Lady in the Water
(Ratings: 9 by Caryl and 23 by Al)
(2006/USA. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan.) (1 hr 50. Rated PG-13 for some frightening sequences.)
What we have here, Kiddies, is two different groups. Neither good vs. evil, nor ying and yang, nor day vs. night. Just two different ways of looking at this movie.
The first group, Caryl’s, went in to see this movie in-theatre after hearing radio interviews, reading movie reviews— in summary, by taking other input of whose sources they are not even consciously aware.
The Other group, Al’s, went in to see the movie not knowing anything about it but its title.
Bottom line? The group (there were four of them) who went into the movie with a lot of media explanations as to what they were going to see liked the movie a lot.
The group (there were two of them) who went into the movie “cold,” that is, without any media explanations paving the way, thought “Lady in the Water” was either “stupid” or “dumb,” depending on which one of the two you talked to about this…thing.
First, let’s go to the group who liked the film. Caryl’s group thought the movie was a fun fairy tale. “Regardless of your sophistication level, you will have fun,” Caryl wrote in her notes. The movie takes a few twists and turns, and has a few surprises. It’s good summer fun.
The media tolt the group that “Lady in the Water” had originally been written by M. Night Shyamalan as a bedtime story for his children. Well, just what *is* that bedtime story?
One night an apartment manager discovers a sea-nymph from The Blue World hiding in the apartments’ swimming pool. He rescues her and takes her into his apartment. She is a messenger, come from The Blue World into ours. Her message is to inspire a struggling writer living in the apartment complex. Once inspired, the writer will write a book that will inspire the leader of the land to change the entire world. Problem is, the sea-nymph does not know who the writer is. The apartment manager (played by Paul Giamatti) tries to help her discover the identity of the writer. Meanwhile, there is a wolf-like monster from another world who is trying to prevent the sea-nymph from being successful. The monster is going to do this by eating her. So the apartment manager, whose name is Cleveland Heep, must also protect the sea-nymph, whose name is Story, (so help us!) from the monster. He does so. It turns out, however, that Story can only get back to The Blue World with the help of a lot of people. These people are a Healer, an Interpreter, a Guardian, and a group of people who “work with their hands” called The Guild. NOW the manager Heep must find out who these people are, and then assemble them in the right configuration. When he has done so, a giant eagle will swoop down, collect Story, and deliver her back to The Blue World.
Cool! Now let’s hear from the group who disliked this thing. Al’s group thought that, first of all, the story was kinda dumb. They didn’t (you see?) read the press release saying that it was a fairy tale made up by some guy to amuse his children. Perhaps if they had read it, this thing wouldn’t have seemed soooo dumb.
(We wrote “perhaps.”)
Now, however, we begin to see the enormity of the problem with this….thing. It’s a movie made about a fairy tale which no one knows. When we write “no one” that includes the characters in the movie. All of them are clueless, excepting one Chinese grandmother. She knows the story but does not speak English. She is asked to tell the story, literally one sentence and one little piece at a time, by her hip-hopping clubbing granddaughter, who is being prodded by Heep, who keeps hearing new things from the sea-nymph.
The process is maddening.
It is, however, only part of the horror of this dumb fairy tale.
The movie begins with a two-minute voice-over that tries to tell us about the connection of human beings and those of The Blue World. The voice-over sets up the premise for a story about which we would otherwise know Absolutely Nothing. The story doesn’t spring from folk tales, mythologies, or any other grounding that would give the audience a structure upon which to build the story of Story inside of this two-hour mini-agony. This voice-over is accompanied by pictographs that resemble those made by…North American Indians.
Huh? We begin to feel uneasy.
After this voice-over explanation of the movie — *always* a sign of BAD movie-making — we fade in on Cleveland Heep using a toilet plunger to repeatedly stab at something under a kitchen sink which we do not see but which he describes as “very big and Very hairy.” Each time he stabs at it, four fat women in the background hug each other and scream.
Our uneasiness builds.
We are then introduced to several other of the apartment dwellers. There’s a man who always has his door open, but never speaks and is always looking at news reports from the war-torn Middle East. There’s a slovenly weight-lifter who is always in the stairwell, lifting weights to develop only one side of his body. He explains to us why that is, but we just don’t care. There are the five “philosophers” who live like pigs in one unit and talk all day, while filling the apartment completely with cigarette smoke. There’s an unemployed guy who does nothing but crossword puzzles. He lives with his son, who tells the future by reading dry cereal boxes.
It’s unjust that there’s an awfully uninteresting cross-section of humanity in that building. We don’t want to know any of them better and feel, in fact, as if we need to take a shower after being introduced to them. Creating this feeling in us May make this thing an effective movie but it is Not a movie that we want to see.
Heep first discovers Story in the apartment complex’s swimming pool. It turns out that she lives in an underwater hole which connects to the swimming pool drain. Huh?
Once Story is safely in Heep’s apartment, he starts looking for people to start help solving the mystery of who Story is—- a mystery that has Everyone baffled.
Cleveland has to go all over the apartment complex, finding (with Painful slowness) each little piece of the fairy tale so that he can construct the story of Story.
Our uneasiness turns into a continual low-grade annoyance.
The Chinese grandmother is always angry, it seems. Her granddaughter says she will only tell Heep the fairy tale if she can think of him as innocent and child-like. So, to hear the fairy tale, Heep lies down on the couch and starts acting like a six-year old.
Our annoyance is complete!
The Giamatti character also has a stutter — except that it’s not a stutter so much as it is an awful choking. Every time he started stutter-choking, Al said he wanted to employ a Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.
There are many false starts along the way. Every time anyone runs into a roadblock, someone else steps on camera and says something to the effect of “I am now going to tell you something which nobody else knows, in the hopes that this information will salvage a movie that is incomprehensible.” At one point, a movie and book reviewer, played dead-pan by Bob Balaban, says to the camera, paraphrased “I’ve reviewed a lot of movies, and here is what you should look for next in This movie.” We then go back into the movie and, sure enough, this Twerp has tolt us why what will happen next is important.
Repeatedly throughout this gunk of a movie, no one involved could figure out how to move this convoluted and silly story along through Acting. They repeatedly have to Tell us, flat-footed and clumsily, what the heck this thing is about.
Bryce Dallas Howard does a convincing job as the sea-nymph— in that she looks as if she has been underwater a lot.
There are two or three Very moving and effective scenes enacted between Giamatti and Howard. All in all, however, the gunked garbage of the screenplay lays a thick patina of sludge over everyone and everything in this movie.
With this tedious fairy tale, apparently made up moment to moment, the creator of this sludge has bitten off more than any of us can chew.
The following weekend after enduring this thing, Al had breakfast with someone who wondered how a movie as bad as “Lady in the Water” could ever get made. Al just shook his head in dull dumb sympathy — until he remembered that everyone in Caryl’s group had Really liked it.