Lady in the Water
Director: M. Night Shyamalan. Cast: Paul Giamatti, Bryce Dallas Howard, M. Night Shyamalan, Sarita Choudhury, Bob Balaban,
Jeffrey Wright, Cindy Cheung, June Kyoto Lu, Jeffrey Wright, Noah Gray-Cabey, Mary Beth Hurt, Bill Irwin, Freddy Rodriguez,
Jared Harris, Tovah Feldshuh, Tom Mardirosian. Screenplay: M. Night Shyamalan.
Generally speaking, terrible movies come in three varieties. The least interesting of these are the cases of pure, slapdash,
marrowless incompetence, although here, too, we notice two subspecies: flatulus ephemera, which skirt through the multiplex
so briskly and guiltily that you forget they were ever made (View from the Top,
The Jacket, and In My Country come to mind, though thankfully
not often), and flatulus giganta, which reap bales of cash and make you wonder why we're all so careless with our money
(e.g.: Hitch, The Italian Job, or, on a different tier of the market,
Garden State and Thank You for Smoking). More prepossessing but also, for that reason, more vile are the movies that
are formally or technically credible, sometimes even quite auspicious, but which wed what craft they possess to such odious
themes or stillborn ideas that the contempt they incite in their viewers is laced with terror and resentment.
This is how I felt while watching the first Matrix film inculcate us with fascistic, trigger-happy paranoia
beneath its frippery of whoa-dude metaphysics and its lickable special effects, or while The Green Mile
repositioned America's genetic propensity for annihilating black men as a supernatural mandate (in keeping, too, with the tearful,
semi-autistic wishes of the doomed, and involving collateral spiritual uplift for their white guardians-cum-executioners), or
while watching this past spring's remake of The Hills Have Eyes deploy its impressively bold
mise-en-scène toward all-new lows in voyeuristic rape fantasies and fluorescent spectacles of body trauma.
In the face of these sorts of failures, it's often easy to know what to say: the empty and the reprehensible are easy enough
to diagnose. But what of the third category of failure, the sideshow attractions, the amorphous mutations that dazzle
and puzzle us with their eerie uniqueness, even as they gasp for air and life through their malformed lungs, their weird little
gills? When they conclude, you don't so much laugh at their stupidity or deplore their politics as you wonder what kind of person would or even could make such a thing, and what for any moment of the filmmaking process
the collaborators imagined they were doing, and whether, in even its least filtered states, your own subconscious is nearly
as loopy and fetish-driven and baffling as what has somehow landed on the screen before you. These kinds of imaginative
travesties don't come along every week, or even every year, and there can be a certain epochal pride at catching them when
they arrive. I am still angry that I missed Battlefield: Earth, because its credentials in this vein sound rather
formidable. I did see Showgirls, which sports exquisite moments of this surreal state beyond kitschiness, as when Elizabeth
Berkley's Nomi Malone hyperkinetically rains ketchup down on her french fries, and also when she "dances" in her fringy red dress
at the club where she first meets Glenn Plummer. Bill Paxton's directorial
debut Frailty, which some people tout as an overlooked masterwork, drifted into similarly
high echelons of the ludicrous and confounding, especially during its floridly colorful divine visitations, and whenever Matthew McConaughey
gutted down into his most whispery, somber register to utter some unaccountably portentous line of dialogue.
Get this, though: having landed a square, confident punch right onto the popular cortex with The Sixth Sense,
his overpraised but enjoyable myth about all kinds of haunting, the writer-director M. Night Shyamalan has evolved
a whole career, and a lucrative one, out of the sort of hobbling, misbegotten oddities that most directors, even the worst ones,
never create. Unbreakable, so gorgeously photographed by Eduardo Serra and enticingly
cryptic while it built its central mystery, made a hairpin turn into blank, what-was-he-thinking opacity as soon as Samuel L. Jackson
revealed his true nature and, by extension, that of the Bruce Willis character. With Signs,
Shyamalan, though he wasn't the first at this game, attempted a centaurish combo of alien-invasion thriller and congregational recruiting pamphlet,
as though his heavy-handed and literalizing style were any kind of likely conduit toward the numinous or theological.
Box-office receipts would imply that the experiment worked, but by the time Joaquin Phoenix was swatting glasses of water with
his Louisville Slugger so that Martians would be repelled, and so that one of Hollywood's homegrown Martians, Mel Gibson, would don once
more his clerical collar, I was convinced that aliens had indeed landed, and one of them was sitting in a director's chair.
All the necessary derogations have already been aired about The Village, though in a way I feel
warmly toward that film for so nicely sustaining the upward curve of Shyamalan's
nuttiness. After the dour riddles of Unbreakable and the strained extra-terrestrial pieties of Signs, The
Village was febrile, kitschy, and insane in every nook and cranny of its being, a whole movie engineered ín service of a
"twist" that still didn't add up. But now, Lady in the Water has broken still new ground
in Shyamalan's cinema of looniness: there's no baseline, no origin point. The beginning of the movie plays like a series of
stray, audience-testing preludes to some major, unforeseeable climax; the end of the movie plays like a desultory
and whimpering decline of a movie that had a better beginning. The present of the movie is never interesting; meanwhile, its
past is never illuminated and its future never arrives.
