Film Review: Lady in the Water

The film's emotional center is Cleveland Heep (Paul Giammatti), the self-effacing handyman of a large apartment complex who one day discovers a pale, nymph-like creature (Bryce Dallas Howard) in the building's swimming pool. Her name is Story, she comes from "the blue world" and she must deliver a message before she can return home. Beyond that, she can tell Cleveland very little.

Cleveland begins digging, and in bits and pieces he hears from his elderly Korean neighbor the story of narfs, mythical sea-dwelling creatures who periodically visit humankind, and scrunts, vicious creatures that hunt narfs. Cleveland also learns that narfs have pre-ordained human protectors who must help them return to their home. Shyamalan works hard to keep the audience guessing until the end as to which supporting characters in the apartment building will become Story's guardians.

Howard, who possesses the unique quality of simultaneously looking very beautiful and very much like her father, does a solid turn as Story, but her role in the film is nominal. The heart of Lady in the Water isn't Story's attempt to return home or her relationship with Cleveland, it's the telling of the story itself. To this end, Bob Balaban is brought in as a cheerless film critic who's seen everything and is impressed by nothing. He pulls off the film's funniest moments as he self-referentially comments on the movie he's acting in.

More than most moviegoers I think I am willing to suspend my disbelief. But as hard as Lady in the Water tries to weave an ageless fable, the film's genuinely ethereal moments are few and far between, overshadowed by clunky exposition and a slew of forcedly quirky supporting characters including a feisty old Korean lady, a sassy young Korean lady, a family of fat, hysterical Latina sisters, an old woman who collects cats and a weightlifter who's building up only one side of his body. All their idiosyncrasies feel forced, as does the interplay between Shyamalan, who plays a visionary writer, and his meddlesome sister (Sarita Choudhury).

This movie requires viewers to suspend a whole lot of disbelief and doesn't give them much to hang it on. It's too bad, because Lady in the Water is worth watching even if the film as a whole fails on many levels. Set to a soundtrack of Bob Dylan songs including "Maggie's Farm," "Tangled up in Blue" and a cover of "The Times They Are A' Changing" that rolls over the closing credits, it's clear that for Shyamalan, Lady in the Water isn’t simply a dark bedtime story, it's an allegory about humanity's self-destruction. Unfortunately, Shyamalan has chosen to cast himself as the brilliant writer who will change the world with his words before being killed like Jesus.

Lady in the Water is on its way to being one of the worst reviewed films of the year, but unlike critic-proof movies such as Little Man and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, I suspect the poor reviews are a harbinger of box office doom.

Disney executives should be feeling mighty pleased with themselves. If they still have jobs. Nina Jacobson, the Disney executive who had shepherded several of Shyamalan's movies including The Sixth Sense, reportedly didn’t "get" the script for Lady in the Water. She and Shyamalan argued over it, leading to his messy decampment to Warner Bros., the studio that ended up funding the movie to the tune of $70 million. The fracas is chronicled in The Man Who Heard Voices, a book about Shyamalan that was written with his blessing by Sports Illustrated senior editor Michael Bamberger.

Not having read the book, I can't say whether it truly is the glossy suckjob it's been made out to be, or it's a case of Hollywood execs who no matter how much they want to claw out and feast on each others' livers will close ranks when one of their own is attacked. There's more than enough schadenfreude to go around. Last week, Jacobson was summarily fired from her job while she was in the hospital with her partner who was giving birth to their child. And Shyamalan for his part, is in for a turn on Hollywood's whipping post.

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PS-Bjorn says, "I haven’t seen any of Shyamalan's films all the way through, but the one film of his I did set out to see, Unbreakable, I found so unbearable, I had to stop after 15 minutes, which is something I don't often do."