Lady in the Water
Lady in the Water is based on a bedtime story writer-director M. Night Shyamalan conceived for his two daughters. If Shyamalan's objective was to bore his children to sleep with allegories about his own self-importance: mission accomplished.
The film opens with a voiceover and some crude animation meant to resemble cave drawings that explain how the people of the water and mankind were once buddies, but man's insatiable greed caused a rift and the two groups parted ways. Now the water people are back to help humans in their time of need, and for some reason this turning point in human history will blossom from a group of random individuals at a high-rise apartment building in suburban Philadelphia.
Chief among these troubled folk is Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), the stuttering superintendent of the building who finds the titular character in the swimming pool. He flushes out the rest of the myth's back story from an uncomfortably stereotyped Chinese woman and her college-aged daughter, who translates her mother's version of the fairy-tale to him.
Stay with me now.
Turns out the lady in the water, whose name is Story, is here to make contact with a certain tenant and then return home to the "Blue World" with the help of other key residents who will protect her from an evil beast who hides in the grass. Where is all this fantastical nonsense going? The tenant she inspires is a writer, played by Shyamalan himself, whose book will have a lasting impact on the world.
You know how Woody Allen makes self-referential films, but they're kind of endearing because he hates himself? Well, imagine a Woody Allen in love with himself attempting a scary ghost story. The result would be something like Lady in the Water.
Arrogant, narcissistic and pretentious could all define Shyamalan's casting of himself in the second male lead as a writer whose words and martyrdom will change mankind; but it fails to capture the self-aggrandizing slime that permeates this movie. Shyamalan has taken his usual Hitchcockian cameo to an unbearable extreme, beyond even Quentin Tarantino's ghastly acting appearances. He's a terrible actor, and his tendency to have his character talk from just off-screen or behind the camera to reinforce the point that he is both acting in and directing the film is nauseating.
But the puppeteer isn't done there. For good measure he takes a shot at all the critics who haven't liked his last couple of films (the progressively worse Signs and The Village) by actually having a pompous film critic at the apartment building whose device is to mislead the audience toward the obvious, which of course has the opposite effect on those of us who watch movies all the time, thus negating the "surprise" twist of character roles at the end. I'm not a professional critic, just a guy who loves movies, so I don't take personal offense at the ill-fated jerk played by Bob Balaban; but my intellect sure does.
The best thing about Lady in the Water is its leading lady's legs and deep blue eyes. Bryce Dallas Howard is a stunning, unconventional beauty, and she works well in close-ups. The rest of the cast does not, however, and unfortunately the master director insists on too many close-ups and out-of-focus shots in a vain attempt to add suspense to a predictable farce.
Shyamalan's once promising career, marked by the justifiably huge success of The Sixth Sense and his follow-up masterpiece, Unbreakable (still the best superhero movie ever made), has sunk into a quagmire of hubris and delusions of grandeur. Most fairy-tales have what's called a "moral to the story." There's a lot more ego than moral to Lady in the Water—just a guy telling his little girls how brilliant and important their daddy is.