Lady in the Water

M. Night Shyamalan is mystique personified, or at least that is what the acclaimed director sees himself as. His first major movie, The Sixth Sense, was a near masterpiece with one mind-bogging twist of an ending. And his second film, Unbreakable, contained a quiet, controlled beauty that revealed a director who had confidence in the narrative and didn't resort to little tricks of the Hollywood blockbuster trade.
This was a director who had vision and stuck stubbornly close to that vision at whatever costs. He never felt the need to condescend to his audience, who he felt was intelligent enough to get what he was trying to convey.
But soon, as Signs and The Village showed, Night became a slave to convention, even if he told himself he wasn't. Audiences came expecting the twist, and his latter movies lost a little bit of that magic found in his first.
He tries to capture some of that magic back with his latest offering, Lady in the Water, a movie based on a bedtime story he told his children.
Thankfully, there's no twist here, even if you do find yourself out of habit waiting for one.
But the problem this movie has is Night is trying to be too fanciful, too trusting in his audience to simply suspend belief.
In this movie, Paul Giamatti, who is always a dependable character actor, plays a superintendent of an apartment complex who finds a young woman swimming nude in the apartment pool. Turns out the woman, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, is a narf from the Blue World who has come to find a writer, who happens to be played by the director in the largest role he has carved out for himself in one of his movies. This writer is composing something that has the potential to change the world.
That's pretty heady stuff, right? And guess what, Giamatti's character and everyone else buys the whole story by Story, the name of the narf.
This is a little too easy, because even though there have always been supernatural elements in Night's movies, Night has always made way for some of that natural skepticism to creep in before the audience gives over to believing the unbelievable.
Not this time. We're expected to take the big leap of faith in the whole story, and though this is a fairy tale, there's no grounding for the audience.
The characters are barely fleshed out, though Giamatti does give a powerful performance. Howard hardly says a word; she just stares with those big beautiful eyes of hers as if that's acting.
Night doesn't give the audience anything to invest in, so we just don't care.
He does, however, gives us some good scares (those scrunts are just darn creepy with those red eyes and gnashing teeth), and there is a nice scene with the film critic played by Bob Balaban.
Yet, in the end, the movie just didn't deliver. It didn't move me; it didn't make me feel anything, not like that last scene in The Sixth Sense, with Haley Joel Osment and Toni Collette, where I admittedly choked up just a bit.
Instead, I left the movie theater hoping that Night comes back with something a lot better than this tepid fairy tale.