Week Of July 17, 2006 -Mon / Wed / Fri

July 19, 2006

How does one critique Lady in the Water?

The movie is so steeped in so much stuff that has nothing to do with whether a movie is good, bad, or indifferent. There are, obviously, the other movies M. Night Shyamalan has made. And there is the book that tells the saga of the birth and production of the film, written by Michael Bamberger, but clearly loaded with Night's voice, that tells its readers more than anyone needs to know about the making of the film before the film is seen.

Thing is, I liked Lady in the Water more than I liked The Village. And to me, it was another variation on Signs… without the action and the movie star and, to its benefit, without the now-expected M. Night Shyamalan twist that shocked us all once and that we have been stuck waiting for ever since.

I had some sense of what the movie would be like when I walked into the theater Monday night. More than I wanted to have. But the truth is, I still had no idea what to expect. And the movie surprised me.

Generally, I don't like to get too much into story in my reviews. To my mind, it leaves nothing left for a reader to experience, even if I leave out all the major spoilers. But I don't know how to get much past starting without getting into story here. Shyamalan doesn't really make character movies. He makes stories. So if you don't want to know, it's time to bail out now.

STORY SPOILER WARNING

Okay…

The film is based, as it tells us from the start, on a bedtime story. The story is one that Shyamalan made up, apparently, to tell his kids. But it is made to seem more complicated in the film than it is. To that end, in what seems like an added afterthought to try to make things more clear, there is a cartoon at the opening that lays out the basics.

This is the story of a magical water nymph who must come to the land to find her human kinda-soulmate as well as a crowd of other humans who have been drawn to where she will arrive in order to facilitate, as a group, her ascension. This event will also (perhaps primarily) bring life and self-knowledge to the humans.

First Act - Establish the characters.

Even more than in the previous films, Shyamalan lays out a parade of wild characters who near, and sometimes pass into, caricature. There is a guy who only works out one side of his body, a group of stoners who live together in a no-smoking apartment and smoke all day every day, a Hispanic family of many daughters, a 6' tall Asian girl who is pure bridge-n-tunnel (a NY expression for people who come to the city from the suburbs and tend to be garish) and her mother who is the walking stereotype of the Korean house frau, a brainy black crossword puzzle obsessed guy and his brainy kid, a ramrod straight guy who lives in front of CNN, an aging woman with a gentle, healing touch, the pissy aging film critic, and, of course, a 30something Indian guy who is writing a mysterious "cookbook" and his 30something gorgeous sister who, for some reason, seems to have no life other than to dote on her brother, who is way too old for sisterly doting.

They all live in a six story U-shaped apartment building that would appear to have more than 70 units. And this is one of the first places where Shyamalan lost me.

I was aware that the idea of all these wildly diverse characters being in one place had to be rationalized by a very large apartment building. And maybe there was another reason why Shyamalan felt a need to have that size of building. But when the film turns and the movie tells us that the reason this group is together is for the purpose of supporting the sea nymph, I wonder again, why the need for this huge building?

It felt unnatural to me, instinctually. My minds eye went right to a two-story California style apartment building with a pool in the courtyard and, indeed, the possibility of a pool house on the grounds. The pool house in the movie, which is where the hero of the piece, Cleveland Heep, lives is on the edge of an apparent forest, opposite the U of the 6 story apartment building. I've never seen anything like that. Maybe it is a popular kind of construction in Philly that I have never eyeballed. But with a 6 story, cement, ugly apartment building, the unfocused use of space felt off. People who build in that utilitarian way are not usually prone to leaving so much open space.

Once the sea nymph arrives in the story - it takes a while - the surface thing seems to be that she is there for Cleveland. But he is endlessly uncomfortable about her femininity. And here, too, is a moment where you are screaming for Terry Gilliam, who would understand naturally that her sensuality, overt or subdued, was an important part of this story. Shyamalan lingers on Bryce Dallas Howard's thighs quite a bit. And it is a little sexy. But even, ironically, in Splash, there was a PG sense of the naked woman who needs watering being a naked woman. Not here. And Cleveland never seems to see her as a woman, except in expressing his discomfort. And aside from the stoner dudes who see her as nothing but a naked body, no one else seems to see her as a woman either.

As we will find out in the third act, this fits the magical idea of the story. In Cleveland's case, she is really there to find out about the damage he is carrying from his past and to force him to acknowledge it openly. So the lack of a romance between the two leads is not actually a misstep. But its one of the many things in this movie that feels broken and doesn't quite feel fixed once the map of the movie is finally all laid out.

Second Act - Start down the road to story.

Cleveland Heep spends much of the second act believing in the supernatural nature of the sea nymph (named "Story") and the scrunts that are out to get her (nasty wolf/dogs that hide perfectly in the grass). He tries to come up with information about her and the Korean fairy tale from which she seems to have sprung.

In the process, Cleveland starts to include others in the building on what's going on. And, in fairy tale world, everyone is an easy believer. This is where Shyamalan really started to lose the audience's interest, it seemed to me.

Thing is, the bedtime story is not very complicated. And the movie makes it into an endless - and I mean ENDLESS - mystery.

Third Act - Putting it together.