What we're left with is a cranking machine, forever doling out huge, sedimentary lumps of exposition: that Cleveland Heep (Paul
Giamatti) is the owner and superintendent of a Philadelphia apartment complex that bears no noticeable relationship to any spot I ever
noticed in Philadelphia; that Story (Bryce Dallas Howard) is a water nymph who resides in the dispiriting, concrete, tear-shaped
swimming pool at said complex; that such water nymphs, or "narfs" (!), have a vague ambition of redeeming
humanity from its compulsions toward ownership and combat; that other beings, whose names I have forgotten but which resemble
growling, flounder-flat timberwolves made of grass and sticks, are intent on killing Story as well as her human protectors;
that other monkey-like beings, whose names I couldn't decipher even as various characters uttered them, are either on the
side of the narfs or allied with the stick-wolves; that only by pooling, so to speak, all of their knowledge
and knacks and eccentricities will the residents of Cleveland's cinderblock community achieve their noble purpose, which is
to prepare the narf to be picked up and ferried away by a giant, swooping eagle.
I didn't make any of that up. I don't even know why anyone would. Lady in the Water has been touted generically
as a "bedtime story," specifically as one that Shyamalan devised for his daughters, but the movie plays much more like the
kind of story that restless children tell to adults: desultory, circuitous ("and then... I mean, wait..."), propelled more
by force of will and phatic momentum than by
narrative logic, clogged with all sorts of arcane rules and esoteric backstories, many of which turn on a dime just when you
think they will suddenly be important. The stick-wolves are apparently meant to observe certain rules about when a narf can
or cannot be retrieved by her eagle-protector, and these protocols are elaborated at some length (if not altogether sensibly),
but then it turns out that we are dealing with rogue stick-wolves, and we had best disregard everything that we have
learned about the creatures thus far. You can skip entire chapters of Lady in the Water and have no less trouble
deciphering its plot and its guiding motives than people who are hanging on every detail. You can, of course, skip all of
Lady in the Water and miss nothing whatsoever, including the shockingly drab and ill-advisedly dim camerawork of
Christopher Doyle, including the dismal sight of Broadway regulars like Bill Irwin and Jeffrey Wright and Tovah Feldshuh
wondering why they've been hired for short and nonsensical roles that Ed Wood's repertory might easily
have shouldered. Paul Giamatti doesn't seem to be having any kind of good time, perhaps because Cleveland
Heep's psychological backstory is painted in such broad strokes. Nothing establishes a reclusive character's loneliness like
the first-act revelation that his wife and children were murdered years ago; nothing communicates internal unease like a
prohibitive stutter. If Shyamalan's screenwriting is any indication, he's the kind of guy who brings you a bazooka when all
you need is a flyswatter, and actors accustomed to nuance and shading are increasingly stifled by his approach.
Several members
of the ensemble look visibly churlish here, although one notable exception is Cindy Cheung, who seems to have a marvelous time winning
laughs with her pidgin Korean-accented English. Then there's the sad case of Bryce Dallas Howard, who has now starred in
three high-profile movies—the misbegotten Village, Lars von Trier's rancid and listless Manderlay,
and now this flopping fish. When was the last time a buzzed-about ingénue had this much trouble getting her career off
to a remotely reputable start? And how long will she have to labor before she finally gets a Notorious
Bettie Page opportunity to acquit herself? When the time does come, will any of us ever want to see her again?
Lady in the Water prompts plenty of unintentional laughter during the two hours it slides and sloshes around on the
screen. You watch it the way you watch soapsuds in a front-loading washing machine: you'd think there'd be a pattern, and
that if you just focus hard enough or wait long enough, the logic will be revealed. But there is no pattern, and almost no
motion of any kind. The fussily drawn dots stubbornly refuse to connect, much less to open out into anything stirring or
recognizable as life, even a fairy-tale refraction of life. Filmmakers normally don't incorporate carpy film critics as characters in their movies and then gleefully kill them
off unless they're both smarting from past lashes and anticipating more of the same. And yet, the conception and grisly
dispatch of Bob Balaban's pouty, impatient reviewer (named after Manny Farber) is one of only two self-defensive gestures in a
film that is otherwise quite naked at unveiling its own ridiculousness. The
other insurance policy the film attempts to take out on its detractors is even more outlandish: the casting of Shyamalan
himself in the role of a misunderstood genius. In his mind, this is typecasting, and so what if his pop-messiah ego makes
Kanye West's look minuscule?
When Shyamalan isn't quite so pathetically claiming to be the fairest of them all, certain moments in Lady in the Water
bear enough traces of something intimately, personally felt that you want to give Shyamalan some credit for so recklessly following his
creative muses, even along such deranged and arbitrary paths. Too, even though his mannered editing and visual choices
play exactly like storyboards, and you wish he'd have been willing to follow or even solicit some editorial suggestions, you
want to applaud a filmmaker who still thinks in terms of framings, rhythms, off-screen spaces, and matches of image with
sound, instead of just banking on actors or situations or jokes to obviate the need for formal particularity. Shyamalan may
still be born to work in this medium, but if so, he is betraying those dispositions, almost as brattishly as possible. His
movie is moribund as entertainment. It ascribes such moral-political wisdom to
itself and wastes so much time and so many bland red herrings on its way to getting nowhere that it finally isn't forgivable.
Its creators aren't talentless or lazy, nor are they peddling smut or venality, but the refusal of Lady in the Water
to cohere or even congeal as anything resembling a functional film is finally a sort of insult. Maybe Shyamalan needs to
squander even his most abjectly forgiving audiences—to hit the absolute rock bottom of his capacities for sense and discipline—before
he'll scare himself into making another film that connects to something beyond his own id. D–
