2006 / 110 Minutes / PG-13
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

I don’t think there’s a filmmaker beside M. Night Shyamalan who would have had the sheer hubris to roll on a mess like “Lady in the Water”. “Lady in the Water” is, as Quentin Tarantino once said of Brian De Palma’s “Bonfire of the Vanities”: “the kind of mess that only a talented filmmaker can make.”

According to M. Night Shyamalan, “Lady in the Water” began as a story that he told his daughters at bedtime. The tale concerns a narf (kind of like a mermaid without the fins) from an undersea world who comes to influence mankind and push us toward another stage of intellectual development…or something. She comes to our world through a tunnel from her sea kingdom that ends up in a Pennsylvania swimming pool. The caretaker of the apartment complex where this pool resides is a guy named Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti). Heep discovers this lady in the pool water, falls into the pool and almost drowns before she saves him. After this, Heep lets the narf sleep on his couch while he tries to help her find the human being she has come to inspire.

Also living in this apartment complex are a man who is great at crossword puzzles, a hermit, a man who lifts weights to develop the muscles on only one side of his body, an apartment full of stoners, and a crotchety film critic. Proving that it takes a village to help a narf, all of these strange characters eventually come together to help the narf (the word gets sillier every time I type it) achieve her goal and also to protect her from being killed by a scrunt (a cross between a wolf, a porcupine and a lichen intent on keeping her from completing her mission…for some reason).

Just from reading that synopsis, you can probably tell that “Lady in the Water” is a mess. For one thing, it’s often just plain silly. A man with well-defined muscles on only one side of his body, a narf named Story (Bryce Dallas Howard, looking exceptionally pale and damp), something called a scrunt? These are downright ludicrous concepts. It would be hard for ANY movie to make them work as anything but high comedy. Yet, somehow, Shyamalan makes most of these goofy (albeit highly original) concepts work…at least for the amount of time that I was watching the movie. After I left the theater, I started wondering why the hell I cared about any of this, but for the two hours I spent in “Lady in the Water’s” company, I was strangely mesmerized. Even when characters started looking for divine revelations in the morning crossword puzzle and asking a film critic how the film’s events would turn out, these plot machinations somehow didn’t make me want to throw popcorn at the screen. Perhaps it is because Shyamalan brings to “Lady in the Water” the same dark, suspenseful tone that he has brought to all his other films. The goofy events onscreen take on a ponderous, self-important weight due to the way Shyamalan stages and lights them. The scrunt is a wacky concept, but Shyamalan presents it in such a way that it’s actually pretty creepy. Shyamalan casting himself as a writer with the potential to change the entire world is a pretty shaky proposition, yet Shyamalan the director actually manages to coax a good performance out of himself. It’s not actually as self-delusional as it would seem.

Still, despite the fact that most of the film works, this is a slight, silly film with a self-important tone. Giamatti and Howard do good work, as do most of the supporting actors, but they can’t quite compensate for the fact that their character names are “Cleveland Heep” and “Story”. Themes that would work as subtext are actually spoken aloud by major characters (never good). Moments of sublime ridiculousness abound. The plot isn’t bad, but if Shymalan had used a more fantastical, whimsical approach, it might have worked even better. Shyamalan’s standard look and tone are starting to wear thin. This is a fairy tale, after all, and he still shoots it like a thriller. This, his standard approach, still works, but in “Lady in the Water” I could see cracks forming around its edges. If Shyamalan doesn’t branch out and try something new, I doubt his usual method will work very much longer. “Lady in the Water” is lighter than his past efforts, but it’s still a tad ponderous for its own good.

“Lady in the Water” is like a balloon attached to a lead weight. By all rights, it should never leave the ground. It should falter under the weight of its flaws. And yet, by some bizarre miracle, the movie actually remains airborne most of the time. It’s silly, self-important and weird but it’s still original and highly entertaining…in its own, lunatic fashion. For all its flaws, “Lady in the Water” still one man’s artistic vision. As goofy as this story is, Shyamalan obviously cares about it, and that care and love translate through past everything else. In a summer of films that seem crafted by a committee of executives, these things make “Lady in the Water” downright refreshing.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006 at 8:06 pm and is filed under Dale's Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.