Without getting into painful detail about how each of the players is meant to fit into the puzzle that's been put together by Cleveland and Mr. Shy, the third act brings all the freaks together to get Story, the nymph, safely to the eagle from the sky who will take her to where she is meant to be.

For reasons too complex to write about without me hurting my head from the inside, the first eagle arrival plan doesn't work. It turns out that the designations of how each person or group fits into the puzzle are wrong. (More on why in a moment…)

Now, this is another very interesting idea that Shyamalan is striving to make work. But he fails because he can't quite get it to the point where it matters that the designations are wrong. Not to re-write the movie, because I would not know where to start at this point, but say that the 6' tall Asian Britney Spears wannabe was designated as the embodiment of flaky, modern thinking. (She's not, but stick with me.) If it then turned out that she was really meant to be the embodiment of someone who can speak to the deep, emotional needs of the modern masses, that might be interesting. She misunderstands herself, so others misunderstand her. But that kind of thoughtful shift is barely attempted.

So, in a for-instance that is in the movie, the crossword puzzle guy is not the one who can decipher, but his son (who we know has to be something more than he appears to be, as he reads the colors on cereal boxes like Chris Walken reads body language in True Romance) is the one. The film offers no reason for this… other than the fact that it is so.

So you have a false ending, as everyone who is supposed to be in this role or that role has to shift roles for no apparent reason other than extending the running time.

And then we start again.

(Okay… here is the part about the puzzle that doesn't work. It is straight out of Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation script, conceptually, but it is far less interesting and ends disastrously. The pissy film critic, who seems like nothing but a caricature at first, in spite of the always precise Bob Balaban playing the role, "foresees" the future of the tale by using the language of the studio films about which he has become so contemptuous, as in, "The girl always leaves the boy in the third act." And that actually works for the movie. The guy is an asshole, but he was drawn to the apartment building to serve a purpose, as all the major characters are. Great.

But the follow-up beat is that the critic was wrong and, in theory, endangered the life of the nymph. Of course, in light of the whole movie, his wrong ideas ultimately lead to the success that ends the film. So hating him for that doesn't really make sense. Worse, as you must know since you are reading a SPOILER review, he is killed for his trouble. And that just seems petty and against the spirit of the film.

Moreover, the subtext that "the critics are wrong" is self-serving and Shyamalan proves his detractors right by making the story so much more complicated than a "Hollywood movie" normally is that he bores the audience to distraction. What has worked about his movies, I think, is that he puts real people in these extraordinary situations and they behave naturally… then the third act twist comes and people either like it or not. But as drawn out as the ride always is, at least you have a human center to connect with and compare "yourself" to… but not here. Paul Giamatti is always magnificently human, but here he is one of the freaks in the asylum and, after the first act, like all the characters, believes everything without any real cynicism or doubt. And that is not something we can all agree to as an audience.

But I digress…)

This time, waiting for "The Eagle Thing," there are some clever rationalizations, but essentially, everyone else in the building disappears conveniently, including scores of people who were gathered for a party in the name of the complicated story.

And the one mystery left is, "Who has the power to stop a scrunt?" And the solution to that question is soooooo unsatisfying that it just doesn't matter.

Mind you, there is something redeemable underneath all of this complexity… a complexity I fear this wacko review has fallen victim to itself.

The basic idea at its core is almost exactly the same idea as Signs, which is that a magical event resurrects a good man who has buried himself in grief. And the idea of gathering of powers unknown to the individuals… the idea of people being drawn together for no conscious reason with a higher purpose… the idea of the power feminine… the idea of self-perception and the world's perception vs the truth of the individual… it's all there, almost part of the movie. But in the end, it just doesn't congeal.

Oddly, this script is a big step forward for Shyamalan because he gives up on the third act punchline. He tells a story that ends in the third act, but doesn't really surprise in some oddball way. He is in Wizard of Oz territory here, with modern people living in his cement Oz, and the people who help Dorothy along the road are the real focus of the emotional part of the story and not Dorothy herself. And maybe that explains the problem as well… we don't have a relationship with this film's Dorothy and the power of her "getting home" is not what compels us. And Cleveland, who acknowledges at the end that Story "saved his life" does have a powerful arc. But none of the other helpers matter much. There is a nice bit with The Writer, played for no good reason, but none too painfully, by Shyamalan, but his journey stops dead the moment his future is foretold. (And when he speaks of himself - as embodied by Night - he gets many unintentional and unfortunate laughs.)

I feel like I am offering a rambling, rolling, somewhat unfocused piece of criticism here. And I think it is because the film just isn't settled in my head. It is too complex and there are too many interesting elements for me to dismiss it casually. Yet, it is eminently dismissible.

As I told people who asked all day Tuesday, this movie is not as bad as it's being made out to be. There is some real Roman Coliseum shit going on around Hollywood. But it isn't really good either. If this weren't a "Next Spielberg Shyamalan" movie, it would be getting a lot more slack and perhaps even some raves (that I would disagree with). But the blood is in the water and the legend is already better than the truth. And so it goes…

The Lady in the Water is sunk in L.A. and New York. But it wouldn't be remotely shocking if others, who were not so revved up about it, found more virtues than can be seen through the prism of our predetermination and illuminated by Hollywood Lite. Then again, maybe not.

E Me.

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