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Lady in the Water A new M. Night Shyamalan movie is always an interesting proposition. He's constantly on the cusp of producing a great film to match his debut, The Sixth Sense (1999), but his films to date have been flawed to greater or lesser degrees. A unhealthy reliance on the final act "twist"—which worked wonderfully in his directorial debut—obeyed the laws of diminishing returns in Unbreakable (2000), Signs (2002) and The Village (2004). Signs in particular suffered from a ridiculous deus ex machina (look away now if you don't want the ending ruined): aliens who can be killed by squirting water at them! This begs the inevitable question, what would the alien invasion have done if it had started raining?
But right up to that point, Signs was an intelligent and well-constructed movie. Shyamalan has the directing chops, but seems to be convinced that his auteur approach of writing, producing, directing (and usually giving himself a cameo) is beyond reproach. His producer at Disney, Nina Jacobson, had given Shyamalan free reign on his previous productions, but his script for Lady in the Water was considered to be self-indulgent and led to a falling out between Shyamalan and Disney. The rift was described in detail in the book The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale and Shyamalan ended up taking his script to Warner Brothers.
As it turns out, Nina Jacobson was vindicated and Lady in the Water is unmitigated crap, easily Shyamalan's worst film, and continues his downward trajectory rather than reversing it. The movie is based on a fairy tale that Shyamalan wrote for his kids and concerns the appearance of a water nymph called Story (Bryce Dallas Howard) in the swimming pool of an apartment complex. The building superintendent Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) discovers her and helps her complete her mission to pass on a message to a writer that will help change the world. Trying to stop Story is a rogue scrunt, a kind of supernatural wolf made of coarse grass, with glowing red eyes.
Giamatti is a gifted actor, perhaps the best in the world, and he alone makes Lady in the Water bearable. He manfully wrestles with the script, wringing what he can from it, but boy, it's an uphill struggle. The supporting cast, too, try their best, but it's beyond their power to change the direction of the movie with the egotistical Shyamalan at the helm. It's perhaps telling that the important writer that Story must deliver her message to is played by Shyamalan himself, in his biggest cameo yet.
Shyamalan pokes fun at his detractors with a character called Farber (Bob Balaban), a movie critic, who ends up being wrong about everything. But these I'm-right-you're-wrong indulgences aside, the plot of the film is difficult to take seriously, no matter how earnest the script wants to be. There's a whiff of a good idea buried in the screenplay, but the version that's on the screen stretches the viewer's incredulity, making it difficult to suspend disbelief long enough to buy the absurdities Shyamalan litters the script with.
It's difficult to know where Shyamalan goes from here. He's certainly a talented director, and has some good ideas, but he needs a little humility so that he can accept the fact that not every notion and whim he has will translate into a great movie. The trouble is, he shows no sign of the accepting this truth, so who knows what nightmares—and I don't mean that in a good way—Shyamalan will foist on us before he gets the message.
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