The Moose Hole - Lady Drowns in Shyamalan's Self-absorbed Ego
Written: Dec 23 '06
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Paul Giamatti, musical score
Cons: Bryce Dallas Howard, story, characters
The Bottom Line: Quant and mystifying but ultimately convoluted, redundant, and full of loopholes and lapses in conventional logic so glaring only his own daughters would ignore them
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| mickeymoose15's Full Review: Lady in the Water |
A lot has changed for writer/director/producer M. Night Shyamalan in the relatively short span of seven years. He went from a total unknown to a true up and comer practically overnight when he sold the script for The Sixth Sense to the Walt Disney Company for a remarkable three million dollars, plus an additional five-hundred thousand for Shyamalan to direct the supernatural thriller. The Academy Award-nominated film made him a household name, grossing over seven-hundred million dollars worldwide in 1999. Unbreakable, his follow-up project in November 2000, was unfortunately lost in the confusion of the holiday season, pushed aside by director Ron Howard’s live-action adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas starring Jim Carrey, but quickly developed a cult-following on video and DVD. Signs starring Mel Gibson sealed his standing as one of the greatest filmmakers of our generation, if not of all time. However it was the failure of The Village in August 2004 which eventually led M. Night Shyamalan to break all ties with the Walt Disney Company and start fresh with a new studio, Warner Brothers. While Hollywood is abuzz with rumors about the possibility of M. Night Shyamalan taking the reins of the highly profitable Harry Potter film franchise with the live-action adaptation of The Half-Blood Prince, he is in reality having to start from square one as he did with The Sixth Sense. He still has yet to prove himself fully to studio executives at Warner Brothers so as to prove that the box office failure of The Village (it made as much world-wide as Unbreakable did four years earlier but that’s not adjusting to inflation) was merely a blip on the radar screen and not something significantly larger and more troubling. And judging by the poor performance of the WB’s summer slate so far (the two-hundred million dollar plus budgeted Superman Returns will likely not cross the two-hundred million dollar mark domestically), Lady in the Water is a must win situation for Shyamalan should he desire the same amount of creative control over his films in the future.
The story for Lady in the Water is exactly how director/writer/producer M. Night Shyamalan describes it as, a bedtime story. Quant and mystifying but ultimately convoluted, redundant, and full of loopholes and lapses in conventional logic so glaring only his own daughters, unwilling to hurt their father’s feelings, would ignore them. While this is not atypical for an M. Night Shyamalan supernatural thriller (for example, the aliens from Signs were harmed by water and yet they traveled to a planet to harvest human beings for food on a planet two-thirds covered with water), the lack of a relevant storyline, one which the audience can passionately invest in, makes them all the more evident. It is not that there were far too many rules; The Sixth Sense seven years ago had just as many or more. Rather it is the fact that they existed at all or that they were explained to the audience in such explicit detail at convenient turning-points in the plot. Instead of furthering the connection between mythology and faith, they are treated more like ways for the writer, in this case M. Night Shyamalan himself, to get around loopholes or dead-ends in the script. The problem is not that M. Night Shyamalan is becoming too smart or dextrous for movie audiences to catch up and grasp his ‘creative’ ideas. No, rather it is that they have outgrown his methodic storylines and his trite plot twists. He has dumbed down his characters’ dialogue and the storyline they revolve around to the point where it is insulting to the intelligence of his audience. It certainly does not help matters that both as an ‘actor’ and a writer he comes off as being high on himself. If it was not obvious two years ago with The Village it is even more unmistakable now with Lady in the Water that M. Night Shyamalan is making a political statement about the Bush administration, the war in Iraq, and the role of the United States in the world in general. It is fine if Shyamalan wants to chart this new path for his films but let us be upfront about it rather then hide behind mediocre stories at best which only further damage his image among his core fans.
Bryce Dallas Howard’s performance in The Village may have single-handedly saved the supposed political allegory from being a complete train-wreck, but her rather stoic portrayal of Story, a ‘sea nymph’ whose angelic presence inspires a struggling writer to finish his political commentary entitled ‘The Cookbook’ which in turn will influence a future president of the United States and change the course of history, fails to properly capture the imagination of the audience. In nearly every scene her facial expression is the same, either she’s staring blankly into space or she’s shown with a steady stream of tears running down her cheeks. We have no emotional investment in her or what becomes of her, despite the fact that what happens to Story will have ripple effects across the world. The audience is more concerned with the outcome of Cleveland Heep, the everyman character with whom we form an attachment to, then for Story. Her mannerisms and the way she interacts not just with Cleveland but with the rest of the tenants of The Cove don’t make her seem at all human, although she certainly appears to be one on the surface. So what exactly is a ‘narf’ anyway? The only answer we receive is from Young-Soon, a teenage Korean Britney Spears-wannabe who comes off as a racially offensive stereotype, who defines it simply as a ‘sea nymph’. Of course if you covered Greek and Roman mythology in a Latin language course in high school then that would mean something. More likely however this is not the case for the majority. And why does she spend a lot of her time onscreen in the shower? Does she need to be amerced in water to stay alive? Nothing in the script seems to indicate such a conclusion. There is a great deal of confusion as to what Story is, where she is going, and why we should care what happens to her over the course of nearly two hours, none of which are ever cleared up in the film; the precise reason why Lady struggles so much.
Despite a relatively weak script from which to work from, Paul Giammati is positively fabulous in the role of The Cove super Cleveland Heep who like the attendants around him is more then he seems on the surface. It’s not a ‘Joe Gould’-type performance as he had with director Ron Howard’s vastly underappreciated boxing drama, Cinderella Man, last summer, but it is definitely a significant step forward in becoming a leading man. Cleveland Heep is a truly commiserating and fascinating character we form an emotional attachment to but it takes so long for the script to actually get to that point in the course of two hours that it ends up being too-little, too-late.
Character actors like Bill Irwin as Mr. Leeds, a lonely man who sits in his apartment all day watching war films, and Mary Beth Hurt as Mrs. Bell are greatly underutilized in this film, their respected characters making barely a fleeting appearance in the storyline. As opposed to the residents of Alfred Hitchcock’s flat in Rear Window, we gain no real insight into their lives. They needn’t be crucial to the storyline but at least like in Rear Window they could be placed in the background every so often at critical junctures in the story to add or distract from the heightened emotional state of the movie.
Overall, on the surface writer/director M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water is like any other of his past films, a dramatic creative departure from the ordinary and into the extraordinary, but unlike its predecessors his latest is a significant step in the wrong direction. The ideas Shyamalan expresses in this movie are far too eccentric for audiences to connect intimately with and its petered out message is lost in the sea of self-absorption and egotism of the director’s creation. Frankly Lady doesn’t have much going for it. At least with The Village the first two-thirds of the picture were exhilarating and engaging. Lady doesn’t even have that. Yes, it has an uplifting inspirational message – everyone has a purpose in life to fulfill – but nothing movie audiences have not heard before or in better fashion then Lady in the Water. Shyamalan takes too long to get his point across, dragging us, his audience, through a drawn out and melancholic one and a half hours, that the end result is made all the more disappointing because of it. One thing Lady in the Water has been especially criticized (rightfully) for is writer/director M. Night Shyamalan’s treatment of Harry Farber, the movie critic. His portrayal on screen is in the same vein as Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin’s imitation of Siskel and Ebert in 1998’s Godzilla. Nothing more then a childish voodoo curse on the movie critic community which has shunned his work as of late, although it was the same group of people who nominated him for Best Director at the Academy Award’s in 1997. Shyamalan is not making any friends with this character, though it is hard to imagine that was ever his intent. Comparing M. Night Shyamalan to cinematic legends like Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg in light of this creative spat is a horrendous insult. Neither one was ever a critical darling for their entire career but neither were they so extreme as to acknowledge it, let alone possess the belief that they were above such criticism. Shyamalan is guilty of both. And why is Harry Farber killed by the scrunt in the first place? Remember, it was Cleveland who came to him for assistance, not the other way around. Why should he be punished for Cleveland’s mistake? As for the scrunts themselves – again, no definition is provided as to what they are exactly – while menacing to a certain extent, notably from a far away distance, were at best laughable when examined up close and not the least bit frightening. Shyamalan should take a tip from Alien director Ridley Scott or even from Dead Man’s Chest director Gore Verbinski – this of course is a reference to the Kraken – that less is more. Using a descriptive analysis of the creature and frightening sound produced off-screen, as Shyamalan had done previously for the aliens in Signs, he could have easily made the scrunts appear all the more threatening with very little effort. Instead the more we see of the scrunts in the movie, the less they appear as mystifying creatures to be feared and more like junkyard dogs in desperate need of a bath. Here’s a bit of sound advice for writer/director M. Night Shyamalan – take some serious time off from filmmaking and reexamine the direction in which your career is heading toward because there’s no happy ending where it’s going now.
Recommended:
No
Movie Mood: None of the Above
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Script
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mickeymoose15
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Location: Milwaukee, WI
Reviews written: 226
Trusted by: 14 members
About Me:
The Moose likes movies and likes reviewing them. Nuff said.
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