Lady in the Water (2006)

Idea: Building manager Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) discovers Story (Bryce Dallas Howard) swimming in the pool after hours. She's fragile, so he takes her in for the night. Cleveland soon discovers that Story is a narf (think sea nymph), seeking the Vessel to whom she must tell her tale before she can return to the Blue World. As Cleveland tries to track down the right writer within the apartment complex where he works, he also has to locate other participants that Story needs to safely go home.

Much as Mission: Impossible III served as a national referendum on the formerly enduring popularity of Tom Cruise, Lady in the Water seems to be one on writer, director, producer and now supporting player M. Night Shyamalan. I don't want to defend him, per se, because I don't think it's a defense that he needs. He needs . . . he needs a co-writer is what he needs.

Let me explain. With only seven directorial credits to his name, Shyamalan is disproportionately, Cameron Crowe sized famous. That's the way it is, and I'm not in the business of assessing fame, so just take it at face value. He made two movies that no one has ever heard of, and then he rolled out The Sixth Sense. Suddenly, he was an Oscar-nominated prodigy, and every one wanted a piece. Looking back on the varying success of the three intervening movies, I wouldn't go as far as to call it squandered promise. I'm not sure what the promise of The Sixth Sense was, anyway. Artsy? Kind of full of itself? Not that surprising? It was a well done movie, the ghosts creeped me out, and I'd watch it again.

Some critics complain that Shyamalan should drop the art house pretentions and just surrender himself to what he is -- a horror director. Which he isn't. Sure, he and composer James Newton Howard rely on blank camera vistas and sudden musical crashes to scare us, and you could call each of his movies, to a certain extent, creature features, but that's oversimplifying. Simplifying is an idea Shyamalan could benefit from, yes, but that's certainly not the problem with this offering.

A narrator pretty much lays the story out in an opening monologue, and I was rolling my eyes, groaning, and fidgeting my way through it. For a bedtime story (a fairy tale in my parlance), it was awfully self-serious. Kids don't play that way. But then the real movie started, and I got into it. Shyamalan has always done a great job setting the story and characters up, and, as he always brings it in under two hours, I wouldn't say he takes too long doing it.

It is at this point that he should bring in a co-author. It's not Shyamalan's ideas that need work, it's the execution. Someone to look over his shoulder, reading the dialogue, and politely, gently asking, "You sure you wanna go there?"

For all his thriller efforts, all Shyamalan's main movies are about a few simple things: right and wrong, good and evil, the interconnectedness of all things, and interdependence. If anything, it's equilibrium he seeks to achieve. As a director, he has a knack for finding the one actor that would fill whatever role perfectly and bringing out the one quality that s/he possesses that brings it all together. As a director, he can be strangely literal (esp. here), but he understands humanity in a way that a lot of others don't. As a writer, well, I'm starting to look back on roles in his other works and realize they were the ones he would have played if he could have. A writer often creates a proxy, and I'm too partial to the technique to criticize it.

As an actor, Shyamalan's natural in front of the camera, and he does alright. None of it is ever quite enough (not scared enough, not shocked enough, not happy enough, etc.), but I have seen so much worse so many times that complaining seems unnecessary. Besides, Giamatti, Jeffrey Wright, and Sarita Choudhary (among others) are so enjoyable that it almost doesn't matter.

I say almost because, seriously, what is with Howard? I liked her so much as Ivy in The Village, where her stilted delivery and strange accent worked with the setting. If this is the way she normally talks, then she needs a dialogue coach immediately. She borders on animatronic most of the time. There was one scene where she started talking normally, but it didn't last. If it was an acting choice, I fail to see the reasoning behind it.

Overall, it's a tough call. There's no big twist, just a series of hiccups. It's too self-serious at times, but it gets the job done. You know what? If this was some animated movie for kids, not a single critic would wrinkle his/her nose at the idea of narfs and scrunts and giant birds that carry people away. There's nothing wrong with a fiction writer creating new worlds. Wes Anderson (the contemporary with whom I most closely associate Shyamalan) does it all the time, and critics are quick to embrace his vision. People are unfairly harsh with Shyamalan. This isn't the best movie ever made or even his best, but it's not that bad. And that, my friends, is pretty good. B