Lady In The Water (DVD)

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When writer-director M. Night Shyamalan burst onto the movie scene in 1999 with "The Sixth Sense," some people hailed him a natural successor to Hitchcock. He is really quite a good cinematic storyteller, with, unfortunately, a diminishing supply of good stories to tell.

In "The Sixth Sense," Shyamalan explored the world of the supernatural to almost universal acclaim. In 2000's "Unbreakable, he explored the world of comic-book superheroes to almost universal indifference, except from me because I liked it. In 2002's "Signs," he worked up a fascinating first half, let down by a wholly prosaic second half. Then, in 2004's "The Village," he started with an intriguing premise and went nowhere with it. You may see a pattern here, and it's downward. His 2006 entry, "Lady in the Water," continues the free-fall. I wonder if it isn't about time for Shyamalan to let somebody else do the writing. He is certainly more than able to do some creative filmmaking, if he had the right script to work with.

Shyamalan describes "Lady in the Water" as a bedtime story, basing the movie on a book he wrote for his kids. Obviously, he meant the picture as a children's fantasy, but he may have also meant it as a rebuttal to those critics who found his previous films lacking in substance or logic. One thing is sure, though: As a bedtime story, it is likely to put more than a few viewers to sleep.

Things got off to an inauspicious start when Buena Vista, who had helped produce and distribute the director's first four major films, declined to do this one. Shyamalan had to take the script to Warner Bros. to get it made. Maybe BV knew something WB didn't. Now that I've had a chance to see it, I'd have to say the powers that be at Buena Vista were right. The movie is something of a shambles.

Now, understand, I have nothing against fantasies--for children or adults. Most of the biggest moneymaking films of all time are traditional or sci-fi fantasies: "Lord of the Rings," "Harry Potter," "Star Wars," "Jurassic Park," and the like. But good fantasies have to create and adhere to their own internal consistencies; they can't just make stuff up as they go along and have audiences wondering what's happening. I mean, even fairy tales need to make some sense. Instead, "Lady in the Water" throws together secret worlds, crossword puzzles, cereal boxes, cookbooks, butterflies, prophecies, magical eagles, peculiar guilds, mysterious guardians, automatic sprinklers, and monsters made out of grass, with the tale getting more preposterous as it goes along. OK, maybe Shyamalan meant it as a comedy.

Back when I taught English, about once a year I used to ask my students to play a writing game. I'd start them off with an opening line, and then I'd have them continue it for a few minutes until I asked them to pass their papers to the persons behind them. This would go on for thirty or forty minutes, with everybody adding to everybody's else's story, and everybody having a good time. Even the most reluctant writers joined in the fun. But it was the process, not the end result, that was important. The finished stories were a mess. I thought of this little exercise as I was watching "Lady in the Water." The only difference is that Shyamalan got paid for his script.

The movie goes in all different directions, starting on a moralistic note, becoming humorous, feisty, and satiric along the way, introducing elements of the wondrous and the horrific, and ending up preachy and sentimental. Actually, that sounds a lot like a typical fairy tale, and this one might have worked, too, had not Shyamalan piled on so many exaggerations in so haphazard a way.

It's all about narfs. According the movie, a narf is a sea nymph. And according to the movie, there's a narf living under an apartment-house swimming pool in Philadelphia. Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), the apartment manager, first discovers the narf, whose name is Story (Bryce Dallas Howard). She is the "Lady" of the title, a Madam Narf, one sent from a secret undersea kingdom to the world of humans in order to help them (if only they will listen). But she has to be careful of skrunks--evil, wolflike creatures out to kill narfs who venture onto land. She also has to find the person she is helping and then find a guardian who will assist her in returning to her world.

Giamotti is his usual sad-sack, common-guy self, this time an unhappy fellow with a tragic incident in his past and a stutter in his present, who almost instantly believes Story's story, understands her plight, and determines to aid her. The movie gives no explanation why any sane man would do this.

The first half of the film is, frankly, boring. The Wife-O-Meter suggested that it would have been better if Shyamalan had created more mystery in the beginning, instead of immediately showing us the narf and explaining all about her. Once the filmmaker spells everything out for us in the first fifteen or twenty minutes, the rest of the plot simply unfolds in a jumbled series of incomprehensible events.