Lady in the Water

Day 298 - 10/25/09 - Movie #298

BEFORE: One week left in Shock-tober, and I've got just enough time to knock off some of these M.Night Shyamalan films from my list - as I mentioned before, I would have liked to do an in-depth review of Stephen King movies, but I'll have to postpone this until next October. This month went by a lot quicker than I thought it would.

THE PLOT: Apartment building superintendent Cleveland Heep rescues a young woman from the pool he maintains. When he discovers that she is actually a nymph who is trying to make the journey back to her home, he works with his tenants to protect his new friend from the creatures that are determined to keep her in our world.

AFTER: Man, I just didn't get this at all. I understand the desire to cast Paul Giamatti as an unlikely hero or "antihero", but here's a case where a whole new mythology had to be invented as a backstory for the nymph character (sorry, NARF) played by Bryce Dallas Howard. So there's this opening animated sequence that explains that humans used to live by the oceans, and they would get advice from sea nymphs, and this would somehow prevent wars - but when men moved inland, away from the helpful nymphs, society started to go downhill.

So this superintendent finds a nymph in the pool of this apartment complex, and we're given these little hints of her purpose from an old Chinese folk-tale. Funny, we only seem to get a tiny bit of the story at a time, and of course it's just one little relevant nugget at a time, to draw out the story... The nymph is there to inspire a writer, so somewhere in the complex is an author who's apparently going to change the world with his words, to be a vessel for the nymph's advice to mankind.

There's all kinds of complicated bits to the folk-tale - the narf is being chased by a scrunt, which is like a big nasty dog/wolf that looks like it's made of grass. But she can be protected by a Guardian, a Healer, and a Guild, until an eagle....look, it's just complicated, OK? But my confusion comes with the writing of this story - you could have written anything you wanted, M. Night, and THIS is what you come up with? What was the freakin' point of all this?

Mr. Shyamalan, of course, has a habit for casting himself in his own films - which is not uncommon, Alfred Hitchcock had a cameo appearance in almost all of his films, and Stephen King and Stan Lee are known for making appearances in films based on their stories and characters. But Hitchcock would cast himself in a TINY role - like a man walking a dog, or getting on a bus - or even as the "before" picture in a weight-loss ad in a newspaper. Shyamalan casts himself as the important writer, the guy whose book is going to change the world, possibly by inspiring a future president or something. Someone's got an inflated ego, I think...

Another significant character is a movie reviewer, played by Bob Balaban. He gives Cleveland horrible advice, based on what he knows about predictable movie plots, about how to locate the people who are supposed to help protect the narf. From this we learn, by extension, that movie reviewers are dumb and often mis-understand plots. The movie reviewer meets an untimely end - so I think (the same) someone has an axe to grind with movie critics.

Besides being way too self-referential, this film just gets bogged down in its own mythology - which was created for this film, so why make things so darn complicated? There was a bit of a twist (I guess...) and one small reveal that I saw coming a mile away. Of course Giamatti was great playing a schlub - isn't he always? And there were some OK performances from Bill Irwin, Freddy Rodriguez, and Noah Gray-Cabey (the kid from "Heroes") but mostly this just felt like a waste of time.

RATING: 2 out of 10 lounge-chairs

SHOCK-O-METER: 3 out of 10 (OK, that dog/wolf thing was a little scary...)