from where else? the New York Times.
July 21, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
Finding Magic Somewhere Under the Pool in 'Lady in the Water'
By
MANOHLA DARGISIT was just around the time when the giant eagle swooped out of the greater Philadelphia night to rescue a creature called a narf, shivering and nearly naked next to a swimming pool shaped like a collapsed heart, that I realized M. Night Shyamalan had lost his creative marbles. Since Mr. Shyamalan’s marbles are bigger than those of most people, or so it would seem from the evidence of a new book titled “The Man Who Heard Voices” (and how!), this loss might have been a calamity, save for the fact that
“Lady in the Water” is one of the more watchable films of the summer. A folly, true, but watchable. [...]
Of course even Mr. Spielberg is not Mr. Spielberg anymore (see
“Munich”)... Even when he is gleefully blowing the planet to smithereens, as he does in
“War of the Worlds,” Mr. Spielberg takes on the important issues now, leaving the easy kids’ stuff to manqués like Mr. Shyamalan. This can happen when someone matures, or at least goes gray. Though in Hollywood — which is something of an enormous incubator, where embryonic personalities curl up in their own goo, kind of like Neo before he unplugs from the Matrix — growing up is sometimes awfully hard to do. [...]
Mr. Shyamalan has said “Lady in the Water” began as a bedtime story he told his daughters, to whom he has dedicated the film. There are all kinds of bedtime stories, those that lull you to sleep and those that keep you anxiously perched at the edge of the bed. [...]
Unfortunately, while Ms. Howard’s character, the regrettably named Story, spends a lot of the film wet, she’s one of those juiceless virginal fantasies who inspire pure thoughts, noble deeds and stifled yawns. Disney’s Little Mermaid comes off like a tramp by comparison, which suggests that Mr. Shyamalan needs to add a fairy-tale revisionist like Angela Carter to his bedtime reading.
That seems unlikely, since he appears insistent on clinging to myths, particularly about innocence and faith, that serve the myth of his own genius. In “Lady in the Water,” an unseen narrator (
David Ogden Stiers) explains that while man once listened to “those in the water,” he no longer does, which is why we have gone to hell in a handbasket or words to that effect. Apparently those who live in the water now roam the earth trying to make us listen, though initially it’s rather foggy as to what precisely we are supposed to hear — the crash of the waves, the songs of the sirens, the voice of God — until we realize that of course we’re meant to cup our ear to an even higher power: Mr. Shyamalan.
That doesn’t make him any different from any other bubble boy with a fat paycheck and the slavish attention of a media that mocks his narcissism by publishing articles about his narcissism. Before movies could talk, the great director
Erich von Stroheim stuck a von in his name and a monocle over an eye and strutted around Hollywood until the producer Irving Thalberg slapped him down to size. (Guess who Hollywood named an Academy Award for?) In “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again,” Julia Phillips writes that
Martin Scorsese greeted a news report about Sara Jane Moore’s attempt on Gerald Ford’s life with the line “You think this’ll hurt the picture?” He was worried about
“Taxi Driver.” It didn’t hurt, thank goodness.
Mr. Shyamalan isn’t an artist on the level of Mr. Scorsese; he’s just another film director who, having made a lot of money for a lot of people, was crowned an auteur at an age when he should have been deemed promising. The curse of the auteur fells a lot of filmmakers, in and out of the studio system. And paradoxically, the weakest link in Mr. Shyamalan’s new film is its story, which is filled with strenuously overworked bits and locutions like scrunt (kind of like a devil dog) and the tartutic (monkeylike creatures that descend from the trees). Mr. Shyamalan has yet to realize that one Giamatti in the hand is worth two scrunts in the bush, but maybe one day, after he’s recovered all those misplaced marbles, he will.
