical query to mind, since critics have almost unanimously savaged M. Night Shyamalan's latest. Reactions to this benign bed-time story/fairy tale have been shockingly virulent, with many reviewers indulging in poisonously personal attacks on Shyam-alan or scattergun rants that omit much of what actually happens in the movie (e.g., Lisa Schwarz-baum's bile-ish Entertainment Weekly screed).
Does all this critical Sturm und Drang mean that "Lady" doesn't rise to art, but will appeal to heat-waved audiences looking for AC fun? (Answer: No, weekend box-office results confirm cartoon "Monster House" out-funned "Lady," with "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" holding the lead.) Does M. Night's flick sink to lower depths than previous summer pap like "Mission Impossible III," "Poseidon," "X-Men: The Last Stand," "The Da Vinci Code," "The Lake House," "Pirates of the Caribbean," "Superman Returns"? Can "Lady in the Water" really be even more meaningless and dumb than this gaggle of time-wasters?
For me, the answer to that question is no, and here's why.
Shyamalan's no great shakes as a visual artist, but he has an authentic love of grabby narratives driven by Big Ideas, packaged in a suspenseful ghost tale or science-fiction yarn ("The Sixth Sense," "Unbreakable," "Signs," "The Village"). His heroes, often broken or drained by some loss of faith, surely reflect a pervasive contemporary malaise. I like that his characters must learn to "read" reality (not unlike a good film critic), through signs and sixth senses. When his human "empties" finally crack their stories open, epiphany and fulfillment follow - often the "surprise endings" for which Shyamalan's so (in)famous.
It's true that Shy's Big Ideas sometimes verge on silly, the sort of thing a precocious kid would fall hard for, and surprise endings often cheapen and diminish what led up to them. His movies can come off as self-important and pretentious, and his reach often exceeds his grasp - but at least he's reaching. In a demographic-driven industry, that's a reason not to write off this directorial prodigy/diva quite yet.
"Lady in the Water" may be a mad mess, but it's the mad mess of an aspiring, overweening, idio-syncratic imagination. A dream that falls far short of soaring, it's still a lively respite from impersonal, interchangeable, FX'ed-to-the-max entertainment machines. In short, Shyamalan's failed fairy tale surprised and intrigued me far more than any other mainstream movie I've seen this summer.
Splash. Poor Cleveland Heep (excellent Paul Giamatti, who "carries 'Lady,' his film to carry," as a colleague aptly put it), building super at The Cove apartment complex, is positive that some-one's swimming in his pool after hours. A mist more suited to moors rolls in low over the little field that separates the looming C of lighted apartment windows from a wall of improbably unkempt forest. Zones of white and black magic are demarcated and the night seems pregnant with strangeness ... with the beginning of a story.
A story is exactly what Mr. Heep lacks. Once a doctor, the spine of his narrative has been shattered by the murder of his wife and children. Now he tends to plumbing, wiring and other chores for the tenants of The Cove. Cleveland's an out-of-focus fellow for whom even words stutter and stammer away from coherence. Bumbling around his swimming pool, he trips, striking his head, and topples unconscious into the water. When he awakens, he's indoors being intently eyeballed by a nearly naked girl (Bryce Dallas Howard).
Turns out the lady of the lake - excuse me, pool - is a narf named Story, a sort of sea nymph who's come to fire up a human writer (played by Shyamalan himself) who's blocked on a book that could change the world. Once she's played muse, Story plans to go home - transport to be provided by a giant eagle. Trouble is, there's a scraggly, red-eyed something called a scrunt lurking out there in the mist that'd like to - and does - do her grievous harm.
Ace cinematographer Chris-topher Doyle makes the narf a numinous presence, physically out of synch with the human plane of reality. Howard's already-otherworldly features possess a clarity that seeing through water sometimes confers. She looks as though she might dissolve into transparent, liquid form, like the beautiful aliens in James Cameron's "Abyss."
But once Story kick-starts the narrative, pulling the derailed Cleveland into her fiction as effortlessly as a fairy tale prince gets tapped to kill the dragon and save the maiden, this fragile catalyst becomes progressively more colorless, silent, passive. She's the Grail, origin of energy and desire; the knights and ladies of The Cove are now primed to create and act out their respective parts in the quest to send Story safely home - the happy ending each of us quests for in our own life-stories.
Shyamalan's upfront in his belief that storytelling and mythmaking actually save lives and create community: all the likable, one-dimensional misfits who live in The Cove's cubicles must bond together to decipher the key to Story's salvation, which is, of course, their own. Part of the quest (another name for narrative) lies in finding the truest face and power of each of the characters. Who will be The Guardian? The Healer? The Guild? Because Shyamalan's coven doesn't always get mythic identity right the first time, rewrites on the run are necessary - just like the existential fictions we imagine nonstop to make sense of who we are and where we're headed.
Primary source of narf lore is an irritable Korean matron who reluctantly barks out illuminating details which her unflappable punk-queen daughter (Cecile Cheung) must translate. To charm this witchy mother, Cleveland regresses to adorable infancy, all smiles as he curls fetally on her couch. Only the incomparable Giamatti could bring off this weird, funny moment - and it's a performance that emotionally awakens the old lady.
Shyamalan means for this to be one of many fairy tale moments - when the special charm or guise works the magic that will make the oracle or the witch or the sleeping beauty give it up - but he doesn't seem to have the patience or the know-how to invest such passages with singular significance. Where "Lady" should move with delicate grace, the movie's surprisingly clumsy, hurrying ahead when it should linger.
So "Lady"'s story unfolds its way to fruition by fits and starts, through a legend in a foreign tongue, crossword puzzles, a conversation in sign language, a child's occult "readings" of cereal boxes, a juiceless film critic's by-the-book analysis (it'll be the death of him!), the healing of Heep's heart. Shyamalan crowds his movie with a slew of mythic ingredients, naïvely (or arrogantly) believing that their mere presence guarantees potent storytelling. M. Night should revisit Joseph Campbell's "The Hero's Journey": myth requires magic, almost entirely missing from this oddly earthbound parable about the breaking of a dark enchantment.
John Boorman's 1981 masterpiece "Excalibur" stars a Merlin - half-sorcerer, half-novelist - who imagines sustaining myths into real-world stories, for his pleasure and to advance civilization. The creative fire that arcs dangerously between "Excali-bur"'s dream and actuality makes the short hairs rise: we witness Boorman's/Merlin's movie-world made, unmade and made again. That lightning never strikes in Shyalaman's Cove, to transform it into sacred ground.
Maybe that's what has so many film critics on the prod. Though "Lady in the Water" misses the dauntingly high mark it aims for, it does deliver a more challenging, fitfully entertaining story than is usually served up at the multiplex. If only M. Night Shyamalan hadn't over-advertised himself as a master chef who can cook up such compelling tales they might transform the movies - and the world - forever. After all, who's hungrier for that than all the Heepish film reviewers and moviegoers who've been force-fed cinematic junk food for far too long?[[In-content Ad]]
