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LADY IN THE WATER (2006): Little wet riding hood

December 6th 2008 10:08

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A modern fairytale masquerading as a thriller, Lady in the Water can be an enjoyable enough experience if you accept the initial fantasy premise, told through a series of child-like cartoons: a long time ago the human race was friends with a race of water people called narfs. They have a natural enemy on land, the wolf-like scrunts, but keep on sending out their children on dangerous missions to make contact with us humans for mutual inspiration - offering the story's biggest hole. The plot of the movie is allegedly based on a bedtime story M. Night Shyamalan wrote for his kids, which explains a lot. One of the narfs, Story (Bryce Dallas Howard) is discovered illicitly swimming in the pool after 7 pm by the local superintendent Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), a stuttering, gentle and overly self-conscious soul. They develop an unlikely bond and Cleveland decides to uncover the secrets of the narfs in order to help Story return home. He involves in this all his friends and neighbours, an array of colourful and occasionally grotesque characters, including Young Soon (Cindy Cheung), a Korean student and entertaining source of fairytale-related information via her incredibly unfriendly mother, a crossword-puzzle addict Mr Dury (Jeffrey Wright), a band of smokers, a writer (Shyamalan in a rather extended cameo) and his talkative sister (Sarita Choudhury), the cat lady Mrs. Bell (Mary Beth Hurt), and a recluse (Bill Irwin). I will let you discover Reggie (Six Feet Under's Freddy Rodríguez) for yourself – some things just have to be seen to be believed.

Bryce Dallas Howard and Paul Giamatti get wet in Lady in the Water

Just another spin on E.T., you might say, and that is not too far from the truth, as Steven Spielberg is Shyamalan's self confessed career model. The best part of the film however consists of social observation on cultural diversity, faith, grief, creativity and human idiosyncrasies the director manages to cram into the encounters between the characters in this little movie. One cannot help but think that the beast of the tale is just an aside, a pretext to dwell a little on the intricacies of human communication, our need for rules and spiritual guidance, and constant search for meaning. Hence the narrative character functions everyone is assigned, as if taken straight from Propp's fairytale typology: The Healer, The Guild, The Guardian, etc. The microcosm of the apartment building, with the pool as its heart, becomes a stand-in for humanity and the stories we tell ourselves, but on a tragicomic rather than mythic scale. The purported answer to all woes seems to be a regression to a state of childlike naïveté. The general effect the film achieves is an incongruous mixture of suburban Americana invaded by a bout of magic realism Hollywood style, or literally a different, ahem, story (please excuse bad pun)…

Considering the negative critical reactions this movie has elicited, which insist on reading it as an (extremely) failed weighty allegory of some sort, the inclusion of a film critic Mr. Farber (Bob Balaban, who appears to have the time of his life) as one of the tenants is a stroke of genius, and perhaps the director's ironically pointed reply, considering this particular character's fate. Not very scary and unexpectedly hilarious at times, Lady in the Water features an excellent cast and photography by Christopher Doyle, and is less of a (marketing) cheat than The Village, more fun than Signs, and arguably Shyamalan's lightest feature to date, with the humour somehow counteracting the director's propensity to pretentiousness more effectively than his usual attempts at thrills. Whether Shyamalan can ever top The Sixth Sense remains to be seen though.

Review by Patricia Bieszk

© Copyright P. Bieszk 2006.

Originally published on The Scene.

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