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| Subject: Lady in the Water | |
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Author: Kylopod |
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Date Posted: 10:54:59 09/04/07 Tue Author Host/IP: pool-71-246-76-133.bltmmd.east.verizon.net/71.246.76.133 Not long ago, I watched an old Shyamalan film, "Wide Awake" from 1998. It was not great, but it was passable and interesting (with an early appearance by Julia Stiles). Unlike his other films, it was not a thriller or a fantasy, but a coming-of-age tale about a boy in Catholic School. Still, I could see many of the elements that would come to define Shyamalan's later films, including his ongoing obsession with religion and faith. He tends to handle the subject simplistically, but he's one of the few Hollywood filmmakers to tackle it at all. I still consider "The Village" excellent, and I can defend it against any of the numerous critics who saw it as a poor or mediocre film. That was one of the reasons I was willing to take a look at "Lady in the Water," despite its bad reception from both critics and the public. Unfortunately, I cannot defend this film. The best I can say about it is that on some dumb elemental level, I enjoyed watching it. But it is plagued by flaws, and I am not even sure it could ever have worked. The storyline seems intrinsically artificial and contrived. Shyamalan has had his ups and downs, but all his previous films have been dependable in at least one sense: no matter how confusing the story became, it always ended up revolving around a simple idea. Not so with "Lady in the Water." This film is convoluted from beginning to end, with one arbitrary idea piled upon another. The premise is quite simple: a mythical creature, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, has entered our world and must make her way back to her dimension (which the film unwisely calls "the Blue World") but there is some wolf-like monster standing in her path. She comes into the life of a lonely superintendent (Paul Giamatti) by appearing naked in his swimming pool. Any disturbing sexual overtones this may elicit in us are kept in the background at best. This is supposed to be a bedtime story, after all. How does Giamatti sort all this out? This young Korean-American girl and her mother just happen to know some old fairy tale that explains all the details of where Howard's nymph-goddess came from. Shyamalan makes the exposition gradual by having the mother be a non-English speaker who must speak through her daughter, and who's too stubborn and suspicious to lay it all out for Giamatti. Howard's character is called a "narf," the wolf-like thing is a "scrunt," and they have to wait for a monkey-like creature called a "Tarturic" before Howard can return to her realm. Plus, they have to make use of the apartment's tenants to find a guardian, a guild, and a healer, which at one point involves piecing together clues in a crossword puzzle--or maybe not. Some detractors from "The Sixth Sense" complained that they figured out the secret early on. My response is, well, good for you. That only shows that the secret was well-established in the plot. (Or that these people are good liars who don't want to admit they were fooled.) There's no virtue in a plot twist that's completely impossible to predict. Unfortunately, "Lady in the Water" has precisely that problem. It's not predictable, exactly, but it seems to be making up the rules as it goes along. There's another serious problem. All fantasies set in the contemporary world have to deal with the fact that most people today do not believe in the supernatural. The usual conceit is that the main character goes through some period of skepticism before realizing that what's happening is real, and then he has to convince everyone else, who first assume he's crazy. Curiously, "Lady in the Water" never addresses this problem at all. Giamatti never doubts that Howard really is a sea-nymph, and the people he enlists seem to come around to his story awfully quickly. It gets even worse. There's a film critic character played by Bob Balaban, brought on for some rather unsubtle digs at film critics everywhere. His presence eventually leads to a "Scream"-inspired moment of self-referential horror, which seems intended to be funny but completely shatters the movie's believability. If "Adaptation" represents the best that the genre of self-aware cinema has given us, "Lady in the Water" is at the bottom. It shows how awkward this conceit can become if handled clumsily. Giamatti is a fine actor, and he brings a core of sympathy to his character that makes the movie watchable even as the events around him are ludicrous. His performance seems all the more remarkable when you consider that his character is underwritten. Like Gibson's character in "Signs," he has some terrible experiences in his past, but the movie deals with them too vaguely to flesh him out. As for Howard, she disappointed me, especially after her promising turn in "The Village." In that film, her clipped and stilted speech was a part of creating the faux-19th-century effect that the movie deliberately wanted to evoke. Here, it's out of place, and made her character seem distant and hard to relate to, which is fatal to her relationship with Giamatti. Shyamalan has a fairly big role in this film, and considering the acting skills he demonstrates here (sarcasm alert), we now have a good understanding why he was wise to limit his appearance in his other films. It's amazing how someone who's so good at directing his actors seems so stone-faced whenever he appears on screen. [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ] |
| Subject | Author | Date |
| Re: Lady in the Water | Jimmy | 16:53:11 09/04/07 Tue |
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| Re: Lady in the Water | Jimmy | 19:19:40 09/04/07 Tue |
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