Review of Lady in the Water (2006) by Emily S — 06 Jun 2010

The MacGuffin in the Swimming Pool.

Mostly, I was assured that I would hate this movie. One or two people, on hearing that I'd reached "lady" in the library's catalog, waxed rhapsodic, but it's a rare position and one you'll notice I don't hold. I can see the outline of a decent story here, something which could be built into a genuine classic, but even though it's based on a story M. Knight Shyamalan told his kids, I don't think he was the right person to bring this story to film. Or at any rate, someone else needed to write the screenplay. As it appears in the movie, the story is clunky and overexplained. Several of the explanations, in fact, don't make as much sense as the characters in the story think they do, and what I thought was an obvious alternative to the mistake the characters made wasn't even considered. Given Shyamalan, I don't necessarily expect that road to be taken, but normal people would have considered the person interpreting her grandmother's words as the Interpreter, wouldn't they?

Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) is the beaten-down super of an apartment complex, The Cove. One night, he finds a naked woman in the complex's swimming pool. Her name is Story (Bryce Dallas Howard), and she turns out to be a narf. (I'm not sure if this shows that Shyamalan has seen too much [i]Pinky and the Brain[/i] or not enough.) This is [long, unnecessary mythos here]. Anyway, she has to be seen by and inspire the Writer, who after too much looking around turns out to be Shyamalan--er, Vick Ran, who will write a book which will inspire a future President and change the world. And then the narf has to [unnecessarily long explanation of her return home]. However, she isn't supposed to tell anyone all this, so Cleveland gets his information from Mrs. Choi (June Kyoto Lu), as interpreted by her Americanized daughter, Young-Soon (Cindy Cheung), who calls it a bedtime story despite the fact that it's clearly more of a legend in the amorphously Asian country of their birth.

I say "amorphously Asian" because, if my awareness of Asian names is correct, they have a Chinese last name, but Young-Soon has a Korean first name. Either way, though, it doesn't matter. The Chois are intended to be Movie Asians, or maybe they just are. They are broad stereotypes. Not that such people don't exist, of course, but this is an apartment complex with not much else in it. There are also the Broad Jewish Stereotypes (Tovah Feldshuh and Tom Mardirosian), the "Smokers" (Joseph D. Reitman, Jared Harris, Grant Monohon, John Boyd, and Ethan Cohn), who are oddly enough not stated to be stoners, at least not clearly. There's the Large Hispanic Family (Maricruz Hernandez, Carla Jimenez, Natasha Perez, Monique Gabriela Curnan, Marilyn Torres, and George Bass). And so forth. And, of course, every apartment is decorated in similarly broad fashion, unto changes I certainly wouldn't make to an apartment where I ever wanted my deposit back--they even paint the walls!

Oh, and did I mention that M. Knight Shyamalan is going to save the world? Yeah. Story has been sent to the human world to inspire his book, which will bring about great changes and make everything better for everyone. Bad enough that there is a critic there for Shyamalan to vent his spleen upon (Bob Balaban as Henry Farber), a man intended to show that critics don't know everything and therefore are wrong when they call any of his movies terrible. (His previous movie didn't break 50% on the Tomatometer.) Bad enough, honestly, that he gave himself such a large role. With enough thought, I could name a few actor/directors who have done good jobs directing themselves, but Shyamalan isn't in the, say, Clint Eastwood caliber. And Clint has the good sense not to play the messiah in his own films. And even if he did, he's a much more talented actor. Shyamalan comes across as a goofy kid, and his character has no real failings. It doesn't work, though it might had someone else taken the role.

The other day, we talked about how time travel must follow its own rules. Legends should as well. Even in the complicated morass that is Hindu legend, where there are so many gods that not all of them have names, how each god works remains the same throughout. Alas for this film, it isn't true here. Scrunts can't attack narfs except when they can. Narfs can't tell humans what's going on, but Story ends up doing so in more detail than is really interesting. Story is best under the shower, but she spends a lot of time curled up in it with the water off. No one can watch her be taken up by the eagle thingy until they can. Basically, rules tend to be true until they need to not be so a plot point can be fulfilled. Or to make filming easier. Or because Shyamalan forgot what he was doing. Or something. Anyway, the whole thing felt as though he put thought into the wrong places, and it kind of makes me wonder what his daughters, to whom he originally told the story, thought of the whole thing.