Lady in the Water, written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, is now playing at Culver Ridge 16, Pittsford
Cinemas, Henrietta 18, Webster 12, Tinseltown, Greece
Ridge 12, and Eastview 13.
Wet, weird, and absurd
Whatever else they may accomplish, the films of M. Night Shyamalan exhibit an odd and often original imagination.
They explore the supernatural and the horrific while placing their mysteries
within the commonplace — a recognizable and fully realized setting of work,
familiar objects, family life. His careful cinematic
frameworks, however, frequently also raise some inevitable problems when their
ostensible objectivity and logic disintegrate under even moderately close
scrutiny. Intergalactic travelers find their way to Earth but somehow need a map
to negotiate the cornfields of rural America in Signs; the nonsense of a group of idealists turn the clock and the
calendar back to the 19th century in order to guarantee the safety and
innocence of their children in The
Village.
In Lady in the Water, Shyamalan once again grounds the story in an initially
authentic and somewhat comical vision of ordinary life, but soon transports his
plot and characters to a most complicated and unconvincing place, where the
intersection with fantasy destroys virtually any hope of conviction. Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), the
superintendent of a small apartment complex called The Cove, discovers the
presence of a young woman aptly named Story (Bryce Dallas Howard), a sort of
water nymph called a Narf, who dwells somewhere below
the swimming pool in a place she calls The Blue World. For reasons too
complicated and obscure to explain, she needs Cleveland’s help to save her from
some evil creatures called — brace yourself — Scrunts,
half boar, half wolf, and all horrible.
The unfolding of the narrative and the confrontation with
evil ultimately involve just about all the residents of The Cove, a building
inhabited mostly by oddballs, eccentrics, and assorted nuts. To determine the
meaning of Story’s story and find a way to defeat the Scrunts,
Cleveland enlists the aid of a young Korean woman and her mother, who spins,
intermittently throughout the film, a long, intricate fairytale that explains
the whole business of the Narfs, the Scrunts, some other creatures
called Tartutics, and a gigantic eagle-like bird
called The Great Eatlon.
Just about all the residents correspond to the people in the
convoluted tale — figures known as the Healer, the Guardian, the Guild, the
Man With No Secrets, etc. — and as they learn its
elements and their roles, they all attempt to help Cleveland defeat the Scrunts
and return Story safely to the Blue World. At the same time, almost all the
first interpretations of the tale and the place of various people in it, no
matter how plausible initially, turn out to be incorrect. So the movie in
effect keeps revising itself, changing the function and meaning of its
characters and the working out of its plot.
Just as Cleveland
returns over and over again to the Korean storyteller, who keeps adding new
chapters, new creatures, and new wrinkles to her account, Story, whose name
grows ever more significant, also explains some of her past and present
actions, adding yet more complication. She also knows the history of the people
she encounters, including Cleveland’s tragic past, and predicts the future of
others, notably a blocked writer working on an important book (a large role
played by the director himself) that will change the world.
Shyamalan also includes a kind of
critical interpretation of his method through another of the characters, a
nerdy, misanthropic book and film critic — ouch —who also deciphers some
elements of the story and explains matters like plot, formula, and narrative construction
to Cleveland.
He provides yet another perspective on the film, which constantly threatens to
turn into a running commentary on its own composition. The critic (Bob Balaban) even confronts one of the Scrunts
and explains to the horrid beast what it will do and how he will escape in
accordance with the patterns of B horror films.
The collision of the ordinary and the fantastic that drives
the action of Lady in the Water loses
much of its impact through the constant self reflexive revision and commentary.
The tale’s silliness and weirdness and its compulsive accumulation of ever more
plot, character, and critical analysis ultimately turn it into another Shyamalan absurdity. Finally, all that mumbo jumbo about
The Blue World, the Narfs, the Great Eatlon, the Tartutics, and the
good old Scrunts simply overwhelms all pretensions to
the commonplace and convincing, while weakening any attempt at satisfactory
fantasy as well.
This article appears in Aug 2-8, 2006.
