Review: Lady in the Water
M. Night Shyamalan seems to be living up to his own bad press. Variously termed “arrogant” and “difficult,” he has lost some of his gleaming, wunderkind sheen, in the years since The Sixth Sense premiered. According to a recent USA Today article, when Disney read the script for his latest film, Lady in the Water, they withdrew from the project, at least in part because Shyamalan gave himself a co-starring role in the movie.
We aren’t talking about a Hitchcock-like cameo, either. Shymalan plays a character named Vick Ran, also referred to as “the vessel,” a writer whose work will change the course of human history. Too bad as an actor, Shyamalan can’t change the expression on his face. He’s a bad actor, as bad as Hayden Christianson, almost as bad as Keanu Reeves.
Also, I couldn’t quite get over the egotism of Shyamalan casting himself in the role of “writer as world savior.” The fact that his character is murdered for his teachings, at some point beyond the end of the film, only makes his egotism that much more outrageous.
Is Lady in the Water worth seeing? I think so, but only because there isn’t much else in theaters of any scope or ambition right now. As we left the theater, my wife and I were silent for a few moments, both of us trying to think of something to say about this film, and then she said, “At least he’s original.”
She’s right about that. Lady in the Water is an original story that is untypical of Hollywood, where old plots never die, but find themselves on the re-make short list every twenty years or so. Lady in the Water (hereafter referred to as LW) is also non-traditional in other ways.
It is not easily classified as to genre, which may explain how poorly it has done at the box office. Judging the film based on the previews, the viewer would be hard pressed to decide whether the film was horror, fantasy, or drama. Horror is probably the conclusion most people reach, while watching the preview.
If you go to this film expecting horror, however, you will be disappointed. There is only one “jump in your seat” scary moment, and at other times, Shyamalan blatantly violates the conventions of the horror genre. In a self-consciously post-modern moment, the character of the “symbolist,” a movie and literary critic played by the great character actor Bob Ballaban, actually narrates how he would escape the monster, if this were a typical horror movie. Unfortunately for him, this isn’t a typical horror movie, and the beast kills him. You’ll remember Ballaban as Mr. Dalrymple, the NBC exec, in several Seinfeld episodes; his character ended up lost at sea during a Greenpeace expedition after Elaine spurned his love.
So what is the film? Horror or fantasy? It’s an M. Night Shyamalan movie, so it resists all categorization. And what’s the point of trying to drop it into a slot anyway? Whether or not the movie is any good is the real point.
I’m not going to summarize the plot here, but merely offer an interpretation which, I think, allows the movie some latitude for its flaws. To some degree, watching this movie gives the impression that Shyamalan must have recently sat in on a semester-long seminar on Joseph Campbell’s works. The film takes elements from ancient mythology and tries to combine them into something new.
There is the wounded hero, Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), a former doctor who retreated to live as a building superintendent after his family were killed by a burglar. There are the seven sisters who form a kind of powerful coven. There is the mythical savior, M. Night himself. There is a “guardian” who is a warrior archetype, entrusted with protecting the weak. And there is an interpreter, a kind of sibyl who interprets the signs from heaven and tells people what to do and when to do it; in a nice twist, the interpreter turns out to be a little boy.
All of these roles are played by ordinary human beings who live in an apartment complex called “The Cove.” In fact, the action of the film never strays from the rather insular square of this building, recalling other tales of characters confined by a particular environment, such as Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus or Katherine Porter’s Ship of Fools or Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. The complex has an inner courtyard with a swimming pool that figures prominently in the story, and the camera stays pretty well focused in this central area. One could imagine this movie being made into a play; it would cost little in terms of scene changes.
One interesting aspect of the film are the varieties of characters who live in this complex. At one point, the Symbolist tells Giamatti’s character that in a movie, the director introduces seemingly insignificant characters at the beginning of a film who will be of importance later in the film. Hearing this, the film watcher thinks, “Yeah, that’s what Shyamalan did, isn’t it?”
All of them are quirky, but they are also sort of one-liners, e.g. the body builder, Reggie, who is developing only one side of his body as a scientific experiment. These characters are memorable, but except for the hero, Cleveland Heep, they have no depth. They are like Wagnerian leitmotifs, confined and defined solely by their thematic role.
All these quirky characters must come together to, first, figure out what role they are to play in this myth; and then they must figure out how to save the water nymph, bluntly named Story, who lives in the complex swimming pool. There is a perhaps too obvious liberal message here about the value of community; indeed, I kept expecting a character to utter the nausea-inducing phrase “it takes a village” at some point, but thankfully that line or something like it was never delivered.
Beyond the simplistic idea that “community” or “diversity” (another over-taxed word) can somehow prevail against evil, what else does this film mean? Not much, it would seem.
One good review I read at Jake Allen’s Ockhamist.com interprets the movie from a conservative perspective. “Shyamalan’s films consistently point to something beyond ourselves, something normative that, once realized, directly influences the way we interpret our world.”
I don’t know whether that reviewer is politically conservative, but desiring to find a “normative” value in a film or book is a conservative gesture. Liberals are content with the non-normative, or weird, or illogical. To oversimplify drastically, conservatives think the world makes sense and that good will prevail; liberals like me do not.
We liberals even tend to think that “normative” is probably a bad thing to want or desire. The Stalinist state was normative, after all. Stalinism had universal precepts which, when adhered to, provided the citizen with purpose and security. The non-normative–dissident writers, for instance, like Shyamalan’s character in the film–were rather brutally disposed of.
To a lesser degree than Stalinist Russia, American nationalism, viewed as “normal” patriotism, has a negative value as illustrated by countless examples of brutality and injustice perpetrated by Americans on non-conformists down through the decades.
I don’t particularly want to venture a “liberal” interpretation of Shyamalan’s film, because such an interpretation would be chained and reduced in relevance by association with politics (just as I cannot read and understand the Ockhamist blog review without reference to politics). However, in its self-reverential/self-referential method of exposition, LW does suggest that ego is essentially the central problem of mankind.
The key to the film is in the opening sequence, in which the myth of the Narfs is narrated via a series of cave-painting like representations. At one time the Narfs and humans coexisted in the “blue world,” but humans ventured farther and farther onto land, simultaneously becoming more and more violent. The Narfs continued to try to communicate with their human siblings, but eventually humans stopped hearing them. This suggests it is mankind’s inability to hear other people, to understand other people, that perpetuates the fallen world in which we live.
In the movie, this inability to hear the other person is represented by the mistakes Heep and his friends make in hearing the story of Story. Almost to a person, all of the characters misinterpret their role in the “myth” they are living in such a way that they are aggrandized. Cleveland thinks he is the Guardian (he is the Healer, a more feminine role), Mr. Dury thinks he is the Interpreter (a more intellectual role; his small child is actually the interpreter), and the long-haired pot smokers think they are the Guild. Their initial failure to rescue Story is a result of their wrong-headed sense of who they are. Until they correct this problem with ego, they are doomed to fail.
Perhaps that’s a lesson Shyamalan himself could learn.