Lady in the Water

Here we have another installment by the most original film maker since Alfred Hitchcock. Of course M. Night Shyamalan’s idle is the great Alfred Hitchcock, so this would stand to reason. The Shyamalan camp is split into two very distinctive classes; those who think his movies are stupid, hokey and predictable and those who think he is a genius. Well there are always more than two choices, I fall somewhere in the middle as I usually do.

Like most, I thought “The Sixth Sense” was a very good movie; enjoyable, suspenseful and thought provoking. His next two movies have varying opinions among the masses, including myself. I thought “Signs” was a piece of trash and completely worthless whereas “Unbreakable” seems mostly underrated to me. And his last effort out two summers ago was “The Village” which I did not find as awful and trite as so many others. To me it was entertaining, had its suspenseful moments, and like all of Shyamalan’s films it was visually beautiful. I would say “Lady in the Water” falls somewhere right in between “Signs” and “The Village.”

Let’s first get to some of the positive points about the movie. The first is the acting of the two lead characters. Paul Giamatti was fabulous as the stuttering building Super who becomes the unlikely hero of the fairy tale. Giamatti is fast moving up the list of outstanding actors working today. For some reason he toiled in relative anonymity in the nineties. However, he has burst on the scene in the last 4 years with his award nominated roles in American Splendor, Sideways, and Cinderella Man. The other main actor is Bryce Dallas Howard who plays the female lead in her second straight Shyamalan movie. As in “The Village” Howard is entrancing and we seem to not be able to take our eyes off of her throughout the film. Howard and Giamatti have great chemistry on screen and they hold the movie together with their performances.

Other positives in the movie were the originality of the story and of course the visual aspects of the movie. The story is a true original; it is basically the expansion of a bedtime story Shyamalan made up for his children. And visually he uses all sorts of cool camera angles and editing techniques which always keep your eye focused and aware of what is going on in the film.

With all of those positives the movies is still somehow a jumbled mess of a plot and more confusing than a bad Tarantino film. Basically before the movie really begins the entire plot is laid out in detail during a narrated crudely drawn cartoon. Even with that deep explanation I still had trouble following what was going on. There were too many characters that had too many jobs in trying to rescue the lost girl (The Lady in the Water) and get her back to her homeland. Every time you thought things were figured out it seemed something or someone was missing which led to mass confusion among the audience and I suspect the cast as well. And typical to this director he got monster happy again. He goes to such great lengths to build up these awful, angry, flesh eating creatures but the CGI effects make them appear extremely fake. Not to say there wasn’t a time or two where they made you jump from your seat but overall they weren’t as effective as I suspect he wanted them to be.

Again while it had its good point overall it was a bit confusing and hard to follow. However, I would always give an original movie like this a chance rather then some ridiculous sequel or the Ballad of Ricky Bobby. So I do encourage Shyamalan to keep presenting us with new fresh ideas on the screen, some will work and some won’t, but nothing can take the place of originality.