The Players…
Paul Giamatti, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jeffery Wright, Bob Balaban, Jared Harris…and M. Night Shyalaman.
The Story…
Nothing much ever happens at Cleveland’s apartment complex, his home and his work. Endless days consist of fixing leaky pipes and skimming out the pool. Sure, it’s a living, a simple existence and Cleveland wouldn’t really want it another way. Sort of. So when a water nymph pops up in said pool one night and tells him her desperate tale of escape and peril, his simple world is totally upended. To say the least.
Wait. What?
The Rant…
Poor Night. After being slathered with praise for his Oscar-nominated opus The Sixth Sense, he just hasn’t been able to make lightening strike twice. Don’t get me wrong, his follow-ups Unbreakable, Signs, and to a lesser extent The Village were all fine films. But audiences are a fickle bunch. They want the goodies delivered twice, thrice and over and over again. Some directors can do this effortlessly with no question (Spielberg) regardless of whatever pap they churn out (Always, Hook, Jurassic Park 2 etc). But not poor Night, seemingly always living in a private hell of his own making, shadowed by ghosts and a psychic Haley Joel Osment.
Whilst The Sixth Sense was more or less a high concept Twilight Zone episode, Lady In The Water plays kinda on a fairy tale Night cooked up for his kids. How’s that for a healthy ego? Pretty damned good considering the literal ghosts at his back. F*ck the critics, I’m gonna base my next failure—ahem—feature on this!
Bad idea, dad…
Cleveland Heep (Giamatti) is your average maintenance man for an average apartment complex in a perfectly average corner of Philadelphia. (I’d be remiss to not mention that Night shoots all his films in southeastern PA. Guy wants to work close to home.) His days run seamlessly into the next, unclogging toilets, changing light bulbs and trying to enforce the rules of the roost. Cleveland’s life is very…average. Crushingly so.
One night Heep is patrolling around the complex’s pool, trying to catch any after hours swimmers. Pool closes at 7 don’t ya know. Well sure enough, someone…or something is mucking about in the water, and when Cleveland goes to investigate…
…He wakes up in his apartment dazed, confused and to a naked, young woman dripping water and looking spooked. Things could be worse, but definitely not weirder. The woman calls herself Story (Howard). If ain’t on the nose just like cocaine on Truman Capote’s, I don’t know what is. Story is fearful, wistful and has a certain aura about her. What’s more is the she seems to know things about Cleveland’s history that he’s tried to forget. And…wait. What the hell? Where did Story freaking come from?!?
Well after taking her in, Cleveland discovers that she is, surprise, not what she seems. He does a little sniffing around, and discovers (with thanks to the Asian tenants with the oddest bedtime story recollection ever) that Story is a “narph,” better known as a water nymph in the Western tongue. Story desperately needs to get back home, but forces beyond her control are colluding against her. So it’s up to Cleveland, as he reluctantly discovers, to draw upon knowledge of myth and legend to return Story to her realm and ultimately fulfill a prophecy, which could either save or damn both of their worlds.
Uh…yeah.
The circumstances described at butt end of the synopsis is usually when Night’s movies come off the tracks. Lady is no exception. I know it’s early in the film, but the sh*t gets really weird really quick, and not in a fun way, either.
I’ve found that with Night’s better films, the weirdness is creeping, not like being slapped in the puss with a dead haddock, all slimy and smelly. It’s called building tension, if not atmosphere. Sure, we can be dropped into the thick of it in, say, action movies. But with fantasies like Lady, we need a slow climb with some significant backstory. Since fantasy and its cousin sci-fi work in worlds of their own separate from conventional drama and comedy, we need a steady climb in such a film from the mundane to the fantastic. Within context, of course.
(The following malarky is loaded with spoilers.)
A good example? The twin intros of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I say “twin” because the opening with the proto-humans struggles to survive and the eventual arrival of the Monolith then paired expertly executes backstory that will only reach fruition within context later in the film.
Millions of years later we have the metaphorical jump cut leading into the heralded, ballet-esque docking sequence between the shuttle and the space station, which serves as the second intro. In Kubrick’s version of 1999, space travel has become so routine that the miracle of tech doesn’t even touch Dr. Floyd or his companions imaginations. Being on their ISS is just work. It takes 20 more minutes of keen exposition until sh*t gets weird, and by that point in the film Kubrick has laid the groundwork for the proceeding sci-fi mystery.
(Spoiler alert over. You may now return your stewardess to her upright position.)
In sum, Night, you just can’t drop weird out of the sky and expect us to just roll along with it. Especially when you continue to lay on the weird all rich and thick-like. Both the audience and the cast can’t digest/process it very well.
Speaking of casting, I love Paul Giamatti, but it’s a plutonic relationship (he never returns my calls anyway). He’s far and away my favorite character actor. His work is almost always delightful, humorous and often separate from the film he’s in. He always gives it his all, regardless of the pap smear he’s gotten himself shackled into. This takes chutzpah. It takes a lot of gumption as an actor to throw yourself into a role for a film with a lot of rusty gears grinding against it. You gotta respect that. Especially if the actor is the only redeemable facet of the film.
Like I said earlier, Night conceived this movie on the basis of a story he made up for his children. Now, just because a tall tale enthralls young ears at home does not mean it will gain traction outside the house, especially considering the multiplex. I looked up the disparity of budget versus gross for Lady. Production budget, $70 million. Domestic total gross, a little over $42 million. Ouch. Even taking in the worldwide gross, this movie took in only a little over $2 million profit. That’s the price of certain actors’ trailers. In other words, a pittance. Even simpler: dud.
For all its canny flourishes, solid acting and outstanding cinematography, Lady is (if you’ll pardon the pun) dead in the water. And the funny thing is I had high hopes for this movie. The premise is just so mysterious and wonky, it had to provide some crazy fantasy elements to tickle the mind. Plus it stars Paul Giamatti! And Bryce Dallas Howard is naked! It’s something I wanted to recommend to others with great enthusiasm!
What went wrong?
Well first things first, I’d like to say (and he probably would, too) that M. Night Shyalaman is the Hitchcock of the supernatural film. That’s a fair comparison I think, if you consider The Master’s mid-period films of the Fifties. Night employs a lot of deliberate camera angles, centering elements of the scene to either drop hints about future plot points or to frame the actors (a good example of this in action is Hitchcock’s classic, Rear Window). There are always elements of mystery in his films, paranormal or otherwise. And he always likes to make a cameo in each of his works. Or co-star, as it would appear in Lady. Nope, it wasn’t enough Night made a big budget movie based on a kiddie story, but he had to contribute large chunks of dialogue and plot progression as well. This sort of hubris might’ve offended a certain portion of the movie going audience. The phrase, “Who does he think he is?” seems apt. Just cuz it worked for Hitch, well, you know (that and Alfred never uttered a syllable of dialogue in his films. Smart).
Now don’t get me wrong on that paltry matter. Lady is superbly, well, filmed. It’s crisp and clean. The CGI is an accent, not filler. And the acting by the cast (save Night) is well done. It’s the damned plot that’s hair-brained. This film is so f*cking obtuse. It commits another cardinal sin in my book about bad films: it fails to maintain its interior logic. I know it’s a fantasy film, but watching the story progress is like watching someone patch up a leaking dam. There are corners cut to cram in each element of Night’s supposed fairy tale, seemingly shoehorned into being for the sake of…what? His vision? His kids’ expectations? The fact the audience would lap it up like so much melting ice cream?
Examples: Like all of Night’s films, there is that pervasive weirdness. It oozes from every pore of every frame. It usually works. But not weirdness for its own sake. Like I said, pieces of the story are introduced suddenly, thrown against the wall and maybe they’ll stick and forgotten to only later take up a different tack in the movie. Also, it’s odd (to say the least) how everyone in Cleveland’s apartment complex easily, unquestioningly goes along with Story’s, well, story in trying to make the fable come to life. Is it because Night’s moral of the movie is to say that some fantastic stories should be true? It’s as subtle as a fart at a funeral here. Way too much exposition takes up the second act, mostly consisting of a lot of mumbo-jumbo to allegedly push the fractured plot ever onward. If you’re paying attention, it becomes headache inducing. Again I say: hubris.
Lady In The Water is a waste of a good idea. In execution, it was a shambles. I think we might need more fantasy films at the box office nowadays. True escapism. And based on something else besides Tolkien. Small praise for Night in trying to fill this void, but he tried in a very clumsy fashion. Too bad.
The Verdict…
Rent it or relent it? Relent it. Ever saw a movie you wished you could recommend but in good consciousness could not? This be it.
Stray Observations…
- Howard looks incredibly young without any make-up (or at least minimal coverage). She was around 25 years old when this film was shot; she looks bloody sixteen here.
- The casting director must’ve had a field day with this movie. The sheer abundance of faces here is amazing, extras and all.
- “Thank you for letting me wear your beautiful shirt.”
- Night has the most on screen time here than he’s had in any other of his films. It seems that the more face time he gets, the poorer the return at the box office. I think I discovered a corollary.
- The verdict for Lady from my stepdaughter was “Awesome!” She’s thirteen. Maybe I wasn’t the target audience.
- Damned sprinklers!
Next Installment…
An M Night return engagement! Will and Jaden Smith figure out how to live life After Earth